"Bullet for Adolf" Totally Misfires

We should all be so lucky as to have a friend as good as Woody Harrelson.  As has now been told many times, Harrelson worked a construction job in the summer of 1983 and became buddies with a black guy named Frankie Hyman. The two lost contact after that summer. Harrelson went on to become a TV and movie star but he never forgot Hyman and periodically tried to track him down, eventually using one of his appearances on Jay Leno’s show to ask if anyone knew his old friend and could help them reconnect.  The plea worked.  The two reunited and eventually decided to write a play about the glory days of their earlier relationship (click here to read more about their back story).  The result is Bullet for Adolf, which is playing at New World Stages through Sept. 9. 

Writing, promoting and even directing the play is a lovely thing for Harrelson to have done for Hyman, who seems to have fallen on hard times over the years.  But it turns out to be a lot less lovely for those of us who like plays with believable characters, compelling stories, interesting ideas or actions that make sense. 

The plot that Harrelson and Hyman have concocted pivots around the interactions between their old multi-racial construction crew and a Nazi sympathizer whose prized possession is a gun that jammed when someone tried to use it to assassinate Adolf Hitler. 

There are tasteless Holocaust jokes, tasteless pedophile jokes and some innocuous but still lame jokes that are most likely to be funny only after one has smoked certain uncontrolled substances, a pursuit for which Harrelson is proudly famous.

Set designer Dane Laffrey hints that the play is supposed to be a farce by including multiple doors.  But neither director Harrelson nor his cast know how to make the best use of them. In fact, nearly everyone onstage overacts like crazy. 

David Coomber, who plays a sexually ambiguous guy who shares an apartment with the stand-ins for Harrelson and Hyman, does manage to come up with a few genuinely funny moments but is so amused by his own performance that he soon wears out its welcome. 

There are some spotty attempts to deal seriously with race. When the gun is stolen, cops immediately arrest the Frankie character solely because he's black. But that storyline is dropped just like all of the others in the play. Instead there is plenty of pretend dope smoking, some flat-footed passes at romance and copious hip-hop-style use of the n-word.

The only thing that kind of works are video projections that pop up during the long set changes. It's fun to see and remember images of news events and movie and TV clips (including Harrelson’s “Cheers”) from the ‘80s and I groaned inwardly each time they faded out because it meant that Bullet for Adolf was starting up again. 

And it wasn’t just me. I was sitting across the aisle from a major critic and happened to look at him at just the moment that he put down his pen and placed his head in his hands in a gesture of abject despair, presumably because we were only in the first act and had another hour to go.

I had planned to end this post by saying something about how Harrelson should keep his day job.  But then I remembered the response of the audience at the performance. 

Most howled at the crude jokes.  A few danced to the ‘80s music that played before the show began and during the set changes and intermission.  And nearly all applauded wildly when they heard Harrelson’s voice in the pre-show announcement that is hands-down the best thing about Bullet for Adolf.

Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.  But if you are the kind of folks who value good theater, you should definitely dodge this Bullet.

A Surprisingly Satisfying Day at the Fringe

Unless a friend, relative or lover is doing one of its shows, deciding what to see at the New York International Fringe Festival can be daunting.  Not to mention disappointing. There are nearly 200 shows each year, ranging in quality from polished professionalism to flagrant narcissism. In the past I’ve either thrown up my hands and skipped the festival entirely or chosen haphazardly and then wish that I had skipped it. 

But I got smart this year and about a month ago, I enlisted the help of my intrepid theatergoing buddy Bill, who read through this year’s offerings (click here to do the same) checked out the early buzz on them and then made up a short list of candidates that we might want to see. Luckily, three of the shows that most intrigued us were playing on the same day and so this past Wednesday, Bill and I created our own mini-festival and for the first time ever I can say I had a great time at the Fringe.

All of the Fringe shows play at theaters downtown within walking distance of one another, which makes it easy to get from one to the other.  Bill and I started our day at 2 p.m. at the Gene Frankel Theatre with Pink Milk, a 90-minute meditation on the life of Alan Turing, the brilliant computer scientist and cryptologist who helped the Brits break the German code during World War II but later committed suicide after being prosecuted for gross indecency because he was gay when that was illegal in England.

The show's playwright Alex Paul Young and his seven-member cast are all current college students or recent grads and both the play and the performances reflect their youth. And Pink Milk doesn’t add much to our understanding of Turing beyond what Hugh Whitemore offered in his 1986 play Breaking the Code, which introduced Turing to the general public and gave Derek Jacobi his West End debut.

