Melissa Rose Bernardo

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo  Your ears are not deceiving you: That is indeed the voice of Liza Minnelli, the patron saint of pizzazz, narrating the pop art–inspired opening of the bubbly, bedazzled Drag: The Musical. After all, the showbiz icon is one of the producers, so what better way to kick off this sequin-studded song-and-dance story? Drag, which arrives at Off Broadway’s New World Stages with a studio album and a Los Angeles run under its garter belt, is exactly what you’d expect: high heels, big hair, sassy one-liners and enough RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants to fill their own season.   The fishnet-thin plot centers on two rival drag clubs, each facing its own set of troubles. At the Cat House—where Savannah St. James (Jan Sport), The Tigress (Jujubee) and Puss Puss DuBois (Nick Laughlin) hold court—girl boss Kitty Galloway (Alaska Thunderf*ck) is dealing with imminent eviction. Across the street at the Fish Tank, house mother Alexis Gillmore (Nick Adams, of Broadway’s Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) is deep in the red with the IRS; fellow queens Tuna Turner (Lagoona Bloo), Popcorn (Luxx Noir London) and Dixie Coxworth (Liisi LaFontaine) strongarm her—no easy feat, considering the size of Adams’s arms—into seeking help from her estranged accountant brother, Tom (played by Joey McIntyre of New Kids on the Block). Did we mention that Alexis and Kitty used to be lovers?  Drag: The Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy In the script by Tomas Costanza,

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo  Jonathan Marc Sherman and Jason Robert Brown’s The Connector is clearly inspired by real events: This new musical, about a hotshot young writer who falsifies sources and plot points in his features and brings shame upon a respected magazine, bears many resemblances to the story of Stephen Glass and The New Republic in the late 1990s. Unlike Glass, however, Sherman, Brown and director Daisy Prince (who also conceived the show) do not pretend to be telling the truth, which frees them to shape their story any way they please. One of the show’s smartest choices is to shift the spotlight from the overconfident, fresh-outta-Princeton fabulist, Ethan; played by Ben Levi Ross—an erstwhile Evan Hansen, appropriately enough—he never explains himself or reveals his motivations. But even if he did, could we even trust him? As his editor-in-chief, Conrad (Scott Bakula, perfectly cast as an old-school, scotch-at-noon guy’s guy), sings in the very first scene: “The facts can always be manipulated.” Narration duties fall to the far more likable copy editor and would-be writer Robin (a fantastic Hannah Cruz), who chronicles Ethan’s rise and fall at a New Yorker–esque magazine called The Connector.  The Connector | Photograph: Joan Marcus Sherman and Brown set the show in the peak magazine years of the last century, when college grads were fighting for internships at places like Time and Newsweek. Beowulf Boritt’s spectacular set—with its piles of manu

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo   In Greek mythology, Daphne was a beautiful dryad pursued so mercilessly by the lovestruck Apollo that, to avoid his advances, she transformed into a laurel tree. That tale of thwarted love serves as a loose inspiration for Renae Simone Jarrett’s ambitious but bewildering Daphne, now receiving its world premiere at Lincoln Center. But unless you’re extremely well-versed in old lore (or catch LCT3’s video chat between Jarrett and Jasmine Batchelor, the fine actor who plays the title role), you’re likely to miss the ancient allusion. Daphne and her girlfriend, Winona (Keilly McQuail), are living in a house in the middle of nowhere, presumably to take a break from—or hide from?—the bustle of big-city life. Their only real companion is Winona’s parrot, Phoebus, who stays hidden in a sheet-covered birdcage. (Bonus points if you know that Phoebus is another name for Apollo.) Daphne’s pals Piper (Jeena Yi) and Wendy (Naomi Lorrain) pay visits, wondering if their friend is in the right place. “Like you left so quickly and we’re all worried,” says Piper. Perhaps they’re right to be concerned.  Winona doesn’t care for visitors: “I don’t like it when people are on their way, coming here,” she says. “It makes me weird.” That’s a nice word for what she is. She flips out when Daphne walks to town for a library card, thinks the woman next door (Denise Burse, radiating warmth) is some kind of witch—”Like she comes in through the keyhole while we’re as

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo In the spirit of Annie Dorsen’s provocative Prometheus Firebringer at Theatre for a New Audience, I asked ChatBox to write a review of the show. In mere seconds, it produced 250 words, including high praise: “A mesmerizing fusion of ancient myth and cutting-edge technology…A captivating blend of live performance and digital wizardry…An immersive experience that challenges our perception of what theater can be.” Impressive! You might even think a real person wrote it, were it not for the comment about “live actors”: Writer-director-performer Dorsen is the only human being on stage. Her costars, so to speak, are powered by artificial intelligence: theater masks, with hollowed-out eyes and haunted expressions, who churn out lines “written” by GPT–3.5 in AI-generated voices. Their topic is Prometheus, who defied Zeus and stole fire—i.e., knowledge, progress, technology—from Mount Olympus and gave it to humanity; as punishment, Zeus bound him to a rock. Aeschylus penned a whole trilogy on this subject: Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus Firebringer. Dorsen is experimenting with that final and essentially unknown play, in which Prometheus and Zeus have something of a reconciliation. (Only a fragment of the original text remains.)  Before the performance begins, a précis of the play—typed out in real time, letter by letter—appears on a big screen. This is followed by a slightly different summary, and then yet another, as thou

  Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo  Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s eye-opening 2021 drama Cullud Wattah explored the devastating physical, emotional, and economic effects of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Now she has returned to the Public Theater with another water-powered play: the lyrical and lugubrious shadow/land, the first entry in a planned 10-play cycle about the damage wrought by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on the playwright’s hometown, New Orleans. First produced as an audio play at the Public in 2021, shadow/land brings the mass destruction into focus by centering on two women. Eighty-year-old Magalee (Cullud Wattah’s Lizan Mitchell) is the primary owner of a bar called Shadowland that has been in the family for generations; her caretaker daughter, Ruth (Joniece Abbott-Pratt), wants to sell the building while it’s still standing. “It’s about the land,” Magalee says. “Come hell or high wawdah, I cant sell it Ruth.” (The latter will come sooner than anyone suspects.) Magalee also has middle-stage dementia, so arguing with her about anything—selling Shadowland, getting out of the path of the storm—is futile. “I was 40 when Betsy came through blowin her trumpet & Im still here & Ima be here afta Katrina hardens into a gnarled cackle,” she insists. “Ev’ry storm just a jealous band memba vyin for the spotlight tryna top the last solo.” A third character, the sharp-suited Grand Marshal (a liquidy, loose-limbed Christine Shepard), dances around the edges of the stage

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo  Ryan J. Haddad does not want your sympathy. “If you came here to pity me, you can leave,” says the playwright-performer toward the start of his autobiographical Dark Disabled Stories, a co-production of the Public Theater and the Bushwick Starr. “And don’t ask for a refund.” Reader, no one left.  Haddad has cerebral palsy, which he admits to often mining for laughs. “I try to make disability funny so that non-disabled people can understand it,” he says. Dark Disabled Stories digs into accessibility, ableism and inclusion, yet it’s still shamelessly funny. (“I’m a naturally comedic person,” Haddad says, accurately.) A few years ago, you might have seen his solo show Hi, Are You Single? Here, he has two costars to make the production as accessible as possible for disabled audience members. Deaf actor Dickie Hearts communicates in ASL alongside Haddad, and the duo’s comic timing is flawless; Alejandra Ospina sits just offstage and describes all the visuals—from the set design to the actors’ movements—for blind and low-vision theatergoers. (“Dickie visually represents whipping a cock out of his pants and shaking a cocktail.”) Her captions appear as supertitles atop the flamingo-pink proscenium, and dialogue is projected onto the back wall of the stage. Haddad’s tales run the gamut from daily commutes to nightly sexcapades: his reluctance to ask for help reaching the bathroom in a business meeting, leading to a humiliating “urine situation”

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo  In his 2018 play The Chinese Lady, Lloyd Suh introduced us to Afong Moy, reportedly the first Chinese woman to set foot in the U.S., who was displayed like a curio for paying audiences. In The Far Country, whose premiere at the Atlantic is directed by Eric Ting, he digs into a later period of Asian-American history: the aftermath of 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act. But this is no staid history class. In just over two hours, Suh succinctly and humorously covers 21 years, two continents, two interrogations and two obscenely expensive trans-Pacific crossings from Taishan to San Francisco.  Gee (Jinn S. Kim), having secured American citizenship, has returned to his farming village, where he offers to take the teenage Moon Gyet (Eric Yang) back to the States with him—for a hefty price. “The cost, based on fair market value, is $100 for every year of age,”he explains to the boy’s mother, Low (Amy Kim Waschke). “The price shall be $1,600. To be paid ten percent now and the rest I will recoup from his wages until the debt is fully paid.” Moon Gyet is to work in Gee’s laundry to pay off the fee, pretending to be his son. The whole scenario is “grossly illegal”—as Yuen (the completely delightful Shannon Tyo) points out when Moon Gyet returns years later to make her a similar offer. “This is not how I imagined my marriage proposal would transpire,” she quips. The trip is a major risk emotionally as well as financially. We soon learn that the Bay Are

