And don’t miss the Gift Theatre’s “exhilaratingly subversive” Richard III, reviewed by Tony Adler here.
42nd Street Based on Bradford Ropes’s novel and the 1933 movie it spawned, this 1980 stage musical concerns desperate chorus girls and boys, doing their damnedest to stay afloat and hold on to their dreams during the Great Depression. What’s interesting is that they don’t backbite to achieve those goals. Whenever they make a decision, they do it for the good of the group—even if that means stepping aside to help one of their number get her big break. So it’s a nasty irony that the story is being told here in a non-Equity touring production. I guess the producers think solidarity is only for pretend. As for the show itself: moments of visual confusion in the staging, a few remarkably shoddy sets, and a wide range of skill levels—from serviceable to excellent—among the cast. —Tony Adler
The New Sincerity This Theater Wit production of Alena Smith’s 2015 satire is far more fun than it deserves to be. Smith’s comic strategy depends on adding a facile “not” to the title phrase, skating past loads of recent history, and contriving complications from the main character’s improbable naivete. Her attack on millennial hypocrisy is driven by Rose, whose PhD doesn’t prevent her from going all gooey over the chance to write for a little New York journal run by Harvard boy Benjamin. When the Occupy movement erupts just down the street, at Zuccotti Park, Rose goes gooey for that too, pulling Ben in along with her. Cynical, reductive, occasionally inexplicable high jinks ensue. Director Jeremy Wechsler can’t square certain elements, like Rose’s wayback-machine romantic notions, but he and a great cast maintain screwball levels of energy and sensibility throughout, making the show eminently seeable. Erin Long and Alex Stein are especially engaging as the play’s resident idiosyncrats. —Tony Adler
