The Neo-Futurarium
Chicago
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Few shows, if any, are able to “get under your skin before the first line is spoken,” said Nina Metz in the Chicago Tribune. This new play by Jay Torrence accomplishes the feat solely through smell: The unmistakable odor of something burning greets the audience as they enter the theater. The fact that the odor is obviously part of the production—Torrence’s show concerns the Iroquois Theater fire of 1903, the deadliest single-building fire in American history—makes the effect no less unnerving. Though Torrence never makes light of the tragedy, which killed more than 600 audience members, he “douses it in a wonderfully strange, sharply comic mood” by imagining six singed actors rising from their body bags to finish Mr. Bluebeard, the play they were performing when the fire started.
Alas, the ghostly actors never achieve their goal of completing the play, said Kris Vire in Time Out Chicago. Well into Burning Bluebeard, which features a mashup of John Lennon, Amy Winehouse, and “a creepy children’s-choir rendition of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” the terror of the original conflagration is re-created. The play isn’t uniformly macabre—“gags and dance numbers serve as a welcome balance” to the horror. The performers, from Ryan Walters as vaudevillian Eddie Foy to Molly Plunk as a “gangly” fairy queen, “convey real regret” during their doomed attempt to erase the tragedy by carrying on with the show. The play’s unlikely mix of “wistful, sidesplitting, and chill-inducing” moments lingers long after the fire burns out.
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If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
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Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
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Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
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The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
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Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
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The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
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No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
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The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.