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BILLY BATHGATE by E.L. Doctorow (Random House; $19.95). A fictional Bronx boy, circa 1935, is accepted into the inner councils of the infamous Dutch Schultz gang and survives murderous adventures to tell an incendiary tale...
Things are somewhat better in Hastings' staging of When We Are Married, J.B. Priestley's satire of the Yorkshire bourgeoisie circa 1908. The premise: three long-married couples discover that their wedlock may not be legal and suddenly are able to reconsider, with the wisdom of hindsight, the choices of youth. Two browbeaten wives and one henpecked husband toy with ditching their spouses, a notion that is faintly feminist for its time. Fittingly, the best performances come from Fredi Olster and Joy Carlin as the resentful wives and the delightful Ruth Kobart as a domineering dragon. Randall...
This emblematic world is at full intensity in the Met's own The Creation, and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise by Giovanni di Paolo, circa 1445. God the Father hurtles down from heaven, supported by blue cherubim and bowling before him an immense wheel depicting the concentric divisions of the universe -- the earth, the spheres of water, air and fire, those of the seven planets, the zodiac and the dark blue primum mobile. On the right, an angel chivies our first parents -- pale, forked creatures -- out of a tapestry paradise of emblematic plants...
...even Nude Woman Having Her Hair Combed, circa 1886-88, the most refined and classical of these nudes, seems in the least Renoiresque, though nothing could be more appealing than that pink, slightly blockish body against the gold couch and the regulating white planes of peignoir and apron. It was a subject to which Degas brought special, almost fetishistic feeling, and a later version of the same theme, The Coiffure, 1896, shows what a vehicle for innovation it could be: the contours of the woman and her maid are now roughed out with an almost fauve abruptness, and they emerge...
...American Dream seems especially dated. It's the story of what is supposed to be a parody of an ideal American couple, circa 1960. Mommy (Holly Cate) spends her days shopping or meeting with her women's auxilliary club, while Daddy (Donal Logue) spends his reading the paper in his easy chair. Mommy wears a bright pink party dress, the kind that domestic ex-prom queens like June Cleaver and Donna Reed wore on TV sitcoms in the 1950s and early 1960s. In fact, TV-sitcom theme songs play in the background to drive home the point of Mommy...