Eliana Willis

A diner patron asks a waitress for an extraordinary side dish in Meghan Kennedy’s sweet but shaggy new play.With their twirly stools, chipped mugs and napkin contraptions, old-fashioned diners are apparently dying out. But not onstage, where they solve a lot of playwriting problems.Getting strangers to talk to each other? Easy: Waitress, meet customer. Motivating random pop-ins and exits? Jingle the door and pay the bill. Signal “America” without having to say it? The Bunn-O-Matic might as well be a flag.All of those are ingredients in “The Counter,” a sweet but shaggy dramedy by Meghan Kennedy that opened Wednesday at the Laura Pels Theater in Midtown Manhattan. The waitress is Katie (Susannah Flood): a big-city exile returning to her small-town home for reasons that emerge over the play’s 75 minutes. Her first customer, most days, is Paul (Anthony Edwards): a retired firefighter slumping onto his favorite stool for coffee and a lifeline of conversation.Kennedy’s dialogue is piquant and suggestive but mechanically avoidant. Needing to hold back the play’s big events, she lets her characters spend most of its first third dropping bread crumbs of information and noodling amusingly around the edges of not much. Paul has trouble sleeping and is a cinephile. Katie prefers Netflix. Both, it’s clear, if only by the impenetrable fog on the windows, are lost and lonely, in a way we are meant to understand as American.The banality of all that is undercut, in David Cromer’s typically thoughtful staging, by hints that the story will soon be heading sideways. That’s literally true of Walt Spangler’s set, which orients the title character — the counter — perpendicular to the audience, so we see the divide between Katie and Paul at all times. At some point, each also gets a private soliloquy, with lighting (by Stacey Derosier) and sound (by Christopher Darbassie) altered to indicate interiority.But these breaks in the production’s otherwise closely observed naturalism — including hoodies, plaids and puffers by Sarah Laux — come off as passing tics, especially in comparison to the plot’s wackadoodle bombshell, which distorts the rest of the play.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The landlords also said they would reconsider their process for determining who to honor with full and partial dimmings.Broadway’s theater owners, facing criticism for their decision to dim the lights outside fewer than one-third of the 41 theaters in honor of the musical theater performer Gavin Creel, have succumbed to the public pressure and agreed that all their venues would acknowledge his death.In addition to Creel, a well-known and well-liked actor who died on Sept. 30 at age 48, the theater owners said they would also dim the lights of all theaters to honor Maggie Smith, the British stage and screen star, as well as the actor Adrian Bailey, both of whom died last month. The lights for Bailey will be dimmed Oct. 17; the dimmings for Creel and Smith will be scheduled in consultation with their families.In an email on Wednesday, the theater owners described their decision via the Broadway League, the trade organization that represents them and speaks on their behalf.The lights-dimming ritual, which goes back decades, has been an increasingly fraught one for the nine entities that own and operate Broadway theaters. That small group decides not only which Broadway alumni merit such public recognition when they die, but also how many buildings should go dark, based on how those landlords evaluate the theatermakers’ contributions.In other words: Stephen Sondheim, James Earl Jones and Chita Rivera were recognized with lights dimmings at all theaters, but memorializing accomplished but less-universally known individuals with partial dimmings has been fraught. Those decisions have often been followed by pushback from artists and audiences: over whether to dim lights at all for the comedian Joan Rivers (the theater owners at first decided no, and then yes), and how many theaters should dim lights for the performers Jan Maxwell (at first one, then two), Marin Mazzie (at first six, then all) and Hinton Battle (at first nine, and then all).When the Broadway League announced, on Friday, that the theater owners had decided on a limited dimming for Creel — at first 11, and then 12 theaters after they added the Eugene O’Neill, where Creel starred in “The Book of Mormon” — a backlash arose on social media.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

