Off-Broadway plays can get really weird. Like, watermelon-being-smashed-to-bits-on-stage weird. So when the basic Broadway lineup starts to feel tired, it can be difficult to navigate theater options that extend beyond seeing “Wicked” for the fourth time. Here to help you avoid being needlessly splattered with fresh fruit, we bring you the February edition of our monthly roundup of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway shows.
“A Month in the Country”
Great For: Binge-watchers who almost never read anything on their high school syllabi
Classic Stage Company’s revival of “A Month in the Country” is what would happen if Ivan Turgenev’s five-act play were translated into SparkNotes and then optioned as a Netflix Original Series. Okay, part of that is because it stars Taylor Schilling (“Orange Is the New Black”), and she starts the show off in the role of Natalya feeling a lot like Piper Chapman took a time machine to the mid-1800s. Her first costume looks like the sort of thing Belle would wear in a side show at Disney World.
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“Love/Sick” is a donation-based show performed in a church, and there are times when it feels like … a donation-based show performed in a church. It could easily benefit from a tightened script and more polished direction, though that that only makes it slightly less entertaining. Several comedic vignettes centered around familial obligations (i.e. getting married, having the baby, not getting divorced after you do those things), are cut by the running theme of musical numbers set at a Target-Costco hybrid called SuperCenter: playwright John Cariani’s (blatantly obvious) analogy for the one-stop shop that we consider all adult life to be. Also, speaking of “Wicked,” the show currently stars Dee Roscioli.
Now in performances at the Royal Family Performing Arts Center.
