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    In Germany, ‘Hamilton’ Hangs Up Its Musket

    After a year of less-than-stellar ticket sales, the German-language translation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stage hit is closing. But it has helped diversify German musicals.On Monday, the German-language version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster musical “Hamilton” won the prize for best production at the German Musical Theater Awards. But the timing of the honor was bittersweet. On Sunday, the show will play its final performance in Hamburg, after a yearlong run at the 1,400-seat Operettenhaus.The rise and fall of “Hamilton” in Hamburg is a tale of incredible determination, sky-high expectations, critical acclaim and an uneven box office.“Economically, it makes more sense for us to have a wonderful one-year run, instead of losing the money that you’ve made by prolonging it for too long,” said Stephan Jaekel, a spokesman for Stage Entertainment, the Amsterdam-based company that produced the show.Although sales were healthy overall, the show performed below expectations during the Christmas season, Jaekel said. Noting that tickets for musicals are “the number one German Christmas present,” he added that the holiday season box office was a “good indicator” of whether a show is “flying, whether it’s solid, whether it’s declining.” He added that even when sales were at their most brisk, “Hamilton” never sold out completely.When its closure was announced in March, the show had reported sales of over 200,000 tickets. Jaekel said that twice as many people will have seen it by the final performance on Sunday afternoon.“Four hundred thousand, to us, seems like a very good number of people to have been in touch with a new form of musical,” he said, “because the German musical audience is not as developed, is not as refined, not as used to variety as, say, the British or the American musical audiences are.”Daniel Dodd-Ellis, second from left, plays both Lafayette and Jefferson. He said the production was “a huge learning curve for German musical theater audiences.”Johan Persson“Hamilton” has become one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time since opening in 2015. It won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as 11 of the 16 Tony Awards for which it was nominated. A West End production has been running since 2017, and in addition to a North American tour, the show recently landed in Manila, and will head to Abu Dhabi early next year.Unlike Hamilton’s international tour, however, Hamburg’s was the first (and still the only) production not in the English language. Sera Finale and Kevin Schroeder spent nearly four years working through the show’s more than 20,000 rapid-fire words. Their German-language version has been widely praised as a masterpiece of translation.A little over a year ago, “Hamilton” in Hamburg celebrated a glitzy gala opening, with Miranda in attendance. It opened to strong reviews — but even the most positive critics wondered whether the show’s unique qualities might be lost in translation.“Can this American success story also work here?” wrote Judith Liere in the German newspaper Die Zeit. She applauded the translation, but complained that the story was unfamiliar and hard-to-follow. And though Liere praised the music and the energetic performances, she also asked: “Will that be enough to excite the average German musical audience, who are otherwise used to more accessible and effects-laden material?”At a recent weekend performance, the Operettenhaus was nearly full. I spotted young women decked out in “Hamilton” T-shirts and hoodies, as well as couples old and young and groups of 20-somethings, but relatively few young families, who are one of the main audiences for musicals in Hamburg.The crowd was fired up throughout the three-hour-long show, whooping and applauding as characters made their entrance (Lafayette! Washington! Jefferson! King George!) and the famous line “Einwanderer — we get the job done” was met with a mid-performance howl. The show was every bit as electrifying as it had been on opening night.In an interview afterward, Denise Obedekah, a director who worked on the production, said she still considered the Hamburg production a success. It “did start something in Germany,” she said: “an awareness that there are other musicals out there than just Disney shows.”From left, Ivy Quainoo, Chasity Crisp and Mae Ann Jorolan in the production.Johan PerssonShe added that a show with “Hamilton’s” level of sophistication was able to attract people who might previously have thought “musical theater is only for old people, or is something really kitschy.”Chasity Crisp, the actress who plays Angelica Schuyler, said that “Hamilton” in Germany had “kind of made musical theater cool.” Noting that the majority of the 34 cast members aren’t white, and hail from 13 countries, she added that it had contributed to the “ongoing development of inclusivity and diversity” in the country’s entertainment industry.The show also opened the door for “a new generation of musicals” in Germany, she said: Stage Entertainment is set to import German-language versions of “MJ: The Musical,” “& Juliet” and “Hercules” to Hamburg in versions either partially or fully translated into German.“Hamilton” may have struggled, partly, because it led this charge, said Daniel Dodd-Ellis, who plays Lafayette and Jefferson. Telling such a sophisticated and diverse story “was a huge learning curve for German musical theater audiences, for the German musical producers, and for marketing,” he added. The show’s promotion might have been too focused on the feat of translating “Hamilton,” rather than the merits of the show itself, he said.Although this “Hamilton” didn’t catch fire the same way it did in New York, it would be wrong to suggest, as some in the German press have, that the show was a flop. Revisiting the production a year after its opening, my admiration for the ingenious translation was undimmed (like the original English, the verbose songs reward multiple hearings) and I was transported anew by the raw energy of the production and the performances.Why didn’t local audiences thrill to “Hamilton?” Was the story too quintessentially American? Was its “brand visibility” too low compared to Disney and jukebox musicals? Whatever the reason, nearly half a million people here have discovered “Hamilton” auf Deutsch and that seems momentous. And there are lots of places where this show could find a new home: Vienna, Zurich, Stuttgart. This “Hamilton” hasn’t necessarily thrown away its shot. More

