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Three Off Broadway Productions Bite the Donors That Feed Them
Theater does class warfare in The Counterfeit Opera, Prosperous Fools, and Not Not Jane’s.
“Billionaires will soon be trillionaires, while blaming the poor for all the things.” I’m not one to argue with that sentiment, which is pretty much a statement of fact, but in the context of the performance space — where trendy drinks are on sale in the garden nearby, and Instagrammers prowl the vistas for good sunset pics — the anger rings hollow. Because you’re all poor!” That’s followed by the somewhat awkward acknowledgment that we are in Chelsea: “For tonight, at least.”) Wills’s instinct to lean into the class awareness feels right for the piece — John Gay’s original was making fun of snooty continental imports to England, and the show is working in the shadow of Brecht and Weill’s Weimar-era Threepenny Opera — but even if we’re told the props are stolen, they are a little too nice for their purposes. Nelson-Greenberg’s play had, like The Counterfeit Opera, a speedy development — at my performance, Clubbed Thumb’s artistic director Maria Striar introduced it by saying they’d commissioned the piece at a holiday party last year — and it teems with more ideas than the playwright can wrangle.
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