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo Under the heading of “you can’t make this stuff up”: Camp Siegfried, which gives Bess Wohl’s compelling but slight new Off Broadway play its title, was a real World War II–era summer camp in Suffolk County, Long Island, run by openly fascist German-Americans. Youths there could engage in such character-building activities as studying German, chopping wood and learning Nazi dogma. Wohl sets Siegfried in 1938—the actual camp didn’t close until 1941—and focuses on only two attendees. She (Lily McInerny) is 16, going on 17, and He (Johnny Berchtold) is 17, going on 18, but this is no Liesl-and-Rolf love story. These characters don’t even get names; they’re just She and He, as though the playwright had randomly plucked two teens from their temporary digs on Hitler Street.   At first glance, the two are simply awkward teenagers fumbling around the bases. After their first kiss, She sputters: “I’m sorry oh gosh I’m so sorry. I’m confused oh gosh I’m so confused. It’s nothing it’s nothing. It’s just that I hate myself.” But they’re clearly damaged goods—she’s coming off a yearlong “relationship” with a teacher; he refers to himself as “defective” and “a runt,” labels he undoubtedly received from his father—which makes them prime candidates for indoctrination. Listening to target practice in the distance, She parrots what she’s learned: “Fraulein Linda said the Day of Freedom is coming when we storm the government and fight back.” If you think t

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo A generation gap becomes a generation gulf in Yilong Liu’s ambitious, time-hopping Good Enemy. Howard (the inimitable Francis Jue), a Chinese immigrant to America, lacks a strong bond with his only child, college student Momo (Geena Quintos). They live on opposite coasts—he in Southern California, she in New York—and the pandemic has only exacerbated their emotional disconnect. He doesn’t understand her world: the protests she attends, the TikToks she makes. Conversely, Howard’s formative years in China are a total mystery to Momo. “Who were you before you were my dad?” she asks, but Howard has closed the book on that period—literally. (There is an actual book, and it later comes into play.)  Commissioned and produced by Audible, which will also release an audio recording of it, Good Enemy toggles back and forth between 2021 America and 1984 China with relative ease. Yilong relies on another character—Dave (Alec Silver), a pot dealer and aspiring screenwriter who is chauffeuring Howard cross-country to see Momo—to kickstart the flashbacks. Dave hopes to sell Howard’s story to Hollywood and, perhaps intentionally, the China scenes do seem big-screen ready. Hao (Tim Liu), a rookie police officer tasked with rooting out corruption—loud music, suggestive dancing, Western-influenced discourse—slips into an underground club, where he meets a self-possessed young woman named Jiahua (Jeena Yi). She slips him bootleg Joy Division cassettes, trie

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo  All the Natalie Portmans has a good gimmick at its core. Whenever the play’s heroine, 16-year-old Keyonna (Kara Young), is lonely or distressed, her imaginary best friend, Natalie Portman (Elise Kibler)—actress, activist, Harvard alum—magically appears in costumes from her most famous films: the feathered tutu from Black Swan, the intergalactic warrior gear from the Star Wars prequels. “She the best in the game right now,” Keyonna tells her older brother (Joshua Boone) as she tapes Cosmopolitan pics of Portman to her dream board alongside photos of Julia Roberts and some token shots of Gwyneth Paltrow. “Hollywood is full of beautiful, talented women, Sam. And I see that. I honor it. And someday I’mma make mad money exploiting the hell out of it. Natalie is my ticket.” The rest of C.A. Johnson’s play, unfortunately, is awash in Hollywood-style clichés. Keyonna is smart as hell but skips AP calculus “ ’cause it’s easy.” (Between this play, Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven and The New Englanders, Young is quickly cornering the market on brash, brainy teenagers.) Sam is trying to be both brother and father to her since their dad died; their alcoholic mom (an excellent Montego Glover) disappears for days at a time, leaving her kids to scrounge for food and rent money. And when she is there, she’s by turns disinterested and demeaning, referring to the lesbian Keyonna as her “ass-backwards daughter.” Johnson puts a twist on the love-tria

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo Even the most fervent Horton Foote fan might be hard-pressed to explain the appeal, much less the Pulitzer Prize, of The Young Man From Atlanta. The playwright was renowned for his delicate, layered storytelling, but this 1995 drama lays it on thick. Within the first few minutes, proud Houstonian Will Kidder (Aidan Quinn) mentions his “slight heart condition.” Soon he blurts out the entire tragic tale of his 37-year-old son Bill’s recent death, the newfound religious fanaticism consuming his wife, Lily Dale (Kristine Nielsen, kooky but relatively reserved), and the suspicious appearance of Bill’s, ahem, roommate, the much-discussed but never-seen title character. And then Will, who has just plunked down $200,000 (in 1950!) for a new house, gets canned from his grocery-wholesaling gig: “We need younger men in charge here,” says the tactless Ted Cleveland Jr. (Foote veteran Devon Abner). That’s a lot for even someone with a good heart to take in a single scene. The steely-eyed Aidan Quinn, back on stage after seven seasons on CBS’s Elementary, proves an ideal red-blooded Texas businessman, and the perfect anchor in an often shaky piece. (As Lily Dale’s stepfather, the family peacemaker, Stephen Payne looks uncomfortable in even his best moments.) And go-to Foote director Michael Wilson, who helmed 2007’s superb Dividing the Estate and 2009’s nine-play masterwork the Orphans’ Home Cycle, at least gives this head-scratcher of a play a hands