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    ‘The Vanishing Elephant’ Review: Bringing ‘a Thing of Wonder’ to Life

    This alluring spectacle at Stage 42, which aims to dazzle audiences 8 and older, makes powerful statements about the rights of both animals and human beings.Can magic illuminate a life that was far from magical?Cahoots NI, a children’s theater company from Belfast, Northern Ireland, incorporates illusions into “The Vanishing Elephant,” a show that aims to dazzle audiences 8 and older while also exposing them to the harsh realities of wildlife captivity and human suffering. Although the results are sometimes mixed, this alluring spectacle makes powerful statements about the rights of both animals and people.Presented by the New Victory Theater at Stage 42 (the theater’s regular home is undergoing renovation), the production introduces its title character’s birth in Bengal, on the Indian subcontinent, with a sparkling special effect: a hand-held transparent box fills with light, revealing a mechanized shadow puppet that raises its trunk beguilingly. Written by Charles Way, the play does not mention the period, but adult theatergoers will recognize this as the era of Britain’s crushing rule of India.While the elephant is still very young, hunters tear her from her mother. Even though she wins the love of Opu, a young villager (played as a boy by Adi Chugh and as an aging man by Cliff Samara), he can’t stop a trainer (Madhav Vasantha) from treating her roughly. Opu, who names the elephant Janu, is in many ways her counterpart: a lonely, misunderstood orphan adopted by foreigners (in his case, an English couple). Only he and, later, another child realize that Janu is “a thing of wonder.”That also describes her onstage. Helen Foan, of the company Foan & Fortune, designed the life-size puppets that portray Janu after the opening scene. Gray-suited puppeteers essentially disappear as they manipulate these segmented forms, creating the impression that a real elephant, with sad eyes and a dusty trunk, is moving just feet away.Onstage, gray-suited puppeteers manipulate the elephant’s body, creating the impression that a real animal is moving just feet away from the audience.Melissa GordonThe cast members, who also narrate, execute their roles and Jayachandran Palazhy’s choreographed movement expertly, though it feels jarring to see Opu’s adoptive father, an imperious colonialist, be played by a Black man. The same actor, Ola Teniola, later gives a stirring performance as Jarrett, a harried American circus worker who takes charge of Janu after a wealthy woman (Shanara Gabrielle) transports her to the United States. Forced to train the elephant, now renamed Jenny, for the brutalities of the big top, Jarrett finally declares: “You aren’t meant to be here. Like I was never meant to be here.”Using skillful sleight of hand, cast members set up the circus, appearing to pull tall poles and an entire ladder from a small case. In a departure from Jenny’s sad situation, the surrounding music and crowd noise build a festive atmosphere. (Aoife Kavanagh is the production’s sound designer; she and MD Pallavi are its composers.) Circuses, of course, can be jubilant events, but the production, which is directed by Paul Bosco Mc Eneaney, veers toward contrived romanticism when it depicts a saintly Jenny putting her tormentors’ safety above her own.Inspired by the tale of the real elephant that Harry Houdini made disappear in his New York act in 1918, the show finally places Jenny onstage with that famous magician. Her arduous journey, and those of the play’s Black trainer and South Asian characters, would seem to invite somber reflection about freedom and its loss rather than a Bollywood-style finale. The rousing music and joyful choreography threaten to make Jenny vanish again, just when she’s become indelible.The Vanishing ElephantThrough Oct. 29 at Stage 42, Manhattan; newvictory.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Recaps Biden’s Big Day in Israel