Still, there is a sweet earnest to Pink Milk that flows from a new generation’s delight in having discovered a martyr and hero.  And director Brandon Powers has gussied up the production with all kinds of stagecraft, including stylized dance routines and some symbolic business with apples. He slightly overdoes it but I wouldn’t mind seeing more from him—or from Young for that matter. And, if you hurry, you can see what they’ve done with this since there’s a performance tonight and one more on Sunday afternoon.

Our next show, Independents, was scheduled to start at 4 p.m. and so Bill and I scooted up Second Avenue to Theatre 80 on St. Mark’s Place. There was a great deal of interest in this musical because its book writer Marina Keegan was killed in an auto accident in May, just days after graduating from Yale and a few weeks before she was scheduled to start working as an assistant at The New Yorker (click here to read more about her).

Her collaborators and fellow Yalies, composer Stephen Feigenbaum, lyricist Mark Sonnenblick and director Charlie Polinger, have dedicated the show to Keegan’s memory and it turns out to be a very nice tribute. 

The plot centers around a group of young misfits who are living on a Revolutionary- era tall ship that is the only thing one of them inherited when his parents unexpectedly died. He and his crew try to raise the money to pay off some debt on the boat by performing as Colonial Williamsburg-style reenactors.  But they’re no good at it until a Corky St. Clair-style intern arrives.

There are additional subplots involving a brother in foster care, at least two troubled romances and drug smugglers that Keegan might have combed out and tightened had she lived. But as is, the show is buoyed up by its terrific score—an entertaining blend of pop-rock tunes, riffs on sea ditties and a lovely cabaret-ready ballad, “I Should Be Glad He’s Gone.” 

Polinger meanwhile has directed with a sure hand. The cast—a mix of vets from the original Yale production and young New York actors including Lilli Cooper, the original Martha in Spring Awakening who sings the hell out of that “He’s Gone” ballad—comes with varying degrees of talent but is so thoroughly natural and comfortable with one another that I thought they’d all been longtime friends until I read the Playbill. Kudos to both Polinger and casting director Holly Buczek.

The production values are similarly strong. The handsome nautical set by Brian Dudkiewicz reminded Bill and me of the one for Peter and the Starcatcher and appropriately so since this show is not only set on a ship but deals with a contemporary group of lost boys and girls. 

Independents is scheduled for three more performances next week before the whole Fringe Festival closes on Aug. 26.  The word is that all seats for it were sold out but there were a few vacant ones at our performance so go and you might get lucky.

It began to rain when Bill and I walked out of the theater and since we had an hour until our 7 p.m. show, we ducked into a café on Second Avenue and got a quick snack. When the rain slowed, we ran over to the Kraine Theater on 4th Street, where we saw the most professional of the three shows, Tail! Spin!, Mario Correa’s satirical spin on political sex scandals.

Excerpting verbatim transcripts from press conferences, interviews, emails and other public utterances, Correa revisits former Sen. Larry Craig’s arrest for lewd conduct in a men's airport bathroom, former Rep. Mark Foley’s salacious email exchanges with teen boys, former Gov. Mark Sanford’s extramarital affair with an Argentinean journalist and former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s sexting and emailing of lewd photos of himself. 

The fun derives from the way Correa juxtaposes the words each man said as he tried to control the damage after his alleged indiscretions had been revealed. Veteran comedy director Dan Knechtges brings a light but deft touch to the proceedings in which the actors sit on stools and occasionally refer to the scripts they carry. Video projections help the audience keep track of who’s speaking.

The shamed pols are played by a terrific quarter of actors who’ve honed their comedic skills on TV and onstage: Sean Dugan as Craig, Dan Hodapp as Foley, Mo Rocca as Sanford and Nate Smith as Weiner  But best of all is  “Saturday Night Live’s” Rachel Dratch, who, as the Playbill notes, plays the men’s “wives, tails, beards & Barbara Walters” and is LOL-funny as each. 

Bill and I caught the next-to-the-last performance of Tail! Spin! but it wouldn’t have mattered even if I’d told you about it earlier because all of the seats sold out as soon as the tickets went on sale last month.

So, we did three plays in six hours. None was perfect but they were good enough that I would have been up for even another.

Summer Shorts Remains a Summer Treat

Summer is supposed to be the quiet season for New York theatergoers but somebody apparently forgot to send that memo to the folks who organized all the theater festivals that have been going on around town these past few weeks.