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    Under the Radar to Return, With New Partners

    The festival of experimental work is planning a citywide event at multiple venues in January, after the Public Theater declined to fund the 2024 iteration.When the Public Theater announced in June that it had placed the Under the Radar festival on indefinite hiatus, its founder, Mark Russell, did not know if he would be able to find another home for it. The Public cited financial reasons for the decision; other institutions were facing similar struggles. But today Russell, in association with ArKtype, a production company specializing in new work, announced that Under the Radar, New York’s foremost festival of experimental performance, would return in January.In contrast to the central hub that the Public provided, this new iteration, which will run Jan. 5-21, will take place at 10 partner venues throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Some, like Japan Society, will present a single show, and others, such as Lincoln Center and La MaMa, will host two or three. The festival will also co-sponsor a symposium dedicated to the challenges facing arts presenters.To continue the festival, Russell contacted old friends and longtime funders. He approached several theaters and universities in the hopes that they could take it on. But none were able to do so, especially on such short notice. Still, plenty of theaters offered partnerships. Eventually, he and ArKtype settled on this decentralized model, with Russell ceding artistic control to these new collaborators.“I love my programing, but I’ve had 18 years of that,” he said. “Now I have a dozen curators.” He has given himself a new title, festival director, in place of artistic director. “It’s bigger than me,” he said of the festival, which is supported by grants, private donations and contributions from partners. “So we made something bigger.”Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, is one new partner. St. Ann’s had hosted the first Under the Radar Festival, in 2005, and Feldman hurried to support this new version. She also had a work in mind: Luke Murphy’s “Volcano,” a challenging piece of dance theater, told in four 45-minute segments, that takes place inside a glass box.“We felt like the festival would be the right place for it,” she said in a recent phone interview.Julia Mounsey and her collaborator Peter Mills Weiss have presented work at three previous festivals. They were in rehearsals for a new piece last spring when they learned that Under the Radar might not take place. Mounsey had to go for a walk “because I was so upset,” she recalled during a recent phone interview. She said she felt profound relief about the festival’s rebirth. Mabou Mines and Performance Space New York will host Mounsey and Weiss’s new show, “Open Mic Night.”She will miss the centrality of the Public. “It was great for connecting with people and meeting people,” she said. “But there’s also something exciting about it being spread out.”Russell hasn’t given up on the idea of a festival hub. “If I could find a nice large bar in the center of all this, that would be great. But right now, it has to be what it has to be,” he said. “People are going to have to run all around the city, but they’ll be able to get the Under the Radar experience.” More

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    Review: In ‘(pray),’ Nourish Thyself With Song and Dance

