BROADWAY & ME QUICKIES

The Play: The Potluck; a meta-musical fantasia— part docudrama, part meditation on generational trauma and part political call to arms — about the aftermath of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre in which five labor organizers were gunned down by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party  Written by: César Alvarez        Directed by: Sarah Benson One good thing: Similarities between the political situation in 1979 and current events when social justice activists like Renee Good and Alex Pretti have been killed are undeniable and are most dramatically brought home in the 7-minute excerpt from a documentary that Alvarez’s mom made after the murder of her friends  One not-so-great thing: But the narrative here meanders, too often veering into the self-indulgent (random ruminations on queerness) and the cutesy (a number with dancing mops) and, with the exception of one or two ballads, the score creates more of a vague vibe than a clarifying through-li...

The Play: Henry VI: A Trilogy in Two Parts, the National Asian American Theatre Company’s fully-gratifying production of Shakespeare’s rarely-done trio of plays about the British civil wars known as the War of the Roses which also serve as a prequel to the more popular Richard III Written by: William Shakespeare        Adapted and Directed by: Stephen Brown-Fried One good thing: There’s a lot to love here, starting with the terrifically committed performances of the cast, led by Teresa Avia Lim as a kick-butt Queen Margaret, one of the Bard’s best female roles; Julyana Soelistyo, deliciously devilish as the Duke of Gloucester who will become Richard III; and Jon Norman Schneider as the well-meaning but weak-willed king; but equally great are the kinetic staging with inventively choreographed battle scenes and even the stylish, albeit slightly wacky, costumes by threeASFOUR, the design collective whose other clients have included Yoko Ono and Lady Gaga One not-so-g...

The Play: A Walk on the Moon;  a musical based on the 1999 movie about a working-class Jewish housewife who finds herself falling for a hunky hippie-type guy during the pivotal the summer of 1969 when the nation is riveted by the first moon landing, the want-more-from-life stirrings of feminism have begun to affect average women and the Woodstock music festival is about to take place not too far away from the bungalow colony where she and her kids are vacationing while her nice-guy husband works in the city  Book & Additional Lyrics by: Pamela Gray        Music and Lyrics by: Annmarie Milazzo One good thing: The leads—particularly Talia Suskauer, Max Chernin as her cuckolded husband and Sophie Pollono as their teenaged daughter—sing well and work hard to flesh out their somewhat underwritten characters One not-so-great thing: Sorry but there are so many things; the most egregious may be that neither the writers nor director Sheryl Kaller offer a comp...