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Lone Star has extended through February 6 — with ambitions that include an eventual transfer to Broadway. Before making that leap, I'd advise Haber & Herrick to hold their horses. The one lame aspect of their Shakespeare barbecue is the most obvious, the merry wives themselves. They're saddled with weepy country ballads and lack all the firewater that makes Falstaff, Fenton, Ford, and Miss Quickly so delightful.
Newsical (**) — Face it, America is starving for a dose of strong political satire. But this feeble spoof-a-thon by Rick Crom doesn't deliver the goods. Billed as a musicalized Daily Show, the sketches and parodies are hardly as fresh as the worst you might behold on Saturday Night Live.
Crom dutifully lampoons Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart, apparently lacking the intellect to realize that the media's obsession with these empty celebs is the true target to be abominated. You can't expect devastating thrusts at Dubya if you're dismissing Michael Moore as a paranoid crackpot. Or taking the usual cheap shots at Bill Clinton. Or sidestepping Iraq.
Blundering on with relentless energy, Crom does score some valid points. Barbra Streisand should perhaps shut up and sing, but Crom doesn't quit saying so while he's ahead. Better is the vivisection of Dr. Phil's macho bromides. "Your trouble," the pop guru advises a wimpering teenage girl, "is that you don't put out!"
But barbs aimed at Liza Minelli, the Homeland Security Color Code, and Arnold Schwarzenegger are pretty much stale on arrival. Nor has Newsical really lived up to its promise to refresh its material weekly. So what sounded stale to me on New Year's Eve is likely to sound staler to you.
White Chocolate (*1/2) — I was suckered by the hype for this Culture Project presentation, particularly the glowing John Simon review and the irresistible set-up. A wealthy Boston Brahmin, on the verge of winning the directorship of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, awakens on the morning the appointment is announced to discover a black man staring back at him in his bathroom mirror! To make matters worse, or better, Brandon Beale's savvy Jewish journalist wife awakens to an identical metamorphosis.
Reg E. Cathey is amazing as Brandon, seemingly disoriented in — and marveling at — his own black skin and funkiness. And yes, there are flecks of authentic yenta in luscious Lynn Whitfield's portrayal of Deborah Beale. But New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton takes a disastrous wrong turn with his playscript almost as soon as he leaves the gate.
So we don't see the hypocrisies lurking beneath the shibboleths of armchair liberals. Nor do we savor the spectacle of cosmopolitan New Yorkers stripped of their smugness and exposed as the provincials they truly are.
Instead, the Beales are upstaged for the entire first act by Brandon's screwball sister Vivian, played with hyperventilating intensity by Gayton Scott. Nothing the black Beales can say shakes Vivian's conviction that the people standing before her are artful impersonators, commissioned to add spark to the celebration of Brandon's new directorship. So by the end of Act 1 — this is truly repulsive — Vivian has donned blackface to show her admiration and get into the party spirit.
The Beales' daughter Louise soon drops by with her Harvard-educated Asian fiancé, an extra surprise for Daddy. But Hamilton is determined to fumble three plots simultaneously, so he has Beale's rival for the museum post mosey in and form an instant liaison with Vivian. Erik Laray Harvey manages to overplay this slickster's salivating unctuousness so crudely that he and Vivian seem like an ideal couple — even though he's black!
Oy.
Opera
Kát'a Kabanová (***1/2) — Last season, she sizzled with a wicked wantonness — and a glint of madness — in the title role of Salome, becoming the toast of the town. With memories of that triumph still vivid in the viscera of opera lovers, Finnish soprano sensation Karita Mattila returned to the Metropolitan Opera as a pure forlorn luminescence in Leos Janácek's gloomy excursion to Russia in the 1860s. Once again, Mattila has proven to be regal and devastating, without baring so much as her wrist.
This is the story of a god-fearing, sensual woman who is tethered in marriage to Tichon Kabanová, a prominent merchant in a small town by the Volga River who should have cast off his mother's dominion years ago. But he dares not rouse Kabanisha's jealousy by fully returning Kát'a's love. So, egged on by Kabanicha's perky foster-daughter Varvara, she succumbs to the ardor of an educated neighbor who's nearly as repressed as Tichon.