Press

Ever dream of being a dancer on Broadway? Your day has finally arrived. Seriously. In the finale of Broadway's exuberant revival of "Hair," the audience is invited to dance with the entire cast onstage. It is a communal celebratory conclusion to a theatrical experience you will not soon forget.

This has to be the liveliest death on record. Never mind those scary figures of legend who kept on fighting with bullets, poisons and knives in their guts: Rasputin, Blackbeard, that psychopath from the "Halloween" movies. When it comes to refusing to shuffle off the old mortal coil, these men are all small time compared to his moribund majesty King Berenger, whose last hours on earth have been brought to life like a fire-trailing comet by Geoffrey Rush.

Plays about dying really don't get any funnier than Eugene Ionesco's Exit the King, now getting a rare Broadway revival at the Barrymore Theatre. But getting laughs isn't all that this piece is about; as the work unspools with wild and sometimes joyful abandon in Neil Armfield's beautifully calibrated production, it proves both cuttingly topical and surprisingly touching.

"Nothing's abnormal when abnormal has become the new normal," declares Geoffrey Rush, a short distance into his astonishing performance as the dying monarch in "Exit the King." It's that state of pervasive uncertainty, in a world thrown into chaos as an empire crumbles, that rescues Eugene Ionesco's 1962 absurdist tragedy from the dusty vaults and infuses it with unexpected currency.

"It's certainly not hard to root for Matt Cavenaugh's handsome, likable Tony, or the angelic but warmly coquettish Maria of Josefina Scaglione, whose sterling lyric soprano is perfectly suited to the role. Karen Olivo's witty, fiery Anita is another asset; she may not be the best dancer to ever tackle the role, but Joey McKneely's reproduction of Jerome Robbins' choreography lets her shine and the others soar"

Much of the current West Side's appeal depends on the cast — which is to play off a Sondheim lyric — not only large and funny and fine, but up to fulfilling the tragic dimensions that Shakespeare and Laurents built into the show.

"It happened for me during "America." I forgot I was sitting in a Broadway theatre watching professional actors in a revival of West Side Story. I was spying on a group of high-spirited girls kidding each other about living in New York after enduring the poverty of their native Puerto Rico.

"The show's book has always been secondary to its score, but Laurents efficiently underlines the paradox that the Jets, so threatened by the encroachment of the Hispanic Sharks on their white neighborhood, are only a generation or two evolved from being the kind of immigrant trash they despise. And having their racism amplified through the voice of authority of a sleazy cop (Steve Bassett) further darkens the Shakespearean canvas of warring factions."

Just about everyone in theater is familiar with Anton Chekhov's comment that, to paraphrase, says once a gun is seen on stage it better go off before the play's over. So what would he think about David Mamet's career-making American Buffalo, which director Robert Falls is giving an effective if not explosive revival at the Belasco, in which small-time crook Teach (John Leguizamo) draws a pistol, but the trigger is never pulled?