On a barge in Brooklyn, the story of a beloved watering hole and a neighborhood’s recovery after Hurricane Sandy.How do we hold our shared history? Like a drink? Like a lover? Or does it slip through our fingers, like water from the bay? “The Wind and the Rain,” a new play by Sarah Gancher (“Russian Troll Farm”), which reclaims the recent past as pageant, offers one model.The play, which Jared Mezzocchi has staged on a barge that doubles as the Waterfront Museum and in the blocks of Red Hook, Brooklyn, just beyond, is ostensibly about Sunny’s, a bar that has occupied the ground floor of a brick building on Conover Street since 1907. Opened by Antonio Balzano and his wife, Angelina, each an immigrant from Italy, it survived world wars; prohibition; the building of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; urban blight; Hurricane Sandy, which sent the basin surging into the bar; and legal challenges. Now presided over by Tone Balzano Johansen, the bar remains a neighborhood stronghold. (Johansen is the widow of Antonio Balzano, an actor and painter named for his grandfather, and affectionately known as Sunny.) Every Saturday it hosts a bluegrass jam session. Johansen often sings.From a window of the barge, Sunny’s can almost be seen. Out another window, the Statue of Liberty beckons. The Vineyard Theater produced this show with En Garde Arts, a pioneer of site-specific and site-responsive performance. As the actors strut and a bluegrass combo strums and sings, the barge lurches underfoot. The play, performed by four actors on a narrow strip of stage in the barge’s center, is mostly Johansen’s story. Much of the text derives from interviews with her (Gancher is a Sunny’s regular) and she is played by Jen Tullock with lucid good sense. (Pete Simpson plays Sunny; Jennifer Regan and Paco Tolson fill out the other roles. Ample audience participation is also a feature.) Other vignettes are based on research, some are wholly invented. In a corner the band plays.The whole is affectionate, emotive, playful, but with a fuzziness around the edges — the way the world looks after one too many Manhattans. Instead of focusing only on Tone or on Sunny’s more generally, the play also offers a deep history of the neighborhood (from the British to the Dutch to the Lenape to the Laurentide ice sheet, all the way back to the Big Bang) and it lingers for a long time, too long, with the fraught love stories of Sunny’s grandparents and Romeo (Simpson again), a longtime bar employee.These discursions and the script’s fondness for philosophical postulates (“How do you make a play where everything past and future exists at once?” “How do you talk about time?”) tend to distract from the play’s core — the place of the bar within the greater community, the bar’s recovery after Sandy. The story of the bar is the story of the neighborhood, about a community coming together in the face of something as indomitable as a hurricane. It is a kind of living history, a collective memory in Christmas lights and scuffed wood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

“Just in Time,” a new musical about the “Mack the Knife” pop singer, will open next spring at Circle in the Square in Manhattan.Jonathan Groff, who won his first Tony Award in June for starring in a hit revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” will return to Broadway next spring to play Bobby Darin in a biomusical he has been developing for years.The musical, “Just in Time,” is to begin previews March 28 and to open April 23 at Circle in the Square Theater in Midtown Manhattan. The theater, with its close approximation of an in-the-round experience, will be configured to accommodate an immersive nightclub-like staging, with a 16-person cast, an onstage big band, two stages and some cabaret-style seating.The show began its life in 2018 at the 92nd Street Y as a five-performance concert called “The Bobby Darin Story,” and has been developed through a number of workshops. In an interview, Groff said he hadn’t been sure what to expect from that initial run, but that “it lit me up.”“There is some sort of kinetic magic that happens with the live execution of his material,” said Groff, 39, who was also a Tony nominee for “Hamilton” (he played King George III) and “Spring Awakening” (his breakout role). He has worked extensively on television (“Glee,” “Looking” and “Mindhunter”) and reached global audiences with his voice work as Kristoff in Disney’s “Frozen” films.Darin, a singer-songwriter whose pop career peaked in the 1950s and ’60s, is best known for the songs “Splish Splash,” “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea.” He suffered from a heart condition, and died at the age of 37.“Dramatically he’s really interesting, because what do you do when your whole career is on borrowed time?” said the musical’s director, Alex Timbers, who won a Tony Award for directing “Moulin Rouge!” “His life was lived at high-octane speed. A woman he thought was his sister ended up being his mother. He went on a whole voyage into folk and pop and then decided he was a nightclub animal.”The musical has a book by Warren Leight (a Tony winner for “Side Man”) and Isaac Oliver and will be choreographed by Shannon Lewis. The show was conceived by Ted Chapin, who wrote the initial script and produced it at the Y as part of that institution’s long-running Lyrics & Lyricists series.“We all got invested and excited about the idea of telling his life story in this environment of a night club,” Groff said. “We’re playing with the genre of the biomusical, trying to find our own unique point of view and way into not only his story but also the genre itself. There’s a bit of experimentation happening here.”The lead producers of “Just in Time” are Tom Kirdahy, Robert Ahrens and John Frost; the musical is being capitalized for up to $12.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. More