Sons of the Prophet (Roundabout Theatre Company)

By Harry Forbes

This fine and deeply affecting play by Stephen Karam – commissioned by the Roundabout as part of its New Play Initiative for emerging and established artists – will surely rank as one the best of the 2011-2012 season. And it marks the occasion of another treasurable performance by the impressively versatile Santino Fontana who shone, most recently, in Roundabout’s “The Importance of Being Ernest” last season.

Here, he’s Joseph. a Lebanese-American living in central Pennsylvania surrounded by his handicapped brother Charles (Chris Perfetti) who, like Joseph, is gay; a crotchety uncle (Yusef Bulos) in failing health; and his clinically depressed, pill-popping book publisher boss Gloria (Joanna Gleason).

In the play’s early moments, we learn his father dies of a heart attack one week after swerving to avoid what he thought was a deer while driving. In fact, the animal was on a stuffed decoy placed on the road as a prank by Vin (Jonathan Louis Dent), a local football star who had been raised in a foster home, and whose juvenile sentence is postponed till after football season. This becomes a point of contention in the town, one ultimately debated in the play’s climactic scene, a town meeting.

Joseph is beset by various health ailments, and sorely needs the insurance he gets from working for the scattered, self-absorbed Gloria, a lady who, comically, knows no boundaries. But he faces his various adversities with humor and resilience, as misfortune seems to beset his family at every turn.

When Gloria discovers his ethnic heritage and learns that his family is distantly related to Kahlil Gibran, she sees a way to boost her failing business: a memoir about Joseph’s family geared to their tenuous connection to the famed author of “The Prophet.”

Karam has ingeniously structured the play along the lines of that book with projected headings “On Pain,” “On Friendship,” “On Work,” etc. But for all the Big Issues explored in the play – suffering, sickness, death, loneliness – the play is never heavy-handed, leavened as it is by humor throughout.

Besides Fontana’s fine work, Chris Perfetti shines as the campy younger brother with a spiritual bent, influenced no doubt by their father who revered the Lebanese Maronite St. Rafca, canonized for her suffering, and whose portrait looms in the upstairs bedroom.

Also excellent are Charles Socarides as a reporter covering the hearings about the car accident and who shares a history with Joseph from high school days; and Dee Nelson and Lizbeth Mackay is various roles.

The play is finely directed by Peter DuBois who, like his cast, is ever sensitive to the frequent funny-sad shifts. Production credits are first-rate including Anna Louizos’ split-level set, Bobby Frederick Tilley, II’s costumes, and Japhy Weideman’s lighting.

I didn’t catch Karam’s first well-received play for the Roundabout – “Speech & Debate” – but clearly, he is an exciting playwright with a bright future.

(Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre/Laura Pels Theatre, 111 West 46th Street, (212) 719-1300 or www.roundabouttheatre.org.)

I due Figaro (Amore Opera)

By Harry Forbes

Opera lovers, get thee hence to the enterprising Amore Opera which is currently offering a gem of a rediscovery: Saverio Mercadante’s tune-filled 1826 “sequel” to “The Marriage of Figaro.”

The action takes place 15 years after the events in Mozart’s opera (and Beaumarchais’ play) and involves the same sort of intrigue, this time revolving around the Count’s former page Cherubino who’s now in disguise as another “Figaro” and determined to win the hand of the Count and Countess’ daughter Inez whom the Count would marry off to an older suitor.

The music is closer to Rossini than Mozart, but it’s not just a watered down, second rate Rossini, but music of similarly high quality. Perhaps Rossini might have provided more contrasting moments of light and shade, but I’m not complaining about the steam of infectious melody that just bubbles along from start to finish. Riccardo Muti’s performance of the piece in Europe last year was hailed worldwide, so bravo to Amore for picking up on the buzz so quickly, and giving the work its New York premiere.

Company president Nathan Hull (currently playing an excellent Figaro in the concurrent Mozart work) has directed a delightful production, conducted with panache by Gregory Buchalter. The parts are mostly double cast, and at my performance, the standout of a strong roster was mezzo Hayden DeWitt’s Cherubino singing with smooth and stylish tone throughout.