    Kimmel joked that President Biden and Israel “go way back”: “You know how Moses parted the Red Sea? Joe was the guy who dared him to do it.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Biden in WartimePresident Joe Biden flew to Israel on Wednesday, meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Jimmy Kimmel noted that White House officials say Biden prefers to meet other world leaders face to face, particularly in times of crisis — “which is a nice way of saying he still doesn’t know how to Zoom.”“It’s very rare for an American president to fly into a combat zone. They say the last time Biden was in this much danger, he was rolling with Corn Pop.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“President Biden arrived this morning in Israel, making him the first president to visit Israel during a time of war — which is pretty dangerous, but he should be OK once he makes it down the stairs.” — SETH MEYERS“The president gave a surprisingly strong speech. He told the Israeli people the United States stands with them. He condemned the disgusting attacks by Hamas and cautioned Israel to learn from the mistakes we made after 9/11. This kind of thing is where Biden really shines. He and Israel go way back. You know how Moses parted the Red Sea? Joe was the guy who dared him to do it.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Wow, wise words from President Biden. Anytime an American president admits a mistake, it’s a big deal. So, Israel, please learn from us — don’t stay in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, tops.” — MICHAEL KOSTAThe Punchiest Punchlines (Worse Than the First Edition)“Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan failed to secure enough votes today in the second round of voting to become House speaker and received only 199 votes. That’s worse than he did yesterday! If they keep doing votes, he’s eventually going to get to zero, and then he’ll fade away like Marty McFly in a family photo.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s like retaking the S.A.T. and finding out you got dumber somehow.” — JIMMY FALLON“But he’s not giving up. He’s going to keep on going until he loses unanimously.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingTwo “Tonight Show” audience members competed in a challenge on Wednesday to paint a portrait of Jimmy Fallon on a giant pumpkin as quickly as possible.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightBilly Porter will promote his upcoming album, “Black Mona Lisa,” on Thursday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutAdèle Haenel on the grounds of PS21 in Chatham, N.Y., where she was appearing in “L’Étang.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesThe French actress Adèle Haenel is in New York this week, performing with the choreographer-director Gisèle Vienne “L’Étang.” More

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    Burt Young, ‘Rocky’ Actor Who Played Complex Tough Guys, Dies at 83

