Marilyn Stasio: Last News

Brent Lang Executive Editor Christopher Durang, a Tony Award-winning playwright who specialized in a particular form of brainy and absurdist comedy, has died. He was 75. The cause was complications from a form of dementia known as logopenic primary progressive aphasia, according to his husband John Augustine.

Marilyn Stasio Theater Critic It’s hard to believe, but Bob Fosse’s definitive signature musical “Dancin’” has never been revived on Broadway since its Tony Award-winning debut in 1978. Huge kudos, then, to director-choreographer Wayne Cilento, for creating a new Broadway revival that both honors its source and shares his own inspirational ardor. Although it famously has no plot, Fosse’s groundbreaking show does, indeed, have a story. It’s the love story of a dancer and his dance. This production even has a backstory, because Cilento also performed in the original production. This is Cilento’s rapturous – and extremely personal – homage to a great showpiece by a great choreographer.

Marilyn Stasio Theater Critic In the new Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman,” Wendell Pierce’s powerhouse performance firmly identifies Willy Loman as a tragic hero for these modern times. It’s a searing portrait of a working-class man who has struggled all his life to achieve. Not a man who works with his hands, or on an assembly line, but a man — a Black man — who goes to work in a suit and is welcomed wherever he goes by clients who greet him with a grin and a handshake. As a traveling salesman, he has dignity, respect and a shot at the American Dream, so long as he maintains his footing on the ladder of success — and pulls up his two sons behind him. If Willy should lose his job, he’ll lose that dignity, that respect, that place in society which defines him as a successful Black man in a white man’s world.

Marilyn Stasio Theater Critic In a radical departure from his usual intellectually esoteric style, Tom Stoppard’s new play is an intensely personal family drama. “Leopoldstadt,” which takes its name from the Jewish quarter of Vienna, doesn’t concern itself with quantum mechanics, metaphysical mysteries, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle or Fermat’s Last Theorem — all topics the playwright has tackled in previous plays. But because it follows the disintegrating fortunes of a close-knit Jewish family (and their goyish relatives by marriage), it does deal, in its way, with chaos theory.  The set (Richard Hudson, with a shout-out to the props team), costumes (Brigitte Reiffenstuel) and especially the lighting design (Neil Austin) bathe the first scene in an aura of domestic harmony. It’s 1899 and almost Christmas in Vienna. Everyone in the tastefully furnished Merz household appears to be approaching the 20th century with glad hearts. The family trade is prospering, the men are successful businessmen and academics, the women are smart and articulate and the children are well-behaved.