Word: off-broadway
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First things first: Yes, he's full frontal - and not in Hair-like dim light or just for a fleeting few seconds, in the manner of so many off-Broadway plays trying to demonstrate their avant-garde cojones these days. He's out there for several minutes, alongside a young actress (Anna Camp) equally on display, in a scene that, even 35 years later, is still pretty startling and (rare for the stage) actually erotic. The kid's a trouper...
...comedy and tragedy--Ayckbourn's greatest feat, really--may be why his work has got short shrift in America. Early in his career, after such West End (and occasional Broadway) successes as Absurd Person Singular, Ayckbourn was labeled, patronizingly, the "British Neil Simon." But as his plays have grown darker and more complex, Broadway has largely abandoned him. Although Communicating Doors, one of his lesser comedies, had a successful run off-Broadway a couple of seasons back and Comic Potential, his latest West End hit, will be produced this fall by the Manhattan Theatre Club, most of Ayckbourn's great...
Rado and Ragni were off-broadway actors and part of the downtown experimental-theater scene in the mid-'60s when they decided to write a musical that would express the new attitudes of the youth culture exploding around them: sexual experimentation, an openness to drugs, the rejection of middle-class values of all kinds and most of all a hatred for the Vietnam War. The creative process reflected this freewheeling, convention-defying spirit. To cast the show, Rado and Ragni scoured the streets of Greenwich Village for people with the right look. Early performances had an anarchic, anything-goes feel...
...themes but also in form. The story is little more than a series of vignettes revolving around a communal-living group headed by the fiery, free-spirited Berger and the more conflicted refugee from Queens, Claude. (A New York Times critic, quaintly, said the show reminded him of 1920s off-Broadway revues--"the bright impudence of The Grand Street Follies and The Garrick Gaieties.") The score by Galt MacDermot--a musician who was nearing 40, loved jazz and favored suits and ties, the straight man out in this band of hippie-artists--is more experimental than it usually gets credit...
...play, which attracted an off-Broadway producer, became an unlikely hit and served as the springboard for Segal’s playwriting career...