    A former boxer from the streets of Queens, he became a scene stealer with his portrayals of mobsters, cops and working men with soul.Burt Young, a burly Queens-bred actor who leveraged a weary gravitas and bare-knuckled demeanor to build a prolific career as a Hollywood tough guy in films like “Chinatown,” “Once Upon a Time in America” and, most notably, “Rocky,” for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, died on Oct. 8 in Los Angeles. He was 83.His death was confirmed by his daughter, Anne Morea Steingieser.With his bulldog build and his doleful countenance, Mr. Young amassed more than 160 film and television credits. He often played a mob boss, a street-smart detective or a bedraggled working man.But even when he played a villain, he was no mere heavy. Despite his background as a Marine and a professional boxer, Mr. Young brought layers of complexity to his work. The acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who once coached him, called Mr. Young a “library of emotions.”With his no-nonsense approach, he found a kindred spirit in another Hollywood tough guy, the filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, who directed him in “The Killer Elite” (1975), starring James Caan, and “Convoy” (1978), starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw.“Both were mavericks and outlaws, with a deep respect for art,” his daughter said in a phone interview. “They understood each other because of the intensity and honesty Peckinpah demanded. He had no tolerance for lack of authenticity.”Throughout the early 1970s, Mr. Young made memorable appearances on television shows like “M*A*S*H” and in movies like the mob comedy “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” (1971) and “Cinderella Liberty” (1973), a drama about a sailor (James Caan) who falls in love with a prostitute (Marsha Mason).He also proved a scene stealer in a powerful, if brief, appearance in “Chinatown” (1974), Roman Polanski’s neo-noir masterpiece, as a cuckolded Los Angeles fisherman who becomes entangled in a tale of incest and murder.His true breakout came two years later, with “Rocky,” the story of a low-level hood and club boxer (Sylvester Stallone) who gets an unlikely bout with the heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). Mr. Young played the combustible Paulie, a butcher friend of Rocky’s and the brother of Adrian (Talia Shire), the introverted woman who becomes Rocky’s girlfriend.Although “Rocky” would propel Mr. Stallone, who also wrote the screenplay, to stardom, Mr. Young often said that he had been the bigger name in Hollywood before the project began. “I was the only actor that didn’t audition in the first ‘Rocky,’” he said in a 2017 interview with The Rumpus, a culture website. “And I got the most money for it.”Mr. Young remembered his first meeting with Mr. Stallone, in a studio commissary. “He kneels down next to me,” he recalled. “He says, ‘Mr. Young, I’m Sylvester Stallone. I wrote Rocky,’” — and then, Mr. Young said, he added, “You’ve got to do it, please.”“He’s trying to twist my arm,” Mr. Young said.The film, a gritty and often somber human drama directed by John G. Avildsen, was a far cry from its sometimes cartoonish sequels, all but one of them directed by Mr. Stallone, in which Mr. Young also appeared. “It really wasn’t a fighting story, it was a love story, about someone standing up,” he said of the first movie in a 2006 interview with Bright Lights Film Journal. “Not even winning, just standing up.”“Rocky” became a 1970s landmark. It received 10 Academy Award nominations, including Mr. Young’s for best supporting actor, and won three Oscars, including for best picture.“I made him a rough guy with a sensitivity,” Mr. Young later said of Paulie. “He’s really a marshmallow, even though he yells a lot.”Mr. Young as Paulie in the original “Rocky.” The character was prone to volcanic eruptions, which including smashing up his sister’s house with a baseball bat.Everett CollectionBurt Young — he adopted that name as an actor; sources differ on his name at birth — was born on April 30, 1940, in Queens. His father was a sheet-metal worker, an iceman and eventually a high school shop teacher and dean.Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in the Corona section of Queens, Mr. Young got an early taste of the streets. “My dad, trying to make me a gentler kid, sent me to Bryant High School in Astoria, away from my Corona pals,” he wrote in the foreword to “Corona: The Early Years,” (2015), by Jason D. Antos and Constantine E. Theodosiou.“Soon, however, I got thrown out, and it was on to St. Ann’s Academy in Manhattan, getting booted out after one term,” he continued. “Finally, it was the Marines at 16, my pop fibbing my age to get me in.”He started boxing in the Marine Corps and went on to a successful, if relatively brief, professional career under Cus D’Amato, the boxing trainer and manager who shepherded the careers of Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson. He had a win-loss record of about 17-1 — his own accounts varied — when he quit the ring.In his late 20s, he was laying carpets and doing other odd jobs when he became infatuated with a woman who tended bar, and who told him that she dreamed of studying acting with Mr. Strasberg. “I didn’t know who Lee Strasberg was,” he told Bright Lights. “I thought it was a girl.”Mr. Young set up a meeting for the two of them with Mr. Strasberg, the father of method acting, and ended up studying with him for two years. “Acting had everything I was fishing for,” he recalled. “In my life till then, I’d used tension to hold myself upright. Lee’s great gift to me was relaxation.”His many other film credits ranged from “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (1989), a harrowing adaptation of the scandalous 1964 novel by Hubert Selby Jr. about lost souls from the underside of midcentury Brooklyn, to the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School.” Mr. Young also wrote and starred in “Uncle Joe Shannon” (1978), the story of a jazz trumpeter whose life implodes before he finds redemption.In addition to his daughter, Mr. Young is survived by a brother, Robert, and a grandson. His wife, Gloria, died in 1974.Mr. Young, second from left, performed onstage with Robert De Niro, center, and Ralph Macchio, third from right, in “Cuba and His Teddy Bear,” which opened at the Public Theater in Manhattan in 1986.Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesMr. Young also had a long career in theater, including a role alongside Robert De Niro and Ralph Macchio in “Cuba and His Teddy Bear,” a play about a drug dealer and his son that opened at the Off Broadway Public Theater in Manhattan in 1986 and later moved to Broadway.Mel Gussow of The New York Times praised Mr. Young’s humor-laced performance as Mr. De Niro’s partner and lackey. He singled out one scene for praise in which Mr. Young, he wrote, was “sheepishly pulling up the wide waistband of his loud shorts while insisting that he is not fat but has ‘big bones.’”Mr. Young was an avid painter who sold his work, and whose moody portraits showed the influence of Picasso and Matisse. “I don’t think you can put me in a bottle as an actor or an artist,” he said in a 2016 video interview. “Perhaps the acting, I’m a little more structured.”In acting, he added, he zeroed in on precise emotional cues to express, say, greed or anger — to “fatten up” his characters.Little wonder, then, that his Paulie in “Rocky” leaped off the screen with volcanic eruptions — tossing his sister’s Thanksgiving turkey into an alley in a fit of rage, smashing up her house with a baseball bat.“Paulie was a pretty ugly guy many times,” he said. But, he added, “they miscast me.“I’m a lovable son of a gun. It’s just that I go astray here and there.” More

