While a greater array of musical styles can now be heard, it's been decades since mainstream musical theater kept pace with popular music.
Even though the timing is right for a show that explains a tradition observed by so many people right here, right now, timing in a theater context means pace and precision.
Bram's exceedingly clever novel, set in the world of the theater, is well paced and sexy (both gay and straight); a character much like Ian McKellen is particularly acute about narcissism, the great motor of the stage, which he sees escaping into more and more of everyday life.
Sunday night at 7, Pace Downtown Theater, 3 Spruce Street, Lower Manhattan, (212) 346-1715.
Abramović found the theater's snail's pace and precision (the lighting, the breathing, the placement of her pinkie) a drastic change to her spontaneous street and gallery performances.
Marc Smith has stated, "Through this subscription series, it is our goal for performance poetry to establish a toehold in the 'legit' theater domain, setting the pace for others to follow until high level professional performance poetry productions are commonplace throughout the country".
Ms. Paley, a veteran of New York theater and daytime television, paces her production well.
"To have swept all that crockery away," Arthur Miller remarked in tribute to the pace-setting theater, "took a mighty arm".
Mr. Shanley has directed this Labyrinth Theater production with expert pacing and with such a sure comic hand that all the actors shine.
Mr. Beeson had seized on an ideal subject for him, one that seamlessly blended the pungent period musical flavor of church-and-parlor Americana with an expressive contemporary style that dug deeply into the characters' tragic dilemmas to produce a piece of flawlessly paced music theater.
The appeal of their dysfunctional 70-something characters, who share an Alan Alda obsession and a love of cuh-caine, is hard to describe, but the show, a loving satire of theater with the joke-pace of a standup set, is the funniest thing on the Great White Way.
