Tricky Business

Cahn and O'Connor in Getting the Business.

Sometimes a play starts off with such bounce and pizzazz that you're certain the evening ahead will be a most delightful one. Alas, that was not the case with Getting the Business, a two-hander featuring downtown-theater luminary Susan Louise O'Connor. After a zippy opening, in which a woman with only the vaguest of credentials persuades a businessman (playwright Victor L. Cahn) to hire her as his secretary, this satire about the confluence of office and political politics gradually starts to sag.

Women on the Fringe

Onalea Gilbertson in Blanche.

Very pleased to have had the chance to review a couple of worthwhile shows at this year's New York International Fringe Festival, especially ones in which women play such prominent roles onstage and off. And, though I didn't realize it at the time, both originated in the great fringey country of Canada: The List, about a harried wife and mother's obsessive to-do notes, from Montreal; and Blanche: The Bittersweet Life of a Wild Prairie Dame, pictured above, a song cycle inspired by the story of a singer-composer-musician's grandmother, from Alberta.