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    The Passion of Adèle Haenel, an Artist of Fierce Political Conviction

    Haenel, working with the choreographer-director Gisèle Vienne in “L’Étang,” is trying to “pierce through the surface of things.”The actress Adèle Haenel bristled when asked what drew her to radical art and politics. “The term ‘radical’ is used as a way to discredit protest discourse,” said Haenel, who is best known in the United States for the 2019 art-house hit “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” That was also one of the last feature films she worked on. Since then, she has opted to dramatically alter the course of her life and career.Over the past few years, Haenel, 34, has become one of the most visible and committed faces of the #MeToo movement in France. In May, she wrote an open letter published in the influential French culture weekly Télérama to explain her absence from movie screens: “I decided to politicize my retirement from cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession toward sexual aggressors and more generally the way in which this sphere collaborates with the mortal, ecocidal, racist order of the world such as it is.”She has, she told me, “a political understanding of the world, and my actions are consistent with it as much as possible. Calling someone radical is a way to say ‘She’s hysterical, she’s angry.’ I prefer coherent to radical.”I said that I had used the word in a positive way — to suggest bold choices that steered clear of the artistic mainstream. “I’m not annoyed with you,” Haenel said. “I’m reacting strongly, but it’s just to make myself clear.”Making herself clear is important to Haenel, who has an intense focus and frequently looked to the side as we talked, as if to better organize her thoughts away from an interlocutor’s gaze. She sometimes wrote down points she wanted to come back to later — and she did return to them.We were talking in a house on the bucolic campus of PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, in Chatham, N.Y., where Haenel was appearing in the director-choreographer Gisèle Vienne’s show “L’Étang.” The show comes next to New York City for performances at New York Live Arts, Saturday through Monday, as part of the Dance Reflections festival.By American theatrical standards, “L’Étang” (“The Pond”) is pretty close to radical, though. Based on a short play by the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser, the dance-theater piece locks Haenel and Julie Shanahan, a longtime member of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble, in a helix of escalating tension performed in often excruciatingly slow motion, a tempo familiar to those who saw Vienne’s hypnotic “Crowd” last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Haenel takes on multiple roles, most notably that of Fritz, an adolescent who fakes suicide to attract his mother’s attention, and his two siblings; Shanahan plays their parents. The atmosphere is somewhat hallucinatory — Vienne has cited David Lynch among her influences — but it requires consummate precision, both physical and emotional.“We worked a lot on trying to pierce through the surface of things, and that’s not something you can do alone,” Haenel said. “Among the people onstage, we tried to better understand what’s implied, to understand a person’s feelings. You start anticipating when a person is going to stop moving. That’s a kind of communication I feel very strongly with Julie. We don’t need to talk about it endlessly; I just feel how long she’s going to take to do something.”For Vienne, effort is an integral part of the process. “What I do is very technical from a choreographic and interpretive standpoint,” she said in Chatham. “This virtuosity is the result of a long physical and theoretical training — sociology, philosophy and politics are important to understanding what we’re in the process of building, and the formal choices we make as we create the piece.”This rigor and commitment suit Haenel, as she passionately pursues a path in which artistic goals are intertwined with politics and life, a dedication that coalesces in her work with Vienne.The two met in 2018, when they were on the admissions committee for the National Theater of Brittany’s acting school. Haenel participated in a workshop with prospective students led by Vienne. “I loved it,” she said. “The improvisation was related to her show ‘Crowd’ and involved developing slow motion as a new sense, like seeing or hearing, that would allow you to live or experience things differently.”Making herself clear: Haenel, who has retired from the movie business, has collaborated with Vienne on a few projects. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang,’” Haenel said, “is the issue of violence.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesThe pair further explored that theme in “L’Étang,” which became their first official collaboration and, after a Covid 19-imposed delay, premiered in 2021. Over the course of our conversation, Haenel often circled back to what she referred to as de-hierarchization. In the show, for example, words, movement, music, sound and lighting all contribute to communicating information, feelings and emotions. This undermines the traditional place of text at the top of the theatrical pyramid, and makes us reconsider what carries meaning onstage.And “L’Étang” subverts the usual link between the performers’ body language and the way text is delivered — especially since the voices are often electronically distorted. (Adrien Michel did the sophisticated sound design.)“It’s about the friction between text and subtext,” Haenel said. She brought up an especially intense scene in which she and Shanahan are face to face. They barely move, but the effect is one of terrifying brutality. “Julie actually speaks very calmly, but for us it’s a crazy scene of aggression because there is a negation of the body language,” Haenel said, adding that something they explored with Vienne was dissociation. “We’ve achieved a level where we can have a body that looks almost stoned with a speeded-up voice.”The impact is intended to be as much political as it is aesthetic. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang’ is the issue of violence,” Haenel said, “and this violence is not about saying tough things, but about turning someone else’s speech into silence.”Haenel and Vienne’s partnership has bloomed since 2018. In August, they premiered a new show, “Extra Life,” also starring Theo Livesey and Katia Petrowick, at the prestigious Ruhrtriennale festival in Germany. They are also involved with public readings of work by Monique Wittig, the lesbian philosopher and activist who died in 2003 and has been enjoying a revival in France over the past few years. While in New York for “L’Étang,” Haenel is participating in a Wittig event on Wednesday at the Albertine bookstore, which its organizers conceived in collaboration with Vienne.“Talking about Monique Wittig is a political act of active memory creation,” said Haenel, who is trying to get new English translations of Wittig’s work off the ground. “I’d love to help her be read again in the United States, to be studied more.”Digging deep with Vienne and championing Wittig are of a piece for Haenel. “I’ve always tried to engage in a thinking process,” she said. “The idea is not so much to become better, but not to become calcified in an antiquated relationship to the world. What’s at stake is not whether that relationship is truer or not — I find the idea of a criteria of truth super-problematic — but whether it’s more alive or not. At least for me.” More

