Spirit Control
by Beau Willimon
This is a short one. Skip it. Just skip it. This show is just not worth seeing.
The synopsis tells us this is the story of Adam Wyatt, an air traffic controller who, when a pilot has a heart attack in mid-air, must talk a terrified passenger through an emergency landing. What happens next links him to a person he’s never met and puts his life in free-fall. It promises “a chilling and mesmerizing look at how we navigate a crisis, and the demons that haunt us long after.”
Well, it might promise us that, but it hardly delivers.
The play opens strongly enough- we’re offered the birds eye view of Adam and his fellow air-traffic controller as the deal with this emergency in mid-air . And it is a gripping scene as it all unfolds….but everything that happens after it? Utterly forgettable.
Manhattan Theatre Club at NY City Center Stage 1
West 55th Street between 6th & 7th Aves.
Open now through December 5th
Filed Under:
NYC, Theatre
Apricot Breakfast Muffins
I think there are two kinds of people in the world: jam-people and not-so-much-jam people. I fall into that latter category. It’s not that I don’t like jam–I do–…I just don’t feel the need to eat that much of it. You know, I generally eat my toast plain—well, with butter, but other than that, plain. I don’t spread jam on english muffins, or any other kind of muffins, for that matter. I don’t go wild for thumbprint cookies or sandwich cookies filled with raspberry or strawberry preserves. I’m just kinda plain that way.
But my parents and Suzy—especially Suzy—love, love, love jam. Capital-letters-LOVE-it. You cannot see the toast for the jam at breakfast at their house. We are lucky in that one of the things Suz does at her job is make jam. And even luckier, for us round people, she also makes sugar-free jam. (God bless Splenda!)
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Filed Under:
Bread/Pastry, Breakfast, Diet-Friendly, Recipe
The Language Archive
By Julia Cho
I really enjoyed this sweet little play! The Roundabout Theatre Company commissioned this piece – a comedy about a man studies languages, most notably those that are on the brink of extinction, yet one who struggles to communicate with the people closest to him.
It’s a comedy and the laughs are frequent, most provided by John Horton and Jayne Houdyshell—two very talented actors who play a variety of characters in this play—but most hysterically, they play a couple from a far-away un-named country who are the last two speakers of their native tongue. They’ve come to the Language Archive to record their language so it doesn’t vanish without a trace. And luckily for us they are a bickering couple…who manage to get their points so *hysterically* across—even though we don’t understand a blessed word they are saying.
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Filed Under:
Entertainment, NYC, Theatre
Fela!
Book by Jim Lewis and Bill T. Jones
Music by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti
If you’re like me, you had no idea who or what “Fela” was when you heard the title of this Broadway show. (And if you’re one of the people who did know who Fela was, well, then this review probably does not apply to you.)
Fela Kuti was a Nigerian musician/singer, pioneer of afrobeat music and political activist. You learn this as soon as the show opens and you find yourself in the ‘audience’ at Fela’s final concert in 1978 at the Shrine in Lagos, Nigeria. And that first-act ‘show’ is quite a fun one, even for the un-informed and un-initiated. The music and the dancers and the beat pulse all around you and Fela talks directly to the audience, drawing you further in.
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Filed Under:
Entertainment, NYC, Theatre