    An exploration of how faith intersects with Black womanhood, through a mix of music, movement, ritual and poetry.“Is this a church?,” a character wonders in nicHi douglas’s “(pray).”The Greenwich House Theater, where this production by Ars Nova and National Black Theater recently opened, certainly looks like a church, complete with (fake) stained-glass windows rrffand seating arranged like rows of pews.But it would be reductive to say “(pray)” is any one thing, because this transcendent, paradoxical work — what douglas calls “a sacred offering” — exists both within a Christian tradition and outside any religious institution. It’s a holy communion of musical interludes, movement, poems, rituals and critical theory investigating how faith intersects with Black womanhood.Upon entering the theater, audience members are asked to don disposable shoe covers as nine Black women alternate between shuffling down the aisles in matching powder-blue church ensembles and fanning themselves while sitting among the audience.They are all called Sister Anna Bertha, because they are variations on the stereotype of the sassy, overdressed Black church lady (playful costume design by DeShon Elem).Over 75 minutes, these women run through a 17-part liturgy accompanied by a pianist (Darnell White) and singer (S T A R R Busby, whose resonant voice leads the joyous gospel numbers). At one corner of this church stands a partially obscured forest. A silent spirit in white occasionally dances out from this surreal fantasy space (scenic design by dots), flitting around in fluid swells of movement. This is the Ancestor (Satori Folkes-Stone, magnetic), who also performs offstage rituals as part of the service. Another young woman, called Free (a less graceful Amara Granderson), is the one wondering whether this is a church, and if she even belongs here.Like “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” by Aleshea Harris, “(pray),” which douglas has nimbly written, choreographed and directed, is theater that demands the audience step into a shared experience of Blackness. In these experimental works, theater begins and ends in community.Thus, douglas’s script aims to make faith more accessible via coy translations: “ghost” becomes “most,” for example, and “hallelujah” is “yahleloo.” The similar sounding words with the music (composed by Busby and JJJJJerome Ellis) trick the ear into fluency, so that a prayer that says “O, abundance! May I meet you. May I know you,” feels as true and traditional as, say, the Apostles’ Creed.The Sisters deliver improvised gossip and judgmental comments, sometimes, hilariously, at the audience’s expense. The cohesiveness of their vocals and group movements (a stunning mélange of styles, including hip-hop and Afro-Cuban) recalls the deft cast of performers in Ars Nova’s 2022 hit by Heather Christian, “Oratorio for Living Things.” Each Sister sings with her own textured affect, so the psalms they perform feel creased, pleated or smoothed over like fabric. Tina Fabrique’s elastic bellows electrify “A Song (For to Ease My Troubled Mind).” Another Sister Anna (Ariel Kayla Blackwood) spits Noname lyrics atop a muscular beat. (Mikaal Sulaiman’s ethereal sound design lifts the voices higher.)A whole syllabus of thinkers and artists have inspired (and are referenced in) douglas’s script, including the poets Tyehimba Jess and Raych Jackson. But douglas’s writing sometimes pales in comparison, lacking the same polish and panache. And there are some missed notes: “(pray)” feels more anchored within the distant and recent past, lacking firmer context in the present, and despite the production’s inclusive language around gender, queerness is only occasionally alluded to. The history of race-based attacks on Black churches, like the 1963 Birmingham bombing and the 2015 Charleston shooting, is artfully hinted at with the haunting sound of a helicopter overhead, but feels like a footnote.So the question remains: Is this a church? Well, “(pray)” offers a congregation of believers in God but, more essentially, in the sanctity of Black women. So, let’s call this a house of song and praise — yahleloo.(pray)Through Oct. 28 at Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan. arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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    Late Night Mocks House Dysfunction and George Santos

    Jimmy Kimmel said that Republicans will be successful only if they can “accept the results of an election, and that’s really not their thing.”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.‘One Step Closer to the Worst Job in the World’House Republicans “took a break from fake-impeaching Joe Biden” on Wednesday, Jimmy Kimmel said, to nominate Steve Scalise of Louisiana as their next speaker.“Scalise beat out Jim Jordan in a closed-door session and will now spend a night in the fantasy suite with Matt Gaetz to see how they hit it off,” Kimmel joked.“House Republicans today nominated majority leader Steve Scalise to be the next speaker, while next week’s speaker is still anyone’s guess!” — SETH MEYERS“The House majority chose Scalise by a vote of 113-99. It’s still unclear, though, if he has enough votes to win the speakership because that would require Republicans to accept the results of an election, and that’s really not their thing.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Congratulations, Steve. You are one step closer to having the worst job in the world. It’s just one rung below emptying the Porta-Potties at a chili cook-off.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So if you see white smoke coming from the Capitol Rotunda, it means they’ve either picked a new speaker or Lauren Boebert is vaping again.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Running Mate or Cell Mate Edition)“Federal prosecutors accused Republican Congressman George Santos yesterday of stealing campaign donors’ identities. But if you donated money to George Santos, you’re probably looking for a new identity anyway.” — SETH MEYERS“The latest round of charges brings the total number of counts against him to 23. Congratulations, George, 68 more and you can run for president.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Just to give that some perspective, the BTK killer only had 10 charges against him.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Santos has been indicted on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, falsifying records, and the most Photoshop ever used on a single headshot.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“In one instance, Santos allegedly stole a donor’s credit card number to transfer more than $11,000 to his own bank account. Zoinkers! Though people should’ve been tipped off by his slogan ‘Santos 2022: That’s my PIN number, what’s yours?’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Congressman George Santos was just hit with 10 more criminal charges that accuse him of stealing his donors’ identities and credit cards. Santos was like, ‘Wait, am I not Henrietta Ellenberg from Youngstown, Ohio?’” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s wild. Santos is either going to wind up as Trump’s running mate or Trump’s cell mate.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth Watching“The Late Show” writer Felipe Torres Medina popped by Wednesday’s show for a quick game of “Hispanic or Latino!”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe “Saturday Night Live” star Bowen Yang will appear ahead of the show’s 49th season premiere on Thursday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutFrom left, J.J. Wynder, Mallori Taylor Johnson, Ngozi Anyanwu (standing) and Nicole Ari Parker in “The Refuge Plays,” at Laura Pels Theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNicole Ari Parker stars in Nathan Alan Davis’s new Off Broadway production of “The Refuge Plays.” More