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    ‘Helen.’ Review: A Restless Heroine Tired of Abiding by Gender Roles

    At La MaMa, Caitlin George’s new play uses comedy to counter the legend of Helen of Troy.The play is called “Helen.,” as in Helen of Troy, but her twin sister, Klaitemestra, is the one who steals the show.You remember Klaitemestra, albeit maybe by a different spelling: the grief-enraged mother of Iphigenia, who is sacrificed to the gods by her father, Agamemnon — a betrayal that Klaitemestra avenges by murdering him upon his return from the Trojan War.So dramatic, isn’t it? Not like the humdrum contemporary-classical domesticity that Helen, Klaitemestra and their older sister, Timandra, inhabit at the start of Caitlin George’s “Helen.,” a new twist on the ancient tale in the downstairs theater at La MaMa, in Manhattan’s East Village.Yet for a long time, the bored and restless Helen (Lanxing Fu) is the only one who has a problem with their existence. Timandra (Melissa Coleman-Reed) is placidly happy to have a husband who brings her coffee in the morning and puts socks on her feet when she gets chilly, while Klaitemestra (Grace Bernardo) is so hot for Agamemnon (Jonathan Taikina Taylor) that she can barely contain herself.“That man is melt-in-your-mouth gods-be-damned-licious,” she says. “I love every little speck of him.”The arc of their coupledom — sexual pyrotechnics, cooling affection, grisly end — is the clearest, most affecting element of Violeta Picayo’s incohesive production for the SuperGeographics, presented by La MaMa in association with En Garde Arts.That is unfortunate news for Helen but also for the audience, because this is her story — a comic counter to the legend that she was abducted from her husband, Menelaus (Jackie Rivera), by the handsome Paris (Taylor), whereupon men waged the Trojan War over her. In “Helen.,” the catalyst for her fleeing is her own inchoate yearning.“I want to go on an adventure,” she tells her sisters. “I can’t stay here. I can’t.”Spurred on by Eris (Constance Strickland), the god of discord and the show’s gold-clad narrator, Helen leaves Menelaus and their daughter, meets Paris and takes up with him. (Costumes are by James Schuette.) But the brothers Menelaus and Agamemnon cannot grasp that her absence from home and family is voluntary, the way it might be for a man.“One time right after our daughter was born,” Helen says, “Menelaus disappeared for eight months. Never said anything. Although, to be fair, he did leave a note. ‘Gone out, comma, for glory. Kiss, kiss.’ I had no idea where he was. Then without warning he just rocked up one day and asked what was for dinner.”The struggle here is between a woman’s self-determination and a man’s entitled possessiveness — a world-shaping dynamic rooted in traditional gender roles. This staging mutes that essential resonance, though, with a clownish Menelaus who needs to but never does evoke masculinity. If Menelaus isn’t tethered to some kind of reality, neither is Helen’s stifling marriage. That undermines the urgency of her quest for a fulfilling life.“Helen.,” whose heightened tone sometimes recalls the plays of Sarah Ruhl and Charles Mee, is ultimately overcrowded, and the production largely lacks the ache that George has encoded in the comedy.But it does have that bleakly disillusioned Klaitemestra — and her elegantly choreographed, marriage-ending murder scene.Helen.Through Oct. 29 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    ‘What the Constitution Means to Me’ Is This Season’s Most-Staged Play

