Adoration of the Old Woman As with his mentor Gabriel García Márquez, the best of work José Rivera (see also the Goodman’s Another Word for Beauty) is at once realistic and magical, intensely political and deeply personal. Rivera doesn’t quite achieve this perfect balance in Adoration of the Old Woman; here the political issue at stake, Puerto Rican independence, is considerably more compelling than the various half-developed stories of love and loss that fill out the play. Still, the work has power and lots of heart, as do the performances in director Juan Castañeda’s sometimes ragged revival for UrbanTheater Company. The best—most notably, Andrew Neftalí Perez and Melissa DuPrey, playing respectively a nationalist and a very opinionated ghost—transcend the limitations of this low-budget production and bring a transcendent life to Rivera’s rich material. —Jack Helbig
Randy Harrison as the Emcee in Roundabout Theatre’s touring CabaretCredit: Joan Marcus
Fugitive Songs BoHo Theatre delivers an exquisite rendition of Chris Miller and Nathan Tysen’s 2008 concept revue—a cycle of songs about restless young people running (or wishing they could run) from bad relationships, dead-end jobs, dysfunctional families, and the like. Despite the downbeat-sounding premise, the show is constantly exhilarating and sometimes surprisingly funny, thanks to Tysen’s intelligent, candid lyrics and, especially, Miller’s beautifully textured, complex yet melodic music, which reflects influences ranging from singer-songwriters Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell to musical-theater composers Adam Guettel and Jason Robert Brown. The material’s main shortcoming is its lack of specificity—this is a show about a theme, not a story. But director-choreographer Zachary L. Gray and his superb six-person cast—Justin Adair (who also plays guitar), Greg Foster, Charlotte Morris (who also plays violin), Elissa Newcomer, Julian Terrell Otis, and Demi Zaino—solve the problem with imaginative staging and nuanced, believable, emotionally intimate characterizations as well as beautiful singing. Keyboardist Jeffrey Poindexter’s musical direction of the intricate, driving acoustic-rock/jazz score is crisp and sensitive. —Albert Williams
Pop Waits The “Pop” refers to Iggy, the “Waits” to Tom, and the two names together suggest the dynamic between Malic White’s Stooge energy and Molly Brennan’s Waitsian brooding. But this 90-minute performance piece is about more than musical preferences. White and Brennan use the title personas as a way of exploring their own, very complicated identities. It’s all fun, games, and a sharp three-piece backup band for a while. Brennan and White are both fine physical artists with great comic timing and an uncommon sweetness. The energy dissipates, though, when the pair turn confessional. As canny as they are about the nature of artifice, as brave as they are in attempting to dispense with it, they come up against a basic fact: suffering without art is just suffering. —Tony Adler