Elizabeth Treat was an accomplished Susanna, like DeWitt, handling the high flying coloratura passages with ease. Rounding out the female contingent, Alea Vorillas’ Inez, the Almaviva daughter, proved a delightful comedienne, especially in her despondent second act aria where, as amusingly staged by Hull, she contemplates various methods of suicide. Though the part is smaller than in Mozart’s “Figaro,” Nicole McQuade was an attractively sung Countess, she, Treat, and Vorillas offering a most appealing trio in the first act.

In Mercadante’s work, Count Almaviva is a tenor again (as in “The Barber of Seville), and Gilad Paz sang strongly, while Daniel Quintana applied his virile baritone to the wily Figaro. But in librettist Felice Romani’s text, it’s really the women who dominate here.

The production is a treat. But hurry. The final performance is Friday, October 28.

(Connelly Theatre, 220 E. 4th St., http://www.amoreopera.org or 1-888-811-4111)

Photo credit: Tal Karlin. Daniel Quintana (Figaro) is Figaro in Amore Opera’s American Premiere of Mercadante's hit 1826 opera "I due Figaro" ("The Two Figaros").

Man and Boy (Roundabout Theatre Company)

By Harry Forbes

Some may disdain Terence Rattigan as dated and irrelevant (a sentiment I emphatically don't share), but surely even his critics can't deny the solid construction, effectiveness, and sheer entertainment value of his works, as a recent spate of London revivals commemorating his centennial have demonstrated.

So, too, the present Roundabout revival of his 1963 play about a corrupt Romanian financier and his estranged son proves quite mesmerizing despite, or even because of, its melodramatic trappings.

The play is set in 1934. Gregor Antonescu, played magnificently by Frank Langella, is on the brink of financial ruin. He contrives to visit his son Vasily (Adam Driver) with whom he had a terrible row five years earlier.

The latter, who has assumed the name Basil Anthony, earns his living as a lowly lounge pianist and lives in a Greenwich Village basement apartment. He has an actress girlfriend (Virginia Kull) who knows nothing of his background.

Antonescu shows up, accompanied by his sidekick Sven (Michael Siberry). Langella’s entrance – overcoat collar upturned, and a concealing fedora – heralds a great star turn, and indeed it is. This is a vivid portrayal of a charming but manipulative and emotionally repressed figure. The part was written for Charles Boyer and played to acclaim by David Suchet in a 2005 London revival, also directed, as this so finely is, by Maria Aitken.

The great man has arranged for Mark Herries (Zach Grenier) -- an American magnate who, in light of Antonescu’s financial instability, has called off a proposed alliance – to meet him there.

Antonescu has built his fortune on the principles of liquidity and confidence, both now in seriously short supply. But he has discovered that Grenier has a certain vulnerability, and comes up quite a diabolical way to use it to his advantage. Let’s just say what happens next belies the accusation that Rattigan shied away from themes that might compromise his own closeted sexuality.

Though Langella is so magnetic, he is not the whole show. Driver is completely convincing – physically and dramatically -- as Basil, conflicted by his revulsion of his father’s methods, but adoring him throughout. Kull makes the girlfriend – who takes the news about her boyfriend’s lineage with surprising equanimity – also believable. Siberry, too, offers solid support, proving again a great asset to any production in which he’s cast.

The second act is rather less unconventional than the first, though it introduces the character of Antonescu’s second wife (Francesca Faridany good in a rather stock role), as well as a further obstacle to the financier’s monetary reformation.

Derek McLane’s slightly worn two-room flat captures the 1930’s Village ambiance adeptly, as do Martin Pakledinaz’s period costumes.

Rattigan could have easily called this play “Father and Son” and certainly, as far as dramatizations of that eternal conflict go, this is one of the most intriguing. And for American audiences, the parallels to the Bernie Madoff scandal add further resonance.

More Rattigan, please.

(American Airlines Theatre on Broadway (227 West 42nd Street (212)719-1300 or www.roundabouttheatre.org)

The Mountaintop (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre)

By Harry Forbes

Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett give tremendous performances as, respectively, Dr. Martin Luther King and a garrulous maid in this audacious and ultimately moving play about King's last night in Memphis' Lorraine Motel in 1968 where he would meet his death on the balcony the next day.