    Heidi Schreck’s play will have at least 16 productions around the country; last season’s most-produced play, “Clyde’s,” came in second.“What the Constitution Means to Me,” a challenging exploration of American legal history sparked by a student oratory competition, will be the most produced play at U.S. theaters this season, according to a survey released on Wednesday.The play, written by Heidi Schreck, will have at least 16 productions around the country, according to a count by American Theater magazine.The magazine conducts an annual survey of theaters to determine which shows, and which playwrights, are most popular. Productions of “A Christmas Carol” and works by Shakespeare, which are always widely staged, are excluded. The survey covers theaters that are members of the Theater Communications Group, the national nonprofit organization that publishes the magazine.“What the Constitution Means to Me” was staged on Broadway in 2019, with Schreck starring, and it was filmed for Amazon. (The play has a three-person cast, including a young person who debates the lead actress about the merits of the Constitution.)A production is now running at the Copley Theater in Aurora, Ill.; productions just closed at Main Street Theater in Houston, Syracuse Stage in New York, Capital Repertory Theater in Albany and Ensemble Theater Cincinnati. Other productions are planned at theaters including New Stage Theater in Jackson, Miss.Last season’s most-produced play, “Clyde’s” by Lynn Nottage, remains quite popular — it came in second this season, with at least 14 productions, and Nottage is the nation’s most-produced playwright, with 22 productions overall.Among the other most-staged plays this season are “POTUS,” by Selina Fillinger, and “The Lehman Trilogy,” by Stefano Massini.The complete lists of most-produced plays and most-produced playwrights are online at AmericanTheatre.org. More

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    Steven Lutvak, Whose Darkly Comic Show Won a Tony, Dies at 64

    He wrote several musicals without attracting much notice. Then he struck Broadway gold with “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.”Steven Lutvak, a composer and lyricist whose only Broadway show, “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” — a black comedy about a killer in London who bumps off the relatives who stand in the way of his becoming a wealthy royal — won the Tony Award for best musical, died on Oct. 9 at his work studio in Manhattan. He was 64.The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said Michael McGowan, his husband.Over the years, Mr. Lutvak wrote several musicals that were staged in regional theaters and Off Off Broadway. But none were nearly as successful as “A Gentleman’s Guide.”Set in Edwardian England, it is the story of Monty Navarro, a poor man who, after learning that he is a distant relative of the rich D’Ysquith clan (and then being denied a claim to its lineage), kills the eight kinfolk (all played by one actor) in the line of succession between him and the head of the family, the Ninth Earl of Highhurst.The show opened in November 2013 and ran for 905 performances over more than two years.In his review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood said that the score — Mr. Lutvak wrote the music and collaborated on the lyrics with Robert L. Freedman — “establishes itself as one of the most accomplished (and probably the most literate) to be heard on Broadway in the past dozen years or so, since the less rigorous requirements of pop songwriting have taken over.”“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” was nominated for 10 Tonys in 2014 — Mr. Lutvak and Mr. Freedman were nominated for original score — and won for Mr. Freedman’s book, Darko Tresnjak’s direction and Linda Cho’s costume design, as well as for best musical.“Steve was a gifted composer, lyricist and musician, but more than anything he was a born storyteller,” Mr. Freedman said by phone. “I was able to speak to him in my own language about story, plot and characters in a way that not every composer can do.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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    in Television

