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    The Playwright Who Changed the Face of American Theater

    Since 1965, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, tucked away in the bucolic seaside town of Waterford, Conn., has lured theater professionals every summer for the National Playwrights Conference. Named for the Nobel Prize-winning playwright who spent his childhood summers nearby, the O’Neill was initially informal and heady, but Lloyd Richards, who directed the 1959 Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” brought a sense of gravitas when he became artistic director in 1969.August Wilson first arrived at the O’Neill in 1982 with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” At 37, he was older than the others, but he presented himself as a neophyte who worked as a short-order cook. He had applied five times — and was rejected five times — but finally got his chance with “Ma Rainey.”During Richards’s era, the O’Neill became a haven for writers to test their work outside the commercial pressure of Broadway. Yet it was also a clubby place, with a regular company of actors and directors. Wilson didn’t immediately fit in, but by the end of the summer, he had developed an esprit de corps with his fellow playwrights.The O’Neill was a place, Wilson once said, where “you can fail and your life won’t disappear.” Writers mattered. They stuck up for one another in the way that playwrights today have supported the writers’ strike in Hollywood. It was at the O’Neill, after all, that Wilson got his ticket to the world of professional theater. “Ma Rainey” opened on Broadway in 1984, and Wilson, who died in 2005 at 60, went on to write his series of 10 plays about the African American experience in the 20th century.In 1983, Wilson returned to the O’Neill with “Fences.” The story of that summer is recounted here in this excerpt from “August Wilson: A Life,” an upcoming biography by Patti Hartigan, a former theater critic for The Boston Globe.AUGUST WILSON WAS SETTLING IN to the life of an itinerant playwright. He had been invited back to the O’Neill for the 1983 National Playwrights Conference for a workshop of “Fences,” and this time, he knew what to expect at the preconference weekend. He had one goal before he got on the van to Waterford. He needed to stock up on scotch. When he arrived at the pickup location, he spotted someone he had never seen before. He seemed unfamiliar with the routine, with the same apprehension that Wilson had experienced the year before. He was James Yoshimura, a writer from Chicago who had attended the Yale School of Drama. After a brief introduction, Wilson told Yoshimura that they needed to get some liquid sustenance in order to make it through the long weekend. Yoshimura was up for the chase. They found a store, pooled their money, and bought a large bottle of scotch. By the time the van deposited them at the mansion, they were smashed. And they became fast friends.“Fences,” Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, arrived on Broadway in 1987 after premiering in 1985 at Yale Repertory Theater. Both productions starred, from left, Mary Alice, Ray Aranha and James Earl Jones.Ron ScherlLike Wilson, Yoshimura was raised Catholic and came from a large family. His parents converted when they were forced to live in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. “That does not work for birth control,” Yoshimura said. “I am the middle of 11 children.” His family was one of only three Asian families in a predominantly German American Catholic parish on the North Side of Chicago. “You are the other,” he said of his childhood. “August could empathize with that. He knew what the ‘other’ was. We shared this friendship. It wasn’t like we would discuss Catholicism. This was just how we grew up. We never felt part of the mainstream of the faith that we were baptized into.”During his first year at the O’Neill, Wilson was stunned to see all the theater people hugging one another, but now he was one of them. He took it upon himself to initiate his new friend to the summer camp experience. “The bottle of scotch made the preconference much better,” Yoshimura said. And they were willing to share. “We made a lot of friends.” Yoshimura needed liquid encouragement to get through the process of reading his play aloud before strangers. He was there with “Ohio Tip-Off,” a drama about seven athletes on a minor-league basketball team who are vying to make it to the N.B.A. The team has four Black players and three white players. Wilson did not question his new friend’s subject matter, but he did question the way he read his play for the group. “I read my play very badly, and he laughed aloud about how bad I was — while we were still sharing our scotch.” Wilson did not tell Yoshimura that he had been at the O’Neill the summer before (nor that he had become the controversial star after the Frank Rich [review disguised as a feature] ran in The New York Times, nor that he was in discussions about bringing “Ma Rainey” to Broadway). When Yoshimura found out, he asked Wilson about it. “He was humble. He didn’t want to talk about it.”Wilson, who later went on to make strong public statements about the need for a Black director to direct a film version of “Fences,” nurtured Yoshimura. He never suggested that Yoshimura should not be writing Black characters. His friend played basketball, and he was writing what he knew. “All of our discussions were about aesthetics,” Yoshimura said. “It was never a matter of color. He was like, ‘If you write it, you write it. If it doesn’t work, you gotta fix it.’” Wilson told other playwrights the same