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    Michael Chiarello, Chef and Food Network Star, Dies at 61

    His culinary empire included several restaurants, an olive oil company, a winery and a retail business with a robust catalog.Michael Chiarello, a hard-working, TV-ready chef from California’s Central Valley whose culinary prowess and intuitive knack for marketing helped define a chapter of Italian-influenced Northern California cuisine and the rural escapism of the Napa Valley lifestyle, died on Friday in Napa. He was 61.His death, in a hospital, resulted from an acute allergic reaction that led to anaphylactic shock, said Giana O’Shaughnessy, his youngest daughter. The cause of the allergic reaction has not been identified.Mr. Chiarello was a member of a generation of Northern California chefs who by the 1980s had freed themselves from the conventions of continental cuisine. They swapped olive oil for butter when they served bread, and they used seasonal produce and locally made cheese and wine long before the term “farm to table” became a menu cliché.He would later get caught in the #MeToo movement, when two servers filed a sexual harassment lawsuit in 2016 against him and his restaurant company, Gruppo Chiarello. The case was settled out of court, but his reputation was tarnished and television opportunities dried up.Michael Dominic Chiarello was born on Jan. 26, 1962, in Red Bluff, Calif., in the Sacramento Valley, and raised surrounded by almond trees and melon fields 200 miles south in Turlock, a farming town built on the rich soil not far from Modesto.He was the youngest child of a couple with roots in the Calabria region of Italy. He credited his mother, Antoinette (Aiello) Chiarello, for his earliest culinary lessons. His father, Harry, was a banker who suffered a debilitating stroke when he was in his 40s.“We never had much money and always had to scrape by,” Mr. Chiarello told The St. Helena Star in 2006. “We foraged for our food. The kitchen table was our entertainment. If we had pasta with porcini mushrooms, we’d talk about how we picked them. How wet and rainy it was that day, or how the truck broke down. There was a story to all the food we brought home, and it made everything taste even better.”By 14, he was working in a restaurant in between wrestling practice and classes at Turlock High School. By 22, he had graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and Florida International University in Miami, where he earned a degree in hotel and restaurant management.Even though he was starting to receive national attention for his cooking — he opened his first restaurant in Miami in 1984 and was named Food & Wine magazine’s chef of the year in 1985 — his father wasn’t pleased.“When I decided to be a chef, it wasn’t what it is today. It was just a trade, not sexy like today,” he said in the 2006 interview. “I remember my father was concerned about me. One of my brothers is a Ph.D., one an attorney. I was a cook. He’d say, ‘The family came all this way from Italy. He could have done that over there.’”Mr. Chiarello in 2005 after his Food Network show “Easy Entertaining With Michael Chiarello” won a Daytime Emmy Award.Mathew Imaging/FilmMagicMr. Chiarello caught the attention of Cindy Pawlcyn, who had recently been on the cover of Bon Appétit magazine for her restaurant Mustards Grill, a pioneering Yountville roadhouse with a giant wine list where the great winemakers of the era would walk in covered in farm dirt. She was looking for someone to run a new restaurant in St. Helena called Tra Vigne.Mr. Chiarello arrived for an interview wearing a chef’s neckerchief and brimming with ambition.