I’ve seen many takes on Carroll’s classic, from Disney’s neutered Cheshire Cat to Czech animator Jan Švankmajer’s Freudian stop-motion masterpiece. But never have I seen the Victorian fable transplanted so effectively to another time and place: the studio of a tortured American artist who happens to be called Alice. Bound by a deal with the devil for a commission she cannot complete, Alice (Tana Sirois) sings her frustration into an empty canvas. She pushes away her loving partner Dinah (Meghan Ginley) to make room for more wallowing. She reels from a visit from the devil herself (Molly Kelleher), a collector who struts in like Cruella de Vil and delivers line after biting line with lip-lined precision.

What happens next should be obvious enough: Alice goes through the canvas. But that’s where the predictability ends. Kelleher soon reappears to nail yet another hilarious supporting role, this time as a badly drawn and deeply resentful mermaid from Alice’s childhood portfolio.

In a series of songs and vignettes based ever so loosely on episodes from the book, Alice gets roped into a support group for tortured artists, joins a discussion society with nothing to say, and ends up at the mercy of Kelleher’s Queen of Hearts. Along the way she meets an artist who offed herself in a dryer (Jamie Shapiro), a once-edgy painter who gave it all up for a bougie life in the burbs (a rip-roaring Jack Bowman), and a saber-rattling Italian ancestor on roller skates (Meghan Ginley).

Curioser and cuirassier.

The multitalented Tana Sirois, whose “Crushing Baby Animals” earned positive reviews from Max and Kirill last summer, manages to turn the traditionally passive, reactive Alice into someone passionate and proactive. Her powerful voice is partly to thank. But it’s also due to her total, deadpan commitment to the character, however absurd the circumstances. Her Alice aches to understand and be understood. She may be in a dream world, but she acts as if her artistic career and hence her very life is at stake.

The rest of the cast does a great job of holding Alice aloft, musically and literally, whether harmonizing with her vocals or pall-bearing her through a picture frame. They also deliver some outstanding solos in their own right. Jack Bowman is a standout in this regard. But the only cast member who could justly be accused of stealing the show is Molly Kelleher. Her voice, her stage presence, her acting chops, her grab-bag of spot-on accents—wow. I think I have a girl crush.

Anyway, the lyrics by William Donnelly and Michael Mahler overflow with witty enjambments and clever twists, my personal fav being the discussion group, a techno song full of vapid cell phone lingo. Probably the most serious tune was the final number, “Make Room in Your Life for Love.” I thought it was a moving finale with a valid point. My ex would have called it sentimental bollocks.

Did I mention my ex? Or why I haven’t written Playdate lately? I’ve been off Tinder because I started seeing someone. And he’s—you guessed it—a tortured artist. A sculptor, to be exact. It was fun at first, the heady conversations at 3 am, the modeling sessions with happy endings, the random trips to places no guy would ever take me, like the TWA Flight Terminal at JFK. For a while I felt like the center of his universe. But little by little he grew restless. He couldn’t sculpt anymore because I made him complacent, a.k.a. happy. He wanted us to see other people. If you live in New York, you know the drill.

I mean I get it, he’s afraid of becoming Jack Bowman’s suburban dropout. But I have no desire to play Dinah to his sculpted Alice. So I guess it’s back to Tinder and Playdate.

The date I brought loved “Painted Alice.” There was some kind of Indian party going on in another part of the gallery with a Bollywood DJ and kids in saris. We danced with them during the interval and had a great time in general. I can’t promise kids in saris, but I can promise fun and laughter, insights into the art world and the artistic temperament, and some cool video installations by Guillermos Laporta. Only two chances left to see this show. Don’t miss it. Seriously.

I’ll be OK.

“Painted Alice: The Musical” is running at the Plaxall Gallery through November 9. For information and tickets visit: licartists.org

The post Painting the Roses Black: A Playdate Review of “Painted Alice” appeared first on Reviews from Underground.

And Owens is remarkable. Whether indulging his ‘inner white girl’, performing a madcap mashup of Tyler Perry stereotypes, simulating sodomy with Antwayn Hopper’s overtly racist meth-head or belting out gospel in ‘AIDS is God’s Punishment’, an elaborately staged piece of anti-anti-gay propaganda that had many in the audience clapping along, Owens remains fiercely committed to the play’s overarching goal of making us sympathise with Usher, a character defined­­—at least in dramatic terms—less by race, weight and sexual orientation than by chronic passivity and self-absorption.

Ostensibly set in the interval of a performance of The Lion King, where Usher serves as, yes, an usher, A Strange Loop confronts the reluctant service employee and aspiring writer with a gallery of nagging ‘Thoughts’ brought to life by a cast so gifted as to frequently burst the bonds of their subordinate roles. This is especially the case with Usher’s mother and father, who achieve three-dimensional existence outside Usher’s mind on several occasions in the hands of several talented actors. Stand-out vignettes include Antwayn Hopper as a grindr date, John-Michael Lyles as Usher’s little brother, Jason Veasey as his deeply conflicted father and John-Andrew Morrison as his doting and controlling mother.

But perhaps it’s unjust to single out any one performer in a show so expert in character and gender fluidity—a skill which, by the way, is at once the play’s greatest strength and weakness. For as an inexhaustible source of laughs and surprises it permits the playwright to avoid the more difficult and dangerous task of creating characters who not only prod Usher from within, but actually challenge him from without—as human beings in their own right with back stories and nagging thoughts of their own that invite his and the audience’s identification.

This solipsistic tendency is nowhere more evident than in Usher’s rant to his parents, in which athletic black men who prefer white men to him are accused of social ambition, an argument disturbingly reminiscent of an online screed by a heterosexual ‘incel’. Yet so complete is Usher’s command of the audience’s sympathies by this point that the rant earns rousing applause.

Now one may certainly argue that solipsism is the point. Even the name Usher may be less a nod to the character’s job than a reference to Poe’s short story about a house brought down by incest, that is, by a refusal to engage with the outside world. If so, Jackson clearly sees Usher’s problem. In a telling moment, a Thought protests his parents’ depiction as stereotypes. “But is that really what real life is like with them?”, she asks, to which Usher replies, “Maybe not, but that’s what it feels like”.

Fair enough for a character sharing his feelings or an author writing a one man show. But for a playwright working with a cast of seven, some level of identification is called for—whether the other be a manipulative parent, a bigoted pastor, or a horny racist on meth. Otherwise the very purpose of writing a play is undermined. For how does Usher get out of his head if all he writes is what he feels? And what do we the audience really learn about Usher if we only see him in situations where he suffers as a passive victim? Action defines character, and at no point does Usher take any decisive action save to write a play in which he takes no decisive action save to write a play in which he takes no decisive action…

Don’t misunderstand me. This show is well worth the ticket price. If I criticise the foundations, it’s only in view of the heights to which Jackson’s play has already risen. And his success is well-deserved. His dialogue crackles. His pacing never falters. The world of the play feels constrictingly narrow at times, but the musical numbers are so expansive, inventive, subversive, so side-splittingly funny that one quickly catches one’s breath. This is, after all, a musical, and as a musical, Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop triumphs.

A Strange Loop, produced by Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73, is running at Playwrights Horizons through July 28th. For more information visit www.playwrightshorizons.org

The post Behind the Looking Glass: A Review of ‘A Strange Loop’ appeared first on Reviews from Underground.