thing over the years. Laura Maria Censabella, who was also a jazz singer, came to the O’Neill with her play “Jazz Wives Jazz Lives.” The characters included Black jazz musicians that she based on her friends and colleagues in the jazz world. Some at the O’Neill questioned whether she, as a white woman, should write Black characters. Wilson defended her; she was writing from her own experience. Because of his support, the griping stopped.Wilson had different issues with “Fences.” It clocked in at more than four hours when Wilson read it at the preconference. “My impression was, this guy can write, but he hasn’t heard of the two-hour limit,” Yoshimura said. “It took two hours to get through the first act.”Yoshimura was the perfect partner for Wilson at the O’Neill, where, in addition to learning about playwriting, he enjoyed the college experience he had never had. The two bonded over sports. Wilson was still obsessed with the 1965 boxing showdown between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston. Ali unexpectedly knocked out Liston early in the first round, leading to suspicions that the fight was rigged. Wilson could dissect that match for hours, and Yoshimura was a willing audience.The Broadway revival of “Fences,” in 2010, featured Viola Davis, Denzel Washington and Stephen McKinley Henderson. They all went on to star in the 2016 film adaptation.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen Yoshimura’s wife showed up to visit, Wilson made sure to teach their young son how to hit a baseball with a tree branch, a skill he had learned on the streets of Pittsburgh’s Hill District. They were improvising, onstage and off. This endearing friendship was formative for both men. Yoshimura had been told that he would succeed only if he wrote plays about Asian Americans, but Wilson assured him that was nonsense. Yoshimura tried to engage him on the subject of father-son relationships, since that is the foundation of “Fences.” Wilson, who was willing to talk about any subject for hours, shut down when asked about his father. Yoshimura intuited that his friend was “deeply wounded” and didn’t push the issue.Bill Partlan [the director of “Ma Rainey” the year before] was assigned to direct “Fences,” and Edith Oliver, the theater critic for The New Yorker, was the dramaturg. At the preconference, they both told Wilson that the play needed cuts. They made suggestions, but he said he wanted to see it first before excising any scenes or monologues. Wilson had never studied dramatic structure. He was learning fundamental rules such as the fact that an actor can’t be soaking wet in the rain at the end of one scene and then appear at the top of the next scene in fresh new clothing and dry hair.After the first performance, he stayed up all night and cut 45 minutes from the script. (Helen Hayes had been in the audience that night, and she left after the first act, reportedly saying, “I think I’ve had enough theater for one night.”) Wilson took out a long monologue about bones walking on water, a poetic piece of writing. Partlan told him to hold on to it. The monologue would be the foundation of a moving speech in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”“Fences” revolves around the tragic hero, Troy Maxson, a former slugger in the Negro Leagues who never got a chance to play in the Major Leagues because of the color of his skin. At its heart, the play is about the confrontation between Maxson and his son Cory, a theme that Wilson had explored in “Jitney!” as well. At the end of the play, Troy dies, and his brother, Gabriel, who was wounded in World War II and is mentally disabled with a metal plate in his head, wants to send his brother off to St. Peter in heaven. He blows his trumpet, but no sound comes out. The stage directions say it all. “He begins to howl in what is an attempt at song, or perhaps a song turning back into itself in an attempt at speech. He finishes his dance and the Gates of Heaven stand open as wide as God’s closet.” With that, Gabriel lightens up and says, “That’s the way that go.”On the second night of the performance at the O’Neill, the fog from the Atlantic Ocean rolled in at the end of the play. This was a common occurrence. Eugene O’Neill wrote about the fog in his masterpiece, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” “How thick the fog is,” he wrote. “I can’t see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know.”At the O’Neill, the natural setting was magical. The weather changed just as Gabriel, played by Howard E. Rollins Jr., went to play his trumpet. “The fog came in, and the lights pierced through the fog,” Partlan said. “I sent Howard up the ramp that leads to the door in the barn to usher Troy into heaven. It was magic. I can still see and feel it today.”The wallop of that final scene became a sort of touchstone at the O’Neill. Other playwrights aspired to achieve that emotional depth. At the end of the preconference when Wilson first read his play, he and the playwright John Patrick Shanley got drunk together one night [a story that is recounted in Jeffrey Sweet’s “The O’Neill”]. Shanley said, “You son-of-a-bitch. You wrote that stage direction at the end of that play,” referring to Gabriel blowing the trumpet. “You son-of-a-bitch. Nobody can touch that.”A revival of “Fences” is running at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Mass., through Aug. 27. Hartigan will be there at the Aug. 12 matinee for a discussion about her book, which will be published by Simon & Schuster on Aug. 15. More

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    Everybody Dance Now! ‘Here Lies Love’ Dictates Your Moves.