“Michael was a very driven man; there was no doubt about that,” Ms. Pawlcyn said in a phone interview. “Tra Vigne was a good place to start, because Michael was outgoing and exuberant and could be charming on the spot. He met a lot of people there.”Indeed, Robert Mondavi and other top winemakers would become regulars, and guests often included culinary and Hollywood elite, from Julia Child to Danny DeVito.The restaurant was a jumping-off point for Mr. Chiarello’s empire, which would eventually include several restaurants, an olive oil company, a winery and a retail business with a robust catalog.Mr. Chiarello ran the Tra Vigne restaurant in St. Helena, Calif., until 2001. Robert Mondavi and other top winemakers would become regulars, and guests often included members of the culinary and Hollywood elite.Peter DaSilvaHe left Tra Vigne in 2001 to pursue a career in media and merchandise. His first TV show, “Season by Season,” debuted that year on PBS. And he opened NapaStyle, a website and a small chain of retail stores where he sold panini, flavored olive oil and other specialty foods, as well as cookware, table décor and wine from his own vineyard.He jumped to Food Network in 2003 with “Easy Entertaining With Michael Chiarello,” which landed him a Daytime Emmy Award. He would go on to compete on “Top Chef Masters” and was a judge on “Top Chef.”Mr. Chiarello wrote eight books, one of which, “The Tra Vigne Cookbook” (1999), was at one point as popular in Bay Area bookstores as Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential,” which came out shortly after.He was one of the first to see Napa Valley as a lifestyle and a brand, said the Northern California food writer and cheese expert Janet Fletcher, who wrote two books with him.“He really was a very good cook but also an amazing marketer and merchandiser,” she said, adding that “they didn’t come more charming or handsome.”“Walking through the dining room at Tra Vigne, you could just see the star power,” Ms. Fletcher said, “but there was substance, too. You wanted to eat every dish on his menu.”Mr. Chiarello was one of the first to see Napa Valley as a lifestyle and a brand, said the Northern California food writer and cheese expert Janet Fletcher, who wrote two books with him, including “The Tra Vigne Cookbook.”Chronicle BooksMr. Chiarello jumped back into the restaurant world in 2008, opening the casually elegant Bottega in Yountville. Five years later, he added Coqueta, a Spanish-focused restaurant on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, and in 2019 he expanded it to Napa.Sexual harassment claims dogged him. Two servers at Coqueta named him in a lawsuit in 2016, claiming that he presided over a sexually charged atmosphere, touched employees inappropriately and, among other things, made lewd gestures with a baguette.Mr. Chiarello vigorously denied the charges and vowed to fight them. The parties eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.In addition to Ms. O’Shaughnessy, his daughter from his marriage to Ines Bartel, which ended in divorce, Mr. Chiarello is survived by two other daughters from that marriage, Margaux Comalrena and Felicia Chiarello; a son, Aidan Chiarello, from his second marriage, to Eileen Gordon; two brothers, Ron and Kevin Chiarello; and two grandchildren. A company spokesman said that Mr. Chiarello and Ms. Gordon were legally separated and in the process of divorcing when he died.Despite his outsize career, Ms. O’Shaughnessy said, Mr. Chiarello was a family man at heart who wanted to keep his family’s stories alive. He made a point of teaching his children how to make the gnocchi his mother taught him to make when he was 7, and he named various bottlings of wine from Chiarello Family Vineyards after his children.“In the restaurant business I lost a lot of time with my girls,” he said in 2006. “I don’t want that to happen again. I don’t want to be saying anymore that I should have spent more time with my children, more time with my wife. If I get hit by a bus, I don’t want my last thought to be about a wine deal I was doing with Walmart.” More

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    ‘The Refuge Plays’ Review: A Surreal Family Saga on the Homestead