    Review: ‘Scavengers Reign’ Is a Gorgeous, Hypnotic Space Trip

    Max’s animated sci-fi saga imagines a bizarre ecosystem in which humans are the invasive species.“Weird” hardly begins to describe the extraterrestrial life-forms the viewer encounters on the planet Vesta in “Scavengers Reign.” These include: lamprey-like blobs you can slap on your face to use as breathing masks; herds of equine beasts with throat pouches that inflate when they bellow; spiky fruit (I think?) whose ropy innards double as electrical cables; and a rhino-esque critter whose digestive tract harbors bioluminescent sacs that are useful as torches. (You retrieve them, er, the hard way.)But these creatures are not the aliens. We are. The animated series, whose first three episodes of 12 arrive Thursday on Max, is a lush, magnificent, hypnotic story of human survival in a place that feels, in a way that sci-fi planets only occasionally manage, truly otherworldly.The series builds on “Scavengers,” a short film by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner. In the original (which aired on Adult Swim in 2016 and is available online), a pair of shipwrecked space-farers wordlessly use the local life-forms in a Rube Goldberg bioengineering scheme to survive their isolation.The long-form version, created by Bennett and Huettner, adds dialogue, characters and back story, following several crash survivors scattered across the surface of this strange world. Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) cultivates a farm assisted by Levi (Alia Shawkat), a quirkily malfunctioning robot. The irritable Sam (Bob Stephenson) works on a rescue plan with Ursula (Sunita Mani), a more curious-minded colleague who sees a “profound” beauty in their hostile surroundings. Elsewhere, Kamen (Ted Travelstead), stranded alone, wrestles with guilt over his role in the calamity that landed the crew here.If the survivors are living a nightmare — there is no lack of toxic, parasitic and stabby wildlife all around them — it is a gorgeous one. The luxurious backgrounds are reminiscent of Studio Ghibli films; the polymorphous biological forms make this feel like “Lost in Space” if it were rebooted by David Cronenberg.But while “Scavengers Reign” looks epic, there is no sprawling lore or mythology as in recent sci-fi serials like “Foundation” and “Raised by Wolves.” It’s a man-and-woman-and-robot-vs.-nature struggle, full of ingenuity, ooze and blood. (Parents note: This is definitely an adult animated series, both in language and in the level of occasional gore.)The series is more entrancing than horror-show scary, though. It is attuned to its characters’ loneliness, fear and remorse, and there is a strain of psychedelic spirituality in its rendering of the surreal ecosystem.There is not a clear line, on this planet, between plant and animal life, if the categories apply at all. The world is frightening and violent but in its own way harmonious. Bennett and Huettner have dreamed up a baroquely balanced ecosystem. Some creatures poison you, others eat the poison. What may seem to the harried survivors like constant danger is, on Vesta, just the cycle of life.After all, we may root for the humans, but they are the invasive species here. “Scavengers Reign” imagines a future in which humanity treats the universe, like it did Earth, as a grab bag of extractable resources. The castaways, we learn, were workers in a corporate flotilla who crashed on the planet as a result of a dangerous shortcut meant to make their trip more profitable. The characters who fare best in this strange new world are those who adapt to it, sync with it, or even — like Levi, whose circuitry has become entwined with native vegetation — become part of it.There is such a thing as too much symbiosis, of course. A silent, poker-faced, frog- or newt-like creature that thrives by mesmerizing other animals into bringing it food (think the Hypnotoad from “Futurama,” but creepier) ends up enthralling Kamen into its service, gorging itself on the offerings he brings it until it becomes massive and insatiable. But even this fearsome beast is just doing what comes naturally; the injection of a human into its ecosystem is what turns it into a monster.Expanded from short film to series, “Scavengers Reign” becomes less meditative and more of a gripping survival adventure; it also drags a bit in its last half. But the real attraction is less the plot than the immersive imagery and biological inventions, like the reed-like stalks that make musical noises when bobbled, then shoot spikes. “Scavengers Reign” is much like those plants. It plays a haunting tune, but it can also draw blood. More