    Engaging viewers’ bodies is central to this Broadway musical, a rare production that sets its audience in motion on the dance floor.Like many Broadway musicals, “Here Lies Love” involves a lot of dancing. Notably less common: how much moving is done by the audience.It isn’t unheard-of for a musical to tell the story of a dictator’s wife, but this one, with songs by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, is distinctly focused on its subject’s dancing habits. Imelda Marcos — wife of Ferdinand Marcos, the longtime president of the Philippines — was fond of discothèques. Accordingly, the Broadway Theater has been half-converted into a club on the model of Studio 54. There is a giant disco ball and a D.J., and the orchestra seats have been stripped out so that up to 300 members of the audience can experience the 90-minute show while crowded on a dance floor.As at a disco, those standing can dance as they like. But they are also herded by wranglers in magenta jumpsuits with light-up wands like the ones used to direct taxiing airplanes. Wheeled platforms and runways are regularly rearranged around the floor area, displacing audience members. One cruciform platform is aptly called the Blender. It churns the crowd like batter.The rest of the audience is seated, above the dance floor and back into the depths of the mezzanine. But these viewers move, too, encouraged by the D.J. to join the standing folks in a simple line dance, picking up the moves from cast members spread throughout the theater on more platforms and catwalks. A lot of the story action happens up there, too.“The engagement of the audience’s body is highly unusual,” Annie-B Parson, the show’s choreographer, said. “And when you engage the body, you also engage the mind and the heart.”The choreographer Annie-B Parson: “The engagement of the audience’s body is highly unusual. And when you engage the body, you also engage the mind and the heart.”Naima Green for The New York Times“Here Lies Love” has developed over more than a decade in various incarnations, but dance and audience motion have been at the center of the conception from the start, said Alex Timbers, the director: “We didn’t want it to be interactive, with people pulled up onstage and feeling embarrassed. We wanted the audience to be moving as a unit so no one feels singled out.”The idea is to cast the audience in the drama as extras, Timbers said. They aren’t just dancers at the club. They are guests at the Marcos’s wedding; the public at political rallies and election parties; witnesses to the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., the Marcos’s rival; participants in the People Power Revolution that overthrew the dictator in 1986.“Your journey changes, just like America’s relationship with the Philippines,” Timbers said. “After Aquino’s assassination, you feel a little complicit in having danced at Imelda’s wedding.”Similarly, the D.J. telling everyone what to do is somewhat dictatorial. When Marcos institutes martial law, no audience member “is getting tortured or anything,” Timbers said, “but there is a metaphor at play physically.”“You watch the audience applaud,” Parson said, “and you watch them wonder why they’re applauding. It’s pretty Brechtian.”Development of the show has been a trial-and-error experiment in how to get audiences to move as the creative team wants. “You don’t have the same audience every night,” Timbers said, “so you’re looking at trends, at human nature.”Elaborate charts delineate how the wranglers can redistribute the crowd effectively and safely without being distracting. And since the people in the mezzanine face in one direction while those on the floor face in several, directing everyone to “step to the right” in a line dance isn’t a simple matter. (Well-placed performers and video screens help.)Parson, who has worked with Byrne on concerts tours and on his recent Broadway show, “American Utopia,” comes from the world of postmodern dance. She said that while Timbers “has a beautiful sense of the body and space,” he and she had opposing, if complementary, attitudes about the fact that no audience member of “Here Lies Love” could see everything.The director of “Here Lies Love,” Alex Timbers, said the idea was to cast the audience in the drama as extras.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“Alex worked really hard to share all the story material with everyone in the theater,” she said, whereas she was thinking about the composer John Cage’s philosophical idea that every seat in the house is perfect. “It becomes about perception. I love the experience of watching someone watch things that I might not be seeing. You feel things in your body that you may not see.”It’s a question of perspective, and not the only one. Many reviews of “Here Lies Love” and public objections to the show have focused on how the glamour and play of the club atmosphere rub against the show’s critique of the Marcoses.Parson said the context of disco — “an ecstatic dance form that tips quickly into despair” — is intentionally ambiguous. “Dancing is relative. You can use it for ill or for the greater good.”Imelda’s use of dance, what became known as her handbag diplomacy, “was embodied statesmanship,” Parson said. “She didn’t put a table between her and Nixon or Castro. She asked them to dance. She wasn’t a great dancer but that gave her a lot of power.”At one point, cast members act this out, wearing masks of famous political leaders. At other points, the choreography borrows a few of Imelda’s signature moves: circling her eye with two fingers, tapping the tops of her butterfly sleeves.The line dance, Parson said, was designed to be “fun and easy, something you could do in a chair if space was tight.” (“The Philippines have a really muscular tradition of line dancing,” she added, noting that the line dancing performed by the all-Filipino cast at parties is much more intricate.)Much of the choreography for the cast is more complicated, but mostly in tone, Parson said. In the title song, for example, Imelda tells the audience to remember her for love. “But let’s talk about the families she destroyed,” Parson said. “It’s a beautiful song, but it is ironic, so that’s how I choreographed it, with swinging umbrellas and sternum to the ceiling. You can’t take it straight.”Timothy Matthew Flores, who plays Aquino’s son along with other ensemble roles, said the detail of Parson’s choreography — “every single movement has a meaning” — made it more difficult than flashier and harder-hitting dance he’s done before. And running all around the large theater is “90 minutes of cardio.”But getting the audience out of their seats and dancing? That’s just fun, Flores said. “They start off shy and then they end up having a really good time. You can see them thinking, ‘Wow, this is not like any other Broadway show.’” More