    A family in exile contends with its future, and its ghosts, in Nathan Alan Davis’s new Off Broadway play starring Nicole Ari Parker.The unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” retreats, after an alienating odyssey through the South and Harlem, to live in a secret cellar. Underground is both an escape from oppression and a sanctuary where he can see himself on his own terms.Ellison’s 1952 novel is like gospel to the eldest matriarch in “The Refuge Plays” by the playwright Nathan Alan Davis. “Gotta make your own world in this world,” says Early (Nicole Ari Parker), a great-grandmother homesteading with her family. She can still chop firewood and hunt squirrels with a hammer, but when we first meet Early in this keen but unwieldy family saga, opening Wednesday at the Laura Pels Theater, her daily life has evolved beyond the need for such primal skills.Four generations of Early’s family are living together in the present-day Illinois wilderness, sharing a cabin built years ago by Early and her husband, Crazy Eddie (Daniel J. Watts). The too-small sofa and ratty armchair draped with quilts and crochet (the persuasively salvaged set is by Arnulfo Maldonado) indicate a modest home where her relatives choose to live out of kinship rather than necessity.Early’s great-grandson, Ha-Ha (J.J. Wynder), is the purest product of this social experiment: a 17-year-old who is deferential, bookish and comically naïve about girls. (Many of Davis’s character names are freighted with exaggerated symbolism.) Ha-Ha’s mother, Joy (Ngozi Anyanwu), tried striking out on her own when she was younger, but eventually returned. And Joy’s mother, Gail (Jessica Frances Dukes), the wife of Early’s deceased son, Walking Man, is the functional head of the household, though not for long: The spirit of Walking Man (Jon Michael Hill), a routine and welcome visitor, has just foretold her imminent death.Davis’s grand ambitions for “The Refuge Plays” are indicated by its running time — three hours and 20 minutes, with two intermissions — and by a title that suggests its three parts may not exactly cohere. The action rewinds to the past, revealing what drove Early into the woods, why others followed and what binds them together. (“If you don’t need me, leave me,” Early tells Walking Man.) Each act operates in a different mode: Sitcom conventions play out in the first (with Early as the armchair curmudgeon); surreal and Shakespearean elements dominate the second (with ghosts who incite an Oedipal revenge plot); and the third imagines a meet-cute in exile.Daniel J. Watts and Parker play a young couple who meet-cute in exile in an earlier section of the show.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis Roundabout Theater Company production, directed by Patricia McGregor and presented in association with New York Theater Workshop (where McGregor is the artistic director), benefits tremendously from bold interpretations of Davis’s characters. McGregor accentuates the humor Davis weaves throughout, and even mines more from between the lines, giving the production a sustained momentum. But the pace lags when Davis’s airy lyricism occasionally tips toward the sentimental, as in the heavy-handed second act. Early, for example, insists she has cried a nearby river with her tears.Parker (“And Just Like That …”) has an innate gentility that would seem an odd match for Early’s wild fate, but there is frisson in the juxtaposition and Parker lends Early a poised ferocity. Her flinty exterior is a formidable match for Eddie, the World War II vet who becomes her husband. Slightly sideways and nursing his own wounds, he’s a philosophical jester (Watts can land punchlines with the whites of his eyes) and proof that civilization inflicts violence in many forms.“The Refuge Plays” is populated with gifted storytellers, whose language is sticky with associations (like “if all your worries was ice cream” that melted at death’s door), and who can clearly see the ills of the outside world from the safe distance of their own. They conceive their identities in relation to one another, reflecting an organic sense of human responsibility, yet rib and curse one another like the members of any family would.Davis, whose speculative 2016 drama, “Nat Turner in Jerusalem,” was also produced by New York Theater Workshop, takes a sweeping view of Black life while isolating his characters from the social contexts and systems that would otherwise shape them. Some, like Early and Eddie, have their memories to contend with, while Walking Man, who was born in the woods, encounters human injustice from an absurd angle (beneath a heifer he tries to slaughter with a switchblade).In an attempt to imagine alternative ways of being, the playwright has smashed existing artistic forms and created new ones along the way. The result is provocative but messy: While the three acts interlock, they don’t propel each other forward, and Davis’s surfeit of ideas ultimately comes at the expense of a dramatic throughline. But cumbersome as it is, “The Refuge Plays” suggests the potential for stories to exceed the world’s limitations. Ellison would have to agree.The Refuge PlaysThrough Nov. 12 at Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 3 hours 20 minutes. More

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    Review: ‘Frasier’ Returns, Tossed, Scrambled and Eggscruciating

    One of TV’s longest-lived characters gets revived, in an anticlimactic museum reproduction of the original.“Frasier” always saw itself as something more than a mere plebeian sitcom. It delighted in Noel Coward-esque banter. Its protagonist, the radio psychiatrist