07 May TIO NYC: Ives’ “The Metromaniacs”+
“The Metromaniacs” at The Duke Theatre, 229 West 42 Street (between 7th & 8th) is up through May 26. Non-stop laughs, especially if wordplay is your thing, this show is nonstop zing. Tickets here.
Also, food, drink and music at the sexy bar, The Blacktail.
Great Indian food at Ashoka.
Dina Thomas, Noah Averbach-Katz, Christian Conn, Adam Green, and Adam LeFevre star in David Ives’s The Metromaniacs, directed by Michael Kahn, for Red Bull Theater at the Duke on 42nd Street.
(© Carol Rosegg)
A riff on “The Metromaniacs, The Short Version (in the style of Ogden Nash):
While the plot is precarious
The show is hilarious.
A riff on Metromaniacs, more:
While the plot is precarious
The show is hilarious.
But what are metromaniacs anyway?
People who like the subway?
No way.
Metromania is an obsession, a curse,
Metromaniacs are cuckoo for verse.
Case in point, the playwright David Ives,
He of “Venus in Fur” fame,
That man lovingly ripped off this story of French folly from an obscure 18th-century farce of the very same name.
And it’s “All in the Timing”
Because our boy Ives really likes rhyming.
Asked about author Alexis Pinon’s original plot, Ives sums up
With a thumbs up for “five plots, none of them important.”
“The Metromaniacs” was then and is now all about “gossamer and gorgeousness.”
You know, unmitigated fluff
Which, in this very special case, is quite enough.
Really and truly light, but very funny stuff.
If you are not averse to verse.
Life could be worse.
The cast is terrific too.
Running around spouting improbable couplets as they do.
In the “The Metromaniacs, Ives takes rhyming to the max
So screw the facts.
We guffawed at Ives’s virtuosic wordplay, when he rhymes “exhibits” with “kibbitz.”
We howled when a character remarks that uncivilized Breton women carry “Brittany spears.”
How do they keep all those plates spinning?
Bravura performances, really very winning.
And given what greets us in our morning news read
We suggest you head to The Duke with great speed.
“The Metromaniacs” is madcap
And that’s a rap.
Ok, now that I’ve render your delirious, let’s get serious:
From left, Dina Thomas, Christian Conn and Adam LeFevre in “The Metromaniacs” at the Duke on 42nd Street. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times.
It’s springtime in Paris, 1738. Metromania, the poetry craze, is all the rage. Damis, a young, would-be poet with a serious case of verse-mania falls for a mysterious poetess from Breton, Meriadec de Peaudoncqville (say it). She turns out to be none other than a wealthy gentleman (yes, that’s right) with a touch of the mania himself—looking to unload his sexy but dimwitted daughter—who also just happens to be cuckoo for couplets. Soon scheming servants, verbal acrobatics, and mistaken identities launch a breathless series of twists and turns in this breezy “translaptation” of a rediscovered French farce by comedic master David Ives (“The Liar, ” “Venus in Fur,” “All in the Timing”).
Dinner after “The Metromaniacs” was at the newish (just one year old) and wonderful Indian restaurant on the Upper West Side: Ashoka.
Authentic, delicious food in a sensuous setting. Try the cauliflower in a garlic tomato sauce, tandoori mushrooms and coconut shrimp for starters. The simply plated lamb and chicken confections we tasted were equally good. Live music on the weekends.
From the team behind the award-winning Dead Rabbit comes this Pier A watering hole, designed to invoke American bars displaced to Cuba during Prohibition.
The Blacktail, was voted “Best New American Bar” in 2017.
We went down to Battery Park City on a Thursday night to hear one of the best stride pianists in New York and his lovely, talented vocal companion. The joint was jumping and the jazz was just as hot. The food was terrific too. And the service? Solicitous, but not hovering and always with a smile from the sexy wait staff.
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