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    ‘Back to the Future’ Review: The DeLorean Crash Lands on Broadway

    The addition of 17 songs turns the 1985 sci-fi classic into a big “why?” musical with a big wow factor.The brand-extension musical is a tough genre to game, demanding something new for newcomers yet fidelity for fans. (“Hairspray” succeeded; “Frozen” did not.) “Back to the Future: The Musical,” based on the first of the time-travel films in the billion-dollar franchise, faces an additional hurdle: It hinges on a star performance that would seem to be irreproducible onstage.And by star, I of course mean the car.So, good news: In the Broadway adaptation, which opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden Theater, the famously souped-up DeLorean DMC, or a life-size replica thereof, is terrific — in some ways more exciting than the one in the movies because it does its tricks live.Well, partly live. The time-warping, plutonium-powered joy rides that shuttle young Marty McFly (Casey Likes) between 1985 and 1955 in the vehicle retrofitted by the eccentric Doc Brown (Roger Bart) are crafty illusions combining mechanical action, busy projections and a lot of distraction with fog, lights and sound.Alas, that also describes the rest of the show, directed by John Rando with Doc-like frenzy: mechanical, busy, distracting, foggy. Though large, it’s less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.Certainly the musical’s book, by Bob Gale, sticks as close to his 1985 screenplay (written with Robert Zemeckis, the movie’s director) as stagecraft and current-day taste permit. The Libyans who threaten Doc Brown are gone, swapped for radiation poisoning, which as yet has no defenders.But Marty is still the same frustrated would-be rock ’n’ roller, stuck in cookie-cutter, Reagan-era Hill Valley, Calif. — and, worse, in a family of beaten-down losers. When Doc’s DeLorean accidentally transports the teenager to 1955, during the exact week in which George McFly (his patsy father) and Lorraine (his boozing mother) fell in love at a high school dance, his presence threatens to create a causal paradox, interfering with their courtship and erasing his own existence.Roger Bart, left, as Doc Brown and Casey Likes as Marty McFly with a life-size replica of the souped-up DeLorean DMC from the film.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou wouldn’t expect the adapters to change that; the working out of the paradox is the best thing about the screenplay. Nor would you expect them to drop Doc’s unaccountably beloved catchphrase, “Great Scott,” though invoking it 13 times is perhaps a dozen times too many.Still, you might hope that something in the musical, for instance music, would change the way the material lands. It doesn’t. The numbers carried over from the movie and performed by Marty at that high school dance — including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Huey Lewis and the News’s “The Power of Love” — are of course effective as ensemble opportunities. But neither they nor most of the 17 new songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, though tuneful and in a few cases rousing, do anything different from what the movie did anyway. Like Silvestri’s John Williams-y main title music, repurposed here as a brief overture, they are too generic for that.The exceptions underline the problem. One is “Gotta Start Somewhere,” a song for Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955 who we already know will run for mayor 30 years later. That nice but underfed idea from the screenplay becomes a can’t-help-but-smile barnburner here, with a classic musical theater theme (underdog dreams big) sparking a classic musical theater performance (by Jelani Remy). Similarly, “My Myopia,” the appealingly peculiar song that introduces George in 1955, creates the illusion of depth (“My myopia is my utopia”) from a plot hole.Rando’s staging of that number is not ideal; though George (Hugh Coles) is supposedly peeping at Lorraine from a tree, it looks more like he’s in a rowboat made of leaves. And Lorraine (Liana Hunt) apparently misunderstands the physics of reflection because she’s using her open bedroom window as a mirror.It’s a rare visual misstep for Tim Hatley, the show’s set and costume designer, who has generally provided astonishingly satisfying theatrical versions of the movie’s settings and — with the sound designer Gareth Owen, the lighting designers Tim Lutkin and Hugh Vanstone, the video designer Finn Ross and the illusion designer Chris Fisher — those surprisingly old-fashioned newfangled effects.The inventiveness and surprise of the climactic sequence — we see Doc climbing the crucial clock tower in a hilariously fake layering of live action behind a scrim and animation projected onto it — makes the show’s obsessive concern with faithfulness elsewhere feel like a cheap compromise.And yet it’s not really faithful. The movie is carefully balanced in tone; the musical is dialed up uniformly to 88 m.p.h. Coles, a carry-over from the 2021 London production, which won the 2022 Olivier award for best new musical, essentially duplicates and then vastly exaggerates Crispin Glover’s already exaggerated George. Bart, too idiosyncratic merely to copy the idiosyncrasies of the movie’s Christopher Lloyd, instead adds a descant of commentary atop them, sometimes seeming to extemporize a different show entirely. And Likes, though not at all reminiscent of the expert Michael J. Fox in the movie — in tribute to whom there’s a nice Easter egg — is given nothing new to do except sing, which he does very well.Jelani Remy, center, as Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955, performing “Gotta Start Somewhere.