When the play opens, King – exhausted after delivering his "I've been to the Mountaintop" speech -- is sending his (off-stage) associate, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, off to buy him a pack of cigarettes. Left alone, King frets that the room might be bugged, misses the toothbrush that wife Coretta forgot to pack for him, relieves himself audibly in the bathroom, and takes note of his smelly feet as he removes his shoes, all the while mulling the approach of his next big speech. In short, we're seeing the human side of this now mythic figure.

When he wearily calls down to room service for a cup of coffee, Camae, an alternately feisty and flirtatious maid on the first day of her job, arrives. She’s a plain-spoken, lower-class woman but she certainly recognizes King, who, before long, begs her for a cigarette, and is asking her advice about matters large and small, including whether he should shave his mustache for image reasons. Camae indignantly replies that it's the sort of question he should more properly be asking his wife.

Carmae soon proves how there’s more to her than first apparent, when King asks her to demonstrate what she would say in his position. In a trice, she puts on King’s jacket, leaps onto one of the beds, and launches into an increasingly forceful sermon which builds to the point when she's exhorting the congregation to “f – the white man.”

Afterwards, she brags that her oratorical skills, and she chastises him for presuming she might not know what that word means. She boldly asks if she's as good as he is. He tells her she speaks nonsense; she counters that it’s poetry.

Bassett really shows her comic chops throughout, but reveals impressive gravitas when the script calls for it.

There’s a major twist in all this – thus, that audacity I mentioned earlier – but I shan’t spoil playwright Katori Hall‘s neat construction by giving it away here. The play originated in London and won last year’s Olivier Award for Best New Play.

Jackson looks rather less like King than Jesse Jackson, but he convincingly embodies King’s public persona and his personal demons.

It’s a joy to watch these two play together. They’ve got wonderful chemistry, and should be well remembered at award time next year. Bassett has the showier part, and she really is tremendous, but Jackson’s world-weary King is every bit as skillful, bringing just the right gravitas to the role.

Director Kenny Leon keeps the pace taut, deftly keeping up with the play’s tonal shifts, and making sure both stars are on an equal playing field, without one overshadowing the other. Indeed, Hall’s feminist perspective does sometimes seems to favor Camae, but in fact, the parts seem evenly distributed.

David Gallo‘s motel room set has the right slightly seedy and depressing ambience, and towards the end it breaks away impressively during the play’s climatic coup de theatre. Constanza Romero’s costumes – King’s rumpled suit and Camae’s yellow maid’s outfit – are right on target. Dan Moses Schreier‘s sound design – including the bone rattling thunderclaps that permeate the action which takes place on a stormy night – is most effective. Branford Marsalis has composed some apt original music

At my preview performance, the audience was thoroughly rapt throughout the plays 85 intermission-less, even when the play ventures into more spiritual realms, and the enthusiastic standing ovation at the end was the real deal.

(Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 West 45th St., 212-239-6200 or www.Telecharge.com)

[Pictured at top: Samuel L. Jackson as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Angela Bassett as Camae. Photo Credit: Joan Marcus.]

Follies (Marquis Theatre)

By Harry Forbes

To cut to the chase, Broadway’s second revival of the Stephen Sondheim cult favorite is, not only a vast improvement on the last (the Roundabout’s oddly mediocre 2001 mounting), but a superior production by any standards.

When the evocative ghosts silently traverse the stage in the opening moments and you hear the luscious strains of the 28-piece orchestra (under James Moore’s excellent direction), you just know you’re in for a treat.

And though the sleek, modern Marquis may seem an odd fit for a show taking place in a soon-to-be-demolished old theater, masking the proscenium and boxes in black drapery (courtesy of designer Derek McLane) goes a great distance in overcoming the disparity.

On the other hand, both the 1998 Paper Mill production, which by all rights should have transferred to Broadway, and the 2007 Encores revival were, I think, more consistently persuasive, but here, director Eric Schaeffer has brought out nuances in the text that are often revelatory.

Textually, this is basically the 1971 original with none of the material from the 1987 London revival – like the “Ah, But Underneath” strip that Phyllis performed at Paper Mill – and musically, it is missing only the “Bolero D’Amore” number.

