The Salacious Uncle Baldrick
Gothamist won't try to describe the hilarious brilliance which is The Salacious Uncle Baldrick because we really can't do better than the show's own website: "South Park meets Molière in this mad-capped corruption of classical theater. Zany plots,
arranged marriage, and implausible disguises mix with Indian princesses, wandering pirates and magic potions to update 17th Century comedy with modern bad taste." Gothamist hasn't laughed this hard at anything in quite some time. This is satire with a wink and a nod, completely self-aware of its own absurdity, which just makes the show that much funnier. Great comedy succeeds even when the audience knows step-by-step what's about to happen. In our case, we often couldn't control our laughter, dabbing our eyes to wipe away the tears. This show brilliantly takes French farce and flips it on its head, turning it into something akin to a Bugs Bunny cartoon or Marx Brothers movie. It takes high brow humor and turns it low expertly. It features a cast and a simple stripped-down production -- expertly using its limited set and lighting design -- that is top-notch across the board. Special kudos must go to Josh Perilo as the titular Baldrick (who really is quite salacious and never fails to remind the audience) and Richard Robichaux as his Eric Cartman/Tourettes-afflicted brother. Here's hoping that this show -- easily deserving of consideration for Best of the Fringe -- finds somebody with money to help launch a small commercial run. Its humor might be a bit too crass for Broadway, but audiences definitely deserve the chance to see it in a longer, hopefully Off-Broadway run. Really, all Gothamist should say about The Salacious Uncle Baldrick is "tea and crumpets," and if you don't rush out to find out what we're talking about (there are only 2 more chances during the festival), well it's your loss. Players Theatre, 115 MacDougal St. Remaining performances: Thurs. 8/18, 6:30pm; Sat. 8/20, 2pm) – Aaron Dobbs
God’s Waiting Room
It’s been awhile since Gothamist read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a scathingly funny novel about 1930s Russia that is the inspiration for this play by Ashlin Halfnight. “Inspiration” is a loose term, of course, and the play bears little obvious resemblance to the book, so you needn’t have read it. The title refers both to St. Petersburg, Florida, where old people go to wait for death, and to the room the actors inhabit onstage, which is Limbo. A husband, his rich young mistress, his wife, and his wife’s ultra-religious Russian immigrant employee are there trying to find a way out of that maddening in-between place by reenacting scenes from their past. The company, Performance Lab 115, is mostly made up of Columbia MFA grads, and they all shine in their intense roles. In addition to being riveted by their rage – at each other, at themselves, at God – the audience is implicated in the drama and made to take on at least a small part of the existential agony, which may not be “fun” but it does make for a theater experience that is both intellectually and spiritually rewarding. Even if this show doesn’t get extended, expect to see this young company and its members enriching the theater scene for some time to come. (PS 122 Downstairs, 150 1st Ave. Remaining performances: Friday 8/19, 10pm; Sat. 8/20, 3pm; Thurs. 8/25, 9pm; Sun. 8/28 noon.)
Amerika
A safe bet would be that more people around here are familiar with Kafka than with Bulgakov. Amerika is the former’s novel about the US, which he’d never visited, and this play by Alexander Poe imagines Kafka’s experience writing the book – his inspiration and working process. Ben Correale as Kafka is adorably young and innocent-looking; he’s just been fired from his crummy insurance office job and told by a publisher that he must write about foreign lands if he wants to see himself in print. Naturally he rebels against this, but the mysterious Zoltan (the dashing Noah Bean) shows up and starts making things happen. Reality and literature get mixed up in short order as the mild-mannered author just tries to write as he knows how, yet keeps running into characters from the book, which are in turn based on characters from his life. Unfortunately the show itself seems to get a little too tangled up in all the confusion at times, and toward the end it just goes off the silly end. This wildness had the audience in stitches – the hapless Kafka is no match for his onetime coworker/now protagonist Karl Rossmann (Toby Lawless), for example, and the misunderstandings among all the characters are the stuff of comic gold. If the play were tightened a bit without losing its high-energy weirdness, it would be even stronger, but it’s still a lot of fun. (The Mazer Theater, 197 E. Broadway. Remaining performances: Thurs. 8/18, 7:30pm; Sat. 8/20, 4:15pm; Thurs. 8/25, 5pm.)
The Metaphysics of Breakfast
Eli Clark’s new play features an upcoming crop of Yale theater students, beginning with Tara Rodman (a junior, as is the playwright) as April, the central character, a young woman whose husband has just died tragically. She goes to her parents’ house to come to terms with her life, which mainly means revisiting childhood and how their beliefs and attitudes molded her – Dad is a feminist philosopher, Mom a chirpily optimistic figure skater. April has made her own way in life, but becoming a widow in your early twenties is a pretty world-shattering experience, and she has to figure out where to go from here. Her parents and friends aren’t much help, but their efforts do give the audience an idea of her past and how she’s come to where she is now emotionally. Gothamist loves the quirky title (breakfast being our favorite meal) but apart from the kitchen table covered with breakfast food that is the center of the set, and some lame metaphors about breakfast-as-life, it doesn’t really fit, since there’s little elevated philosophy either. The script could use more focus and fewer clichés, even if they’re intentionally exaggerated, but the cast does well with the material, from Rodman’s deadpan delivery to her parents’ goofy earnestness to the extra roles for Chad Callaghan and Lila Neugebauer, who play her friends but also have great cameos as a “slide show,” a series of old boyfriends, and more. From the roars of laughter in the Yale-affiliate-dominated audience, you would’ve thought it was the funniest, smartest show ever; Gothamist rather thinks the crew still needs some polishing, but they’re talented beyond doubt, and that shows clearly in this production, despite its flaws. (SoHo Playhouse, 15 Vandam St. Remaining performances: Sat. 8/20, 4:45pm; Sat. 8/27, 10:15pm.)
The Suffrajets Present a Musical Séance
If you’ve ever read anything about Victoria Woodhull, the suffragette who ran for president in 1872, you know she was…a “character,” as they say, considered a very odd duck and rather dangerous in her time because of her vocal support for the idea of free love. So maybe she would have approved of the relentlessly weird disjointedness of this play, but it’s not that interesting for viewers. As a “musical séance” it doesn’t pretend to be a real biographical sketch, but the scenes conjured up between Victoria (Tess Gill) and her sister and partner in crime Tennessee (Laurie Norton) don’t amount to much of anything else either. Parts of the show are quite fun to watch – the actresses share an electric energy, and the production itself is very stylish, with great props and costumes. But from beginning to end we were left scratching our heads as to what we were supposed to be getting out of the random mishmash of punky songs, speeches, and narrative. It didn’t help that the poor acoustics and not-so-strong singing meant that the instrumentals often drowned everything else out. Gothamist was tickled to hear the prediction of a female president in 2012, but other than that the show did little to demonstrate its subject’s relevance today or interest for a modern audience. (The Connelly Theater, 220 E. 4th St. Remaining performances: Fri. 8/19, 5:45pm; Sat. 8/20, 9pm; Fri. 8/26, 5:30pm)