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat the problems of musical adaptation, even when solved, come to define the production — good workarounds are not the same as good work — suggests the “Why?” problem at its heart. Why, other than the opportunity to rake in a gazillion more dollars, make a musical out of a movie that clearly does not want you to?I say that because, like most pop science fiction, “Back to the Future” resists (and barely benefits from) deepening. Its plot is necessarily complex and its characters compensatorily flat — instead of, preferably for a musical, the other way around. The movie’s two hours were barely enough to tell the story; to tell it in about two-and-a-half, while leaving room for those 17 new songs, everything else has been cut to the bone, with no room for subtlety, let alone expressivity. Why then bother with the songs in the first place?Making material shallower, even if cleverly, is not a great argument for adaptation. It can be defended if some other value is countervailing. For me, the show’s stagecraft and general high spirits come closest to providing that value, but they are too often undone by 1955-ish ideas of Broadway style (cartwheeling cheerleaders, backflipping jocks) and 1985-ish plot points held over from the movie. The Libyans may be gone, but the story still valorizes a peeping Tom and suggests that a white boy introduced “Johnny B. Goode” three years before a Black man actually wrote it. That’s what we call a caucausal paradox.Though much praised at the time of its release and more recently beatified as one of the all-time greats, the movie, with its implicit consumerism and win-at-all-costs ethos, has always struck some people — including Glover — as morally hollow. One of the sour notes in the musical is the way it sings the same tune. Still, in this first post-“Phantom of the Opera” season, I have to admit that the car alone might be worth a ticket. It fills a deep Broadway longing for large objects performing audience flyovers — and, like the dear departed arthritic chandelier, may be doing so for the foreseeable future.Back to the Future: The MusicalAt the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; backtothefuturemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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    ‘Cat Kid Comic Club’ Review: Tiny, Big Imaginations

    In a musical based on works by the creator of Captain Underpants, an anthropomorphic feline urges young swamp dwellers (and the polliwogs in the audience) to let their creativity run wild.“Oppenheimer” isn’t the summer’s only work of popular culture in which atomic bombs detonate. The other such production, however, draws laughter and aims for an audience that probably worries more about long division than about nuclear fission.That show is TheaterWorksUSA’s “Cat Kid Comic Club: The Musical,” which opened on Sunday at the Lucille Lortel Theater. This family-oriented romp, set in a swamp “right this minute,” features obstreperous tadpoles, a bionic butterflyfish and a sweet-natured feline hero — all characters that spring from the imagination of Dav Pilkey, the delightfully subversive author of such best-selling children’s graphic-novel series as Captain Underpants and Dog Man. Now the writer and lyricist Kevin Del Aguila, who’s also an actor in “Some Like It Hot,” and the composer Brad Alexander, who in 2019 winningly adapted the Dog Man books for TheaterWorksUSA, have returned to bring Pilkey’s Cat Kid Comic Club series to the stage.The new production begins as the tadpoles, who have been endowed with telekinetic powers, are destroying civilization, but soon morphs into a humorous tale of redemption. Cat Kid (Sonia Roman), a feline friend to all the swamp’s residents, has an antidote to the evil force controlling the polliwogs, and Flippy the fish (Jamie LaVerdiere) adopts them. But when they still prove to be disciplinary challenges, Cat Kid starts the club in the musical’s title, hoping that teaching the tiny frogs to create comics will help tame their behavior.Drawing comics certainly helped Pilkey, who has written about his early attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But just as his irreverent novels dismay some adults, the tadpoles produce comics — all acted out hilariously onstage — that horrify their adoptive father.Curly (Brian Owen) delivers one in which a failed baby superhero inadvertently causes nukes to explode, ending the world. And Poppy (L.R. Davidson) draws “The Cute, Little, Fluffy Cloud of Death,” whose lonely, lisping title character finds friendship with a ghost girl and her skeleton dog. (Emmarose Campbell created the dog; AchesonWalsh Studios did the other ingenious puppets that augment the nimble human cast, and Cameron Anderson designed the inventive set.)Now, parents who think gallows humor is inappropriate for the young may not buy tickets to “Cat Kid.” But they would be depriving their children of not only the wit of the musical’s book and the inventiveness of its numbers — they range from Bon Jovi-esque power ballads to bluegrass to rap — but also of its serious import.In addition to urging its audience to be fearlessly imaginative, the show promotes equity for girls in a subplot involving the combative tadpole Naomi (Markia Nicole Smith) and her smug brother, Melvin (Dan Rosales). The action reveals that Naomi’s prickliness derives partly from having to work harder for the rewards that boys like Melvin take for granted.But the musical, deftly directed and choreographed by Marlo Hunter, also endorses a more global inclusiveness. At one point, Cat Kid announces a lesson on perspective, which led a little boy at the performance I attended to whisper, “What’s perspective?”The show answers by demonstrating how the concept plays a role in society as well as in art. At a time when some communities are banning certain children’s books — Pilkey’s included — “Cat Kid” emphasizes the value of learning about diverse points of view and encouraging creativity in young people. And if what they create makes their parents uncomfortable? It’s not the end of the world.Cat Kid Comic ClubThrough Aug. 27 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; twusa.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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    ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 2, Episode 8 Recap: Domestic Bliss

