New York Critic

Club DaDA/Kabaret Kaput Club DaDA/ Kabaret Kaput  is appearing for five performances at Dixon Place in NYC. It calls itself "a 'cabaret' in the Kurt Weil Weimar sense of the word". But audiences expecting the Kit Kat Club from  Cabaret  will be disappointed. The two performers haven't bothered to hire a trio or even a pianist; they sing accompanied by recorded instrumentals. When an audience buys tickets to a cabaret, they expect cabaret, not karaoke. Singing to recorded tracks is unacceptable at open mike night; in cabaret it's unknown. They've played a bait-and-switch trick on the audience.   Ellen Foley and Robert I Rubinsky are senior singers who take on the characters of bedraggled, stressed vaudevillians, "always singing — never stopping". "Nobody likes old people," they tell us, "We'll be exiled or worse." They sing a string of pop/rock songs from the 1960's onward. Not all these songs lend themselves to the cab...

  The Knight of the Burning Pestle = By Francis Beaumont   = Produced by Red Bull Theater and Fiasco Theater = Directed by Noah Brody and Emily Young = Lucille Lortel Theatre, NYC, Off-Broadway = Shakespeare eclipsed the other Elizabethan dramatists, but their plays are nonetheless very rewarding. If they're less rewarding than Shakespeare, they're also less challenging — the syntax is simpler. And being more accessible is itself a strength. Francis Beaumont was one of the best of these playwrights He wrote The Knight of the Burning Pestle in 1607. It's a terrific comedy. It uses the technique of a play-within-a-play several years after Shakespeare experimented with it (and then abandoned it) in The Taming of the Shrew . Knight opens with he actors announcing the play they're about to present, The London Merchant . They're soon interrupted by The Citizen and his Wife who insist on that their son, Rafe, be included in the cast. Throughout, they interrupt the play —...