The cast is fine across the board. Danny Burstein is the best of the post-Gene Nelson interpreters of Buddy, creating an enormously sympathetic character, and bringing back at least some balletic movement to his big moment, “The Right Girl,” which people forget was accompanied by Nelson’s virtuosic dancing in the original production. Ron Raines’ Ben, the disillusioned businessman, is on the stolid side, but the approach works for the uptight, self-absorbed character, and he sings beautifully.

As for their unhappy wives, Jan Maxwell nails Phyllis, delivering a really scorching “Could I Leave You?” that makes you momentarily forget even the best of the past ladies in the role, though I didn’t quite buy her generic vamping in “The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” rather prosaically choreographed by Warren Carlyle.

Bernadette Peters’ Sally – delusionally carrying a torch for Ben– is alternately touching and overwrought. This lady is really losing her mind, long before she gives voice to that condition in her eleven o’clock torch song. Vocally, Peters does some lovely things, especially with that upper range of her voice which we rarely hear, though at other times, her singing seems a bit tremulous.

Though she doesn’t bring the true-life persona of the original’s Yvonne DeCarlo or Paper Mill’s Ann Miller, London’s West End musical queen Elaine Paige – who’s already proven her Sondheim chops in the New York City Opera’s “Sweeney Todd” – gives a finely shaded reading of “I’m Still Here,” a bit over the top only at the climax. At my performance, the lights and the mikes blew just as the song was reaching that climax, but Paige finished the number like a trouper. She was also a hoot in her line readings.

As for the other ladies, Terri White is as much a standout delivering “Who’s That Woman?” as she was in “Finian’s Rainbow” where she stopped the show with her almost baritonal rendition of “Necessity.” The surprise here is her nimble footwork, as she leads the gals through their paces.

Jayne Houdyshell’s drolly dour “Broadway Baby” is amusing; Mary Beth Peil’s “Ah, Paree” a bit too understated; and Metropolitan Opera veteran mezzo Rosalind Elias – accompanied by Leah Horowitz as her younger self – delivers an especially powerful “One More Kiss,” though the Romberg-esque duet is arguably more satisfying performed in a soprano timbre.

It is a delight to see Susan Watson, the ingénue lead in the hit revival of “No, No, Nanette” which ran concurrently with the original “Follies,” turn up here with Don Correia singing and hoofing through a charming “Rain on the Roof.”

Schaeffer brings out all the marital strife of James Goldman’s script and then some. The highly-charged confrontations among the four principals are as acerbic as anything by Strindberg. Some of that bitterness could be ramped down, I think, but the text does support the interpretation, and the resulting fireworks are certainly not dull.

McLane’s dark empty theater set gives way to a splendiferous burst of pink for the big “Loveland” sequence, Natasha Katz’s atmospheric lighting in the early scenes morphing into complementary radiance. Gregg Barnes, whose costumes sharply defined each of the characters, also has a field day in this sequence. The production, on the whole, looks as good as it sounds.

This is not perhaps completely the “Follies” of one's dreams, but it will do just fine until that idealized one comes along.

(Marquis Theatre, 1535 Broadway, 877-250-2929 or Ticketmaster.com)

Olive and the Bitter Herbs (Primary Stages)

By Harry Forbes

Olive (Marcia Jean Kurtz) is a crotchety old actress whose greatest fame came as the “sausage lady” in a popular TV commercial years before.

A perennial complainer about life in general and her neighbors in particular, and the sole surviving renter in her co-op, she grudgingly makes the acquaintance of the gay couple next door -- the even-tempered Robert (David Garrison) and the caustic Trey (Dan Butler) -- whose sounds and cooking smells she detests.

As with Robert and Trey, she also comes to know the co-op board chairman’s father (Richard Masur), thanks to the peace-making intervention of her cheerful, do-gooder friend Wendy (Julie Halston), a B-level theater company manager, and inveterate helper of aging actresses.

Eventually, Olive invites them all for a Passover Seder (that’s where the “bitter herbs” come in), and later, they all come over to watch Olive’s comeback part in a TV procedural.