    Carrie and Aidan play house. Miranda and Charlotte get back to work.Season 2, Episode 8:Who could have guessed that Che would be the hero we needed to finally ask, out loud, the burning question so many of us have had for Carrie and Aidan for the last 20 years or so?“I mean come on,” Che says to them innocently enough. “Why did this not work out the first time?”It’s a question Carrie hasn’t been able to get out of her head since that fateful Valentine’s Day dinner in last week’s episode. When this week’s kicks off, we find out Carrie and Aidan have been fully back on, spending night after night in hotels, living on $26 room service omelets.It’s not just that they’re dating again. As Carrie tells it to Miranda, she and Aidan are connected in a way now that feels beyond what they ever had. Could it be, Carrie wonders as she walks down the street — clad in some strange jammies-and-slippers get-up with a baby blankie coat to match — that some toxic attachment to Big never allowed her to truly let Aidan in. Maybe she missed out. Maybe, she tells Miranda, Big was a “big mistake.”It kind of makes sense, then, that Carrie and Aidan find themselves playing house, gaming out a life that could have been.Of course, Aidan lives in a Virginia farmhouse with his three sons and an undisclosed number of chickens, but when he’s in New York, he and Carrie essentially live together. They rent out Che’s apartment, saving Che from a string of unruly Airbnb-ers, and when Carrie and Aidan discover that Che has little to no houseware to speak of, they all but clean out a Williams Sonoma (or Crate and Barrel or wherever they are) to fill that void, looking as happy as any couple picking out items for their wedding registry.Naturally, Carrie and Aidan quickly become a “we.” It’s a little too quick for Seema, who dodges Carrie’s invitation to join her and Aidan for dinner. It’s not just jealousy that Carrie has a new boyfriend and Seema doesn’t. The real hurt she feels, as Seema confesses to Carrie over a melodramatic cigarette on Madison Avenue in the rain, is that Carrie has experienced great love — not once, but twice. The harsh truth for Seema is that she may never get that chance. And if she winds up third-wheeling in the Hamptons house she and Carrie are supposed to share this summer, that feeling is going to weigh on her a little too heavily.The Hampton plans are nixed, and Seema insists that she needs space. Carrie lets her go, even though she doesn’t want to.While Carrie and Aidan are rapidly advancing their relationship, both Miranda and Charlotte are taking off in their careers. Although Miranda is merely an intern at Human Rights Watch, she is thrilled about her new position — she’s finally free from corporate law and instead engaged in actual do-gooding. Her fellow interns, who are much younger but have been at the organization longer, are less thrilled when Miranda becomes the supervisor’s pet and is immediately selected for the coveted role of note-taker while they’re stuck slaving over citations. They quickly ice out Miranda like a couple of high school mean girls.Charlotte, on the other hand, has an entirely different, more enlightening experience with the younger set at work.Leading up to her first day at Kasabian Gallery, Charlotte finds herself obsessed with an extra few tummy pounds that simply will not do underneath her perfect new gallerina dress. She consumes nothing but bone broth all week and double bags herself in shapewear, but the “pooch,” which is nearly nonexistent, remains.Charlotte shows up to work, sucked and tucked, covering her midsection with her coat as if she were hiding a pregnancy. But when a 20-something co-worker, who is larger than Charlotte but confidently baring her midriff, swoops down the stairs and tells Charlotte her dress is fierce, Charlotte shakes off all the drama she internalized during the heroin chic era.It’s an abrupt about-face, which is kind of jarring, but as a Xennial who bore witness to Y2K’s relentless body shaming, I can attest, at least anecdotally, that Gen Z is truly an inspiration to older women everywhere in their unabashed embrace of all body sizes and their devil-may-care attitude toward which women are “allowed” to wear certain garments. Even though the crop-top queen Britney Spears ruled our youthful years, few millennial and Gen X women had the stick-slender body type at the time “required” to sport that look. Today, girls bare whatever bellies they’ve got. And as becomes clear immediately to Charlotte, that attitude is helping women of all ages to finally exhale.The best revelation of the episode, though, comes toward the end, when Carrie stops wondering about all of her past missteps and instead starts understanding them.Back in Che’s kitchen, between sips of beer, a quiet pause lingers over Che’s question: Why did things go so wrong between Carrie and Aidan? To Carrie, the answer simple.“Because I made a mistake,” Carrie says, clearly, and with conviction. But the look she gives Aidan right after says even more. Carrie isn’t referring only to the affair she had with Big, which broke up her and Aidan the first time. Nor is she talking only about the cold feet she got during their engagement, which split them up the second time — though certainly those events appear to be huge regrets.Carrie knows now that choosing Big over Aidan, at all, was a colossal blunder, and that the last couple of decades could have been far happier and more fulfilling if she had chosen a life with Aidan instead.And honestly, hallelujah. A significant portion of the fan base (me!) agrees and has never really gotten over it.Carrie and Aidan embrace, and I couldn’t help but wonder … can’t we just end the series right here?Things still taking up space in my brain:It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that when Carrie tells Seema she can’t have space because space between friends just leads to more space, she is talking about Samantha. Luckily, Seema doesn’t abscond to London and finds the strength to show up to the “we” dinner, with a smile to boot.If Carrie and Aidan fizzle out by the season finale, I truly don’t know if I can take it. Big got 20-some years. The Aidan stans are owed our longer arc. More