There was the Lincoln Center Festival, which sponsors international productions and this year featured the National Theatre of Scotland’s one-man Macbeth with Alan Cumming playing all the roles and the Sydney Theatre Company’s Uncle Vanya with Cate Blanchett (click here for my review of that).  The New York Musical Theatre Festival which usually sets up camp in September even moved its operations into July this year (click here to listen to an interview with its executive director Robert Hurwitz). 

And now we’ve got the New York International Fringe Festival, which began last Friday and will present nearly 200 different shows before it closes on Aug. 26. I’m scheduled for a three-show marathon today and plan to post about what I see on Saturday.  

In the meantime, my favorite summer theater festival may be Summer Shorts, the series of original short plays that opened a four-week run at the 59E59 Theaters last week. There are only six plays in the festival and they’re presented in bills of three (Series A and Series B) on alternate nights. And you don’t have to travel around from place to place to see them as you do with other festivals because all the Summer Shorts offerings are presented on the same stage.

The playwrights, directors, actors and designers who mount these shows tend to be pros with solid Broadway and off-Broadway credits so there’s a polish to Summer Shorts productions despite obviously limited budgets. In fact, each play is the theatrical equivalent of an amuse-bouche, a little treat that doesn’t pretend to be a full meal but still offers a satisfying taste of the playwright’s specialties.

The play groupings aren’t usually meant to be thematic but Series B, the trio I saw, might easily have been called Series G, for each of the three playlets involves gay characters in comic situations. 

Two masters of high-camp humor, playwright Paul Rudnick and actor Peter Bartlett, join forces in Cabin Pressure, a monologue about a gay flight attendant who is being awarded for having thwarted a terrorist attack on his flight. Rudnick riddles the acceptance speech with non-sequitur zingers about hedge fund managers and movie celebrities, and Bartlett, under the gleeful direction of Walter Bobbie, nails almost every one of them.

Next up is Love and Real Estate, a mini-musical by Sam Davis, a frequent Broadway conductor who has branched into composing his own shows, and Sean Hartley,a book writer and lyricist whose best known credit is Little Women. They’ve updated the Three Little Pigs story to modern-day Manhattan: the piggies are now the three human Bacon sisters played by Stephanie D’Abruzzo, Sarah Corey and Jessica Hershberg; the wolf is a sly guy (Kevin Greene) who woos all three siblings and Edward Hibbert plays an Into the Woods-style narrator, whose role is more than it seems.  I can’t remember even one song from the show but its silly antics still make me smile.

Neil LaBute is a Summer Shorts regular and he’s back with his trademark misogyny in The Furies, a tale about an older and recently out gay man (Victor Slezak) whose attempt to break up with his younger lover (J.J. Kandel) arouses the suspicion and the vengeance-is-mine fury of the lover’s sister, played with comic finesse by Alicia Goranson.

Altogether, the three plays lasted a total of just 90 minutes.  Afterward, I walked over to Madison Avenue, caught a bus uptown and stopped in the 90s to have dinner at Paola's, an Italian place that my husband K and I used to like a lot but haven't been to for a while. I got an outside table, ordered a nice bowl of pasta and a chilled glass of wine.  In every way, a light, easy and savory summer evening.

Why "Into the Woods" Fails to Enchant Me

The first real writing I ever did was a reworking of Grimm’s Fairy Tales because they just didn’t make sense to my 8 year-old self. As I recall, I made them more agreeable by changing some endings and giving the princesses more backbone.

That love of fairy tales and bent for deconstructing them would seem to make me the perfect audience for Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical revamping of those same fables about witches and princes, evil spells and magic wishes. But when I first saw Into the Woods during its original Broadway previews back in 1987, I was so unhappy with it that I left after the first act.   

Now the Public Theater has imported a much acclaimed 2010 revival from London that opened at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park on Thursday night. I stayed through both acts this time but Into the Woods still failed to enchant me.

Most of the familiar storybook figures are there: Little Red Riding Hood, her grandmother and the Wolf; Jack of the beanstalk fame and his giant nemesis; Rapunzel and her long golden hair, Cinderella, her mean stepmother and stepsisters and her benevolent fairy godmother, a couple of charming princes and an ugly old witch.  And as though that weren't enough, Sondheim and Lapine also invented two central characters: a baker and his barren wife who are desperate to have a child. 

The fun of the first act is supposed to be seeing how all the stories are tied together and all the characters brought to the point where they’re ready to live, as these stories always promise, happily ever after. The pleasure of the second is supposed to be watching how the show makes good on the old adage “be careful what you wish for.”