Beyond the realistic story, playwright Charles Busch has decided to give Olive a ghost living in her ornate mirror. At first we think this may be a fancy of Olive’s faltering mind, but when, one by one, all the others see the spirit too (and know him to be a certain Howard), we realize the ghost is meant to be real.

Busch – writing in his accomplished Neil Simon manner as in “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” rather than his accomplished movie spoof mode (e.g. “The Divine Sister,” “Die Mommie, Die” -- has said his play is “about connecting to the people in our lives – those with us and those who have passed on” and indeed the inter-connectedness theme gets full play in the fun, if predictable and wildly improbable, climax.

Still, Busch is equally adept at writing in both a comic and sentimental vein, and Mark Brokaw expertly draws both those qualities from his cast.

Busch veteran Halston exudes great warmth throughout, and her body language – a sort of Olive Oyl come to life – is a rib-tickling pleasure to watch from start to finish. The titular Olive is intentionally unpleasant, though we’re meant to grow fonder of her as the play progresses. Kurtz excels in the unlikable aspects of the part, but her performance could have used more colors in helping convey the other.

Garrison and Butler make a well-contrasted pair, and the bear-like Masur, who ultimately serves as Olive’s love interest, is affable and appealing.

Some of the cast stumbled on their line readings – perhaps the disorienting result of Hurricane Irene a couple of days earlier – but, on the whole, the ensemble could not be faulted.

Anna Louizos’ lived-in set suits Olive to a tee. Suzy Benzinger’s characterful costumes, and Mary Louise Geiger’s lighting – including that mirror with its glowing specter -- are also first-rate.

While not perhaps Busch’s very best work, as there’s a contrivance to the basic setup that makes it hard to suspend disbelief completely, “Olive and the Bitter Herbs” is never less than amusing, often laugh out-loud funny, and generally succeeds in making its touching point about our common humanity in a most entertaining way.

(Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters (59 East 59th Street, (212) 279-4200 or www.primarystages.org; through Sept. 3)

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (Music Box Films/Universal)

By Harry Forbes

Eric Elmosnino gives a mesmerizing performance as the iconic singer, songwriter, poet, actor, provocateur Serge Gainsbourg (1921-1991) in this expressionistic bio.

Despite some fanciful conceits on the part of director Joann Sfar, a noted comic book artist making his feature film debut (both writing and directing), the narrative covers, in fairly chronological fashion, Gainsbourg’s life from precocious child Lucien Ginsburg – son of loving Russian-Jewish parents – to his early days as a painter, then cabaret pianist, and finally superstar pop icon.

Famously, he was the lover of Juliette Greco (Anna Mouglalis), Jane Birkin (Lucy Gordon), and Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta), and they are vividly portrayed here. Casta makes a luscious Bardot, and Gordon is especially likable as Birkin. Sadly, Gordon committed suicide after filming her role her, a great loss.

Gainbourg became increasingly outrageous as the years went by, smoking and drinking to excess, finally dying in 1991 of a heart attack.

Many of Gainsbourg’s hit songs are heard, including “Bonnie & Clyde,” “La Javanaise,” and “Je t’Aime Moi Non Plus,” some duets with Bardot and Birkin, and everything is newly performed, rather than lip-synced to old recordings. The songs and background score (by Olivier Daviaud) are beautifully interwoven into the whole.

Handsomely shot by Guillaume Schiffman, the film utilizes a life-size puppet alter ego for Gainsbourg to spur him on to new challenges, get him into trouble, or remind him of his less than movie star looks, and of his outsider status.

The figure – which we first see in the childhood scenes, as if the anti-Semitic posters then posted around occupied France had sprung to life -- exaggerates Gainsbourg’s prominent ears and nose. The alter ego device becomes a bit wearying after a while, but fortunately never gets in the way of the story which Sfar has stated was meant to have the aura of a Russian fable.

I’m sure many Americans are unfamiliar with Gainsbourg; I knew him mainly for the series of catchy hit records he penned for Petula Clark in her pre-"Downtown" French period. But he was a towering figure in his native France – praised by Mitterand as a modern Baudelaire – and this interesting film, with its very persuasive performance by Elmosnino (winner of the 2011 Cesar Award), paints a vivid picture of his life and times, especially in the swinging Sixties.