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    in Television

    ‘The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart’ Review: The Right Kind of Melodrama

    Sigourney Weaver stars in an Australian family thriller full of stormy emotions and strangely beautiful terrain.The title of the new Amazon offering “The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart,” with its echo of V.C. Andrews’s Gothic novels of family calamity, is a case of truth in advertising. The seven-episode Australian mini-series, which is based on the novel by Holly Ringland and premiered Thursday on Prime Video, is an unapologetic melodrama — a family saga in which lies and secrets proliferate beyond all reason, putting parents and children, friends and bystanders, through unnaturally intense storms of emotion.That it’s also entertaining, moving and vividly atmospheric is a pleasant surprise in a time when melodrama tends toward the banal (some variety of soap opera) or the scolding (some variety of humorless social critique). “Lost Flowers” is a reminder that when it is handled with skill, sophistication and a measure of restraint, melodrama can be as satisfying as any other style of storytelling.The story involves a complicated web of relationships centering on Thornhill, a flower farm that doubles as a refuge for troubled women, who are called “flowers.” Some of the women, though not all of them, are escaping abusive men. The farm is run by a forbidding matriarch, June (Sigourney Weaver), with the help of her Indigenous lover, Twig (Leah Purcell), and their adopted daughter, Candy (Frankie Adams).June is one pole of a story in which the keeping of shameful family secrets is the foundation of tragedy. The other pole is Alice, who is a child when we first see her (played by Alyla Browne) and knows nothing about June, her grandmother. Savage events unite them early on so that they can spend the rest of the series being drawn together and, as Alice works her way through June’s lies, torn apart again.Most of the first half of “Lost Flowers” is tied to the point of view of this young Alice, and the director and cinematographer, Glendyn Ivin and Sam Chiplin, give these episodes the seductive texture of an ominous, doom-tinged fairy tale. Using the strangely beautiful landscape of the New South Wales coast, they create an ambience that reflects Alice’s childlike, wavering apprehension of the unreasoning violence that regularly bursts into her life.They are helped immensely by Browne, who gives a terrific performance even though Alice spends several episodes mostly mute while recovering from trauma. Sadness, rebelliousness and a puckish sense of humor are there in her eyes. Though she shares the screen with Weaver and with the Australian star Asher Keddie, who plays a sympathetic but self-righteous local librarian, Browne draws you right to her.Alycia Debnam-Carey plays an older version of Alice, who after a 10-year leap forward in the story appears to be repeating harmful family patterns.Amazon StudiosMidway through, the series jumps ahead more than a decade, and Alice, now a young woman played by Alycia Debnam-Carey, finds herself in another magical setting — this time a national park where a volcanic crater provides a haven for wildflowers.The change of scenery is symbolic — away from the protection of the farm, Alice is free both to find herself and to start repeating harmful family patterns when it comes to men. And the writing, led by the series’s showrunner, Sarah Lambert, dries out a little along with the landscape. These episodes feel more like something we’ve seen before, though a bit of the earlier enchantment lingers in a plot strand involving Twig’s long road trip in search of Alice.What carries you through, finally — as you might expect — is Weaver. “Lost Flowers” doesn’t play to her traditional strengths — the taciturn, bottled-up June doesn’t provide much of a canvas for Weaver’s regal-yet-feral intelligence or her deadly sense of humor. She can get more out of sheer presence and stubborn charisma, however, than most performers do from busily acting, and in the later episodes she takes over, carrying off some wonderful moments as June slows down and opens up. Weaver’s work in series has been sparse and unpredictable; getting to spend seven episodes with her is the icing on the melodrama. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Spamalot’ Revival to Open on Broadway This Fall

    The new production, directed by Josh Rhodes, had a brief run at the Kennedy Center in Washington in May. Casting has not yet been announced.Make way for shrubbery: “Spamalot” is returning to Broadway.The show, a Monty Python-inspired spoof of Arthurian legend, first opened on Broadway in 2005, won the Tony Award for best musical, ran for four years, and has been widely staged since then.This new production, which had a 10-day run in May at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, will be the musical’s first Broadway revival.Previews are scheduled to begin Oct. 31, and the opening is set for Nov. 16 at the St. James Theater. The executive producer will be Jeffrey Finn, who is the Kennedy Center’s vice president of theater producing and programming.