Into the Woods came during the second half of Sondheim’s career but still centers around one of his favorite themes:  life is a real bitch unless you can find a way to connect to someone but you shouldn’t expect any miracles even if you do manage to open up your heart and commit.

The fact that this existential reckoning is happening to fairy tale characters, the Jungian avatars of our desires, is suppose to drive the point home even further. The problem for me is that even a slightly precocious 8 year-old knows that fairy tales characters are unrealistic and so I’ve never been able to truly care about the ones who inhabit Into the Woods or to be moved, or even surprised, by their eventual fates. 

The show's musical themes are similar too.  There are some lovely songs in Into the Woods, including the classic ballads "Stay With Me" and "Children Will Listen" and the underrated comic number "Agony", an anthem for the grass-is-always greener set.  

But other numbers like the title song seem like reprises from other, better shows. The jaunty ditty the characters sing as they head into the woods very closely echoes the one another group sang as it set out for a weekend in the country.

Indeed, there are several almost paint-by-the-number moments in both the book (every character has to get his or her comeuppance) and the score (nearly every character gets his or her "I want" song) that made me wish I were seeing some other, more subtly drawn Sondheim show. 

But that apparently is just me. The original production won Tonys for that book and that score and ran for a healthy 765 performances, longer than the original outings of Company, Follies or Sweeney Todd (click here to read about the making of that production).

The run for the current production has already been extended a week through Sept. 1 and people are already camping out over night to be first in line for the free tickets that are distributed at 1 p.m. each day. 

What they’ll see is different in several ways from earlier productions. The biggest difference is that the show was originally narrated by an older man but in this telling, co-directed by the Brits Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel, a framing device has been added that changes the narrator to a small boy who seems to have run away from home and is imagining all the stories that play out onstage.  But this extra story just adds another layer to a show that already has too many of them.  And the direction doesn't help make following those storylines any easier.

The characters in this version don’t wear traditional fairy tale garb but are dressed in an assortment of styles including steampunk outfits that allow Little Red Riding Hood to combine a straw basket with a motorcycle helmet and cutoffs, while Cinderella’s stepsisters go Goth. Emily Rebholz, who took a similar approach with the costumes for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, has great fun with the mash-ups and perfectly captures the self-parodying tone that Sheader and Steel have set for the entire show. 

Alas, the cast has a harder time maintaining that attitude.  Sarah Stiles nails it with a delightfully feisty portrayal of Little Red Ridinghood (even her giggle is in character). And Ivan Hernandez and Paris Remillard (filling in the night my theatergoing buddy Bill and I saw the show for an ailing Cooper Grodin) are appropriately fey and funny as the preening princes. On the other hand, Denis O’Hare and the movie actress Amy Adams (burdened under the oddest-looking wig) still seem to be searching for their characters as the Baker and his Wife.

Luckily, the redoubtable Donna Murphy plays the Witch and is all by herself worth the wait on line. She isn’t called upon to rap her lyrics as Bernadette Peters was in the original production, but she is both wryly funny and heartbreakingly moving. Needless to say, she also sings the hell out of the show’s signature ballads.

And, of course, there is the park. It almost doesn’t matter what show is playing at the Delacorte if you have the good fortune to be there on a balmy summer evening.  Plus, set designer John Lee Beatty has cooked up a magical coup d’park in the second act that made even the finicky 8 year-old inside of me smile.

Taking It a Little Easier Than Usual

Yep, it's that time again.  We're heading into the dog days of summer when everything slows down. Including B& Me.  As seems to have become a tradition around this time each year, I'm shifting into vacation mode.  I'll continue to see a few things and to let you know what I think about them but over the next month or so I won't be posting as regularly as I usually do.  Instead I'll be kicking back, spending more time on the terrace and sampling some of my husband K's new cocktail recipes (he's recently been testing out ones for piña coladas). I hope your summer is being a great one too and that, even in these lazy days, you’ll still find some time to see a good show or two.

Memory-Making Visits to Two "Uncle Vanyas"

 

Actors and directors love to do classic works.  It gives them a chance to size themselves up against the myths and memories of earlier, legendary performances and productions.  And those of us who are theater junkies love to see them do it. That gives us the chance to look anew at these works that define the theatrical canon and, perhaps, to witness some history in the making. 

This explains how I ended up seeing two versions of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya within just the last four weeks.

The first was the Soho Rep production, directed by the ubiquitous Sam Gold from a new adaptation by his frequent collaborator playwright Annie Baker and starring a treasure chest of New York’s best stage actors.  It was scheduled to run for a month and close on July 15, but has proven such a must-see that it’s now been extended through Aug. 26.

The second production is the Sydney Theatre Company’s, helmed by the Hungarian director Tamás Ascher, who is considered one of the world’s reigning Chekhov interpreters, from an adaptation by the company’s co-artistic director Andrew Upton and starring Upton’s wife and co-artistic director, the Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett. Its brief run at City Center as part of this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival ends this weekend (click here to read about the evolution of their production).

The New York Times’ Ben Brantley so loved the Ascher-Upton-Blanchett version when it played at the Kennedy Center last year (it gets “under your skin like no other I have seen,” he wrote; click here to read the whole review) that despite the disappointing experience I’d had the last time I saw Uncle Vanya (click here to read that review) my theatergoing buddy Bill and I bought tickets as soon as they went on sale.

But just a few weeks later, I read that Soho Rep was planning to do the play and I couldn’t resist seeing what three of my very favorite showmakers—Gold, Baker and the inestimable Reed Birney as the disillusioned Vanya—would do with it and so Bill and I bought tickets for that one as well.

And I’m glad we took the double dip because the companies have taken radically different approaches to the play. And both are worth seeing.

Gold and Baker’s is almost aggressively contemporary and emphasizes the melancholy of this play about a group of interrelated and unhappy people whom economic circumstances have forced to share a Russian country house (click here to read about the thinking behind their version).

Baker, who is credited with the costuming, has dressed the actors in the kind of casual street clothes they might have worn in the rehearsal room. Andrew Lieberman’s set looks like thrift-shop cast-offs and Mark Barton’s lighting design leans heavily on the on-set lamps that stagehands and the actors plug in to signal the start of each act.

It’s a determinedly no-frills take on the play that reminded me of David Cromer’s revelatory modern-dress version of Our Town and the new no-set, no-props Cock: in all three cases, the viewer is forced to focus on the play because there’s not much else there but the play.

This stripped-down aesthetic extends to the seating for the Soho Vanya. The inside of the theater has been arranged so that there are no real seats. Instead, the audience sits on carpet-covered platforms that surround the playing area. It creates an intimate space in which to see the play but unless you’re in the first row there’s no where to put your legs.

Most people, except for the occasional women unlucky enough to be wearing a skirt, sat yoga style at our performance.  But, as my numbed knees will attest, it’s not the most comfortable way to see a play.

So it’s a testament to the production that I was not only riveted by it, but moved as well. Although Baker’s language is decidedly modern, the play’s themes of unrequited love and missed opportunities are timeless. And the actors she and Gold have assembled are fearless in exploring them.

Birney is unsurprisingly excellent as Vanya but the spotlight may have been stolen by Michael Shannon, who brings an edgy, idiosyncratic charm to the role of Astrov, the doctor who falls in love with Yelena, the restless wife of the much-older professor who is his patient. 

Meanwhile Merritt Wever, best known as the cheery junior nurse on TV’s “Nurse Jackie,” is wrenching as Sonya, Vanya’s self-effacing niece who is helplessly in love with the doctor and who gives the play’s famous final speech which, in this production, becomes an elegy for all those who lead lives of quiet desperation.

There is more comedy in the equally conversational adaptation that Uptown has written for the Sydney Company.  And it’s a fancier production. He and Ascher have updated the time period from Czarist Russia at the turn of the last century to the Soviet Union at midcentury. 

Ascher’s longtime collaborator Zsolt Khell has designed an elegant dacha that is just rundown enough to suggest the economic hardships that all but the highest members of the Communist Party endured during that period.  

And costume designer Györgi Szakács has underscored the class differences in this supposedly classless society by incorporating touches of peasant wear into the outfits of the characters who live in the country, while dressing the professor and Yelena, who have recently arrived from Moscow, in sleeker, more fashionable outfits.

Blanchett, long a favorite of fashion magazine editors, looks fabulous in these clothes. And, of course, she acts fabulously too. Chekhov is prized by actors because he wrote roles that allow them to show off both their dramatic and comedic talents, often within the same scene. Summoning her considerable skills, Blanchett makes Yelena simultaneously spoiled and unfulfilled, slapstick silly and achingly sad. 

She is well matched by Richard Roxburgh who plays the hapless Vanya (although I found Roxburgh to be so endearing that it was hard to understand why Yelena wouldn’t respond to him) and by Hugo Weaving, familiar to fans of “The Matrix” and “Lord of the Rings” movie trilogies, who plays an equally alluring Astrov. 