“I have been a crazy fan of ‘Spamalot’ since I saw the opening in 2005,” Finn said. “I feel as though in 2023, audiences are really looking for a fun escape and an opportunity to laugh as much as possible, and I believe this show delivers all of that.”The casting for Broadway has not yet been announced; at the Kennedy Center the cast included Alex Brightman, James Monroe Iglehart, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, Rob McClure, Matthew Saldivar, Jimmy Smagula, Michael Urie and Nik Walker.The musical, based on the screenplay for “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” features a book and lyrics by Eric Idle, who was a member of the Monty Python comedy group. The music is by Idle and John Du Prez. Reviewing the original production, The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “resplendently silly” and a “fitful, eager celebration of inanity.”The revival is directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, who will be making his Broadway directing debut; he has worked on Broadway as a performer and choreographer. (Rhodes’s husband, Lee Wilkins, was a replacement swing in the original “Spamalot” company.)Rhodes described “Spamalot” as “a beautiful satire of Broadway, and of the class system,” and said he is excited to introduce Monty Python to a generation of theatergoers who may be unfamiliar with the group’s history and work. “In D.C., there was some sort of incredible energy from the audience that made us realize people were so hungry for this material,” he said. “There was a rowdiness that maybe wasn’t there before, and made it feel very special.”The “Spamalot” revival will be the first production developed by the Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage program to transfer to Broadway; Finn created the program in 2018, and it has evolved from presenting semi-staged concert versions of existing musicals to presenting fully staged, but short-run, productions. The Kennedy Center had a previous history of nurturing work that transferred to Broadway; the last Kennedy Center-produced transfer was a 2014 revival of “Side Show.”A few years ago a movie version of the musical was in the works, but Paramount Pictures, which held the rights to produce it, is no longer pursuing the project, and Idle suggested on Twitter earlier this year that that the film adaptation had been killed. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Let’s Call Her Patty’ Review: Rhea Perlman as an Uptown Matriarch

    Rhea Perlman stars as a quintessential Upper West Sider in Zarina Shea’s snapshot of affluent, self-flagellating motherhoodShe shops at Zabar’s, does Pilates on Columbus Avenue and resides comfortably in a prewar high rise between West End and Riverside, where she gossips about private lives as though they were front-page news.That she could be any number of women, of some advanced years and moderate means, who live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is suggested by the taxonomic title “Let’s Call Her Patty,” a new play by Zarina Shea that opened on Tuesday night at the Claire Tow Theater, overlooking its subject’s natural habitat.Close your eyes to picture the type, and the production’s star, Rhea Perlman, may spring directly from a sidewalk crack, with her featherweight frame, babka-colored curls and voice like gravel and honey.Patty is introduced to the audience, chopping onions behind a long and luxe marble-topped kitchen island, by her niece Sammy (Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer). Scene-setting banter between the two demonstrates their shorthand intimacy, and Patty’s reflexive tendency to make other people’s business her own (and, more specifically, about her). That notably includes the triumphs but mostly troubles of Patty’s daughter Cecile (Arielle Goldman), an artist who struggles with body image and addiction.Patty’s maternal relationships with Cecile and Sammy are the play’s sources of conflict (Patty’s offstage husband, Hal, we’re told, is “fine”). When Cecile, who appears onstage only in brief interludes, falls out of touch, Patty considers it personal punishment, simultaneously convinced that she’s to blame for her daughter’s problems and defensive at her own accusation. Sammy, a font of patience as she is of exposition, gently suggests, “I think this is not about you.”Of course, she’s right. Patty is presented as a quintessential Jewish mother, but the qualities she exemplifies are not culturally exclusive; anyone who recognizes her narcissism from their family dynamics might appreciate a trigger warning. And yet, the play’s own narrow focus on Patty works to its detriment.The matriarch is little more than an amalgam of stereotypes; that there is truth to them is hardly a revelation. But the play does little to question or disrupt the preconceived notions it assumes New York audiences will have about “an Upper West Side lady” like Patty. Nor does Perlman mine much unseen depth from a character exclusively defined by circumstance.The production, from the director Margot Bordelon, confines Patty behind her cutting board, where she chops imaginary onions without shedding a tear for much of the play’s brief 70 minutes. If this is a character study, Patty’s pungent, messy center is largely withheld from view.Goldman’s Cecile occasionally drags a folding chair onstage to insert herself into her mother’s narrative, trembling like a frazzled live wire. Unfortunately, Cecile is kept at arm’s length from a story in which she seems to have the most compelling inner life. Sammy is likewise sketched mostly in relation to her aunt; that Sammy’s mother-in-law is near death is relevant only insofar as it keeps her from being with Patty.Patty’s co-op apartment, one of her primary distinguishing features, is suggested with chic austerity by Kristen Robinson’s set, reflecting a fixation on wealth that the play seems unsure whether it means to critique. Pivots in focus and time are punctuated with abrupt shifts in lighting (by Oliver Wason) and sound (Sinan Refik Zafar) that drum up tension and surprise the drama otherwise lacks.“Let’s Call Her Patty” gestures toward an oral tradition of storytelling that aims to preserve local, and often endangered, histories. Sammy’s narration acknowledges the Lenape tribe, who once lived on the land now occupied by New York City, and suggests that one day it will all be underwater. Dutifully recording for posterity the era of the affluent and self-flagellating mother seems to be as much an act of ambivalence as of love.Let’s Call Her PattyThrough Aug. 27 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More