They and their colleagues have created a stylish and intelligent production.  And yet, it didn’t move me in the way that the one at Soho Rep did. Bill, on the other hand, felt exactly the opposite way.  He admired the work the Soho Rep company did but was transported by the Sydney crew, even though the acoustics in City Center made it difficult to hear everything those actors said.

That, of course, is the magic of great theater.  And it is the reason those of us who love theater grab at the chance to see great works, particularly when presented by artists of this caliber, over and over again.

"Dogfight" Aims for the Winner's Circle

It would be hard to find a show with a more impressive pedigree than the one for Dogfight, the lovely little musical that opened at Second Stage Theatre on Monday night:

•Its director is Joe Mantello, the wiz who brought Wicked to the stage. Mantello has made some missteps since then (9 to 5, November, The Odd Couple) but he’s an ambidextrous showmaker, equally adept at big audience-pleasing musicals (Wicked) and intimate character-driven pieces (Other Desert Cities) and both skills are put to good use here.

•Its composer and lyricist Benj Pasek & Justin Paul may not yet be household names but the music they've produced for Dogfight shows why, still in their 20s, they’ve won just about every prize a talented young musical team can (The Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theatre, The Jonathan Larson Award, the ASCAP Songwriters Fellowship Award, to name a few) and are scheduled to make their Broadway debut in November with A Christmas Story: The Musical!. 

•Its star is Lindsay Mendez, a favorite in the theater community who has a powerhouse voice, has paid her dues off-Broadway, in the regional theaters and in the ensemble of Broadway shows like Godspell and Everyday Rapture and is finally getting her first shot at a leading role—and making the most of it.

•And, although it’s another movie-to-musical transfer, Dogfight is based on the small but beloved (at least by me) film that starred River Phoenix as Eddie Birdlace, a young Marine shipping out to Vietnam in 1963, and Lili Taylor, as Rose Fenny, the homely waitress he meets when he and his buddies engage in a cruel prank in which the one who brings the least attractive girl to a party wins a jackpot. 

I remember being immensely touched by the bittersweet romance that eventually develops between the characters when I first saw the movie back in 1991 and I was moved again by this new stage version. That might be, in part, because book writer Peter Duchan sticks close to the storytelling of the movie script, including its rather abrupt ending. 

But it also reflects the fact that Pasek and Paul have written tuneful songs that capture both the bravado and longing of the characters. They may be young but, like Joseph and David Zelnick, the brothers who wrote Yank!, (and when are we going to see it again?) Pasek and Paul are old-style songwriters and it’s easy to understand why lovers of old-fashioned musicals are so excited about them.

I confess I do wish that their songs in Dogfight distinguished themselves more from one another but each is fine in its own right, developing character, moving the plot along, unafraid of metaphor.

The staging is equally stylish but Mantello seems uncomfortable with how to portray the women that the marines disingenuously pick up for their party. Attitudes about the way we discus women’s looks have changed since the ‘60s (a girl in my high school was the victim of a dogfight-style contest) or even from the early ‘90s when the movie came out. 

The production doesn’t seem to know whether it should portray the women as hideously ugly, goofily funny-looking or just plain-faced. And since the party scene is so key, that lack of clarity throws the first act off a bit. 

But Mantello and his actors are spot-on when it comes to portraying the awkward love story that develops after Rose discovers why Eddie asked her out and he tries to make it up to her.  

Derek Klena has the difficult job of making the audience care about a guy who’s initially a jerk and he pretty much pulls it off. But Mendez is the heart of the show. She brings a courageous honesty to Rose, who knows that she is no beauty and yet still blossoms.  (Click here to read an article in which the actress describes how she does it).

Meanwhile, choreographer Christopher Gattelli contributes dance numbers throughout that entertain without overwhelming the story: there are no showstoppers here, which may disappoint those who come expecting the kind of gymnastic routines that won Gattelli a Tony for Newsies, but the moves he's created for Dogfight fit this more intimate show.

Producers don’t assemble talent like this unless they’ve aiming for the kind of little-musical-that-could success that similarly small and eccentric shows like Next to Normal, Spring Awakening and Once managed to achieve. But that outcome may be more difficult for Dogfight, which doesn’t have the rock-flavored score of the first two or the emo quality and Oscar-anointed love anthem of the latter.  

Even so, Dogfight is worth championing.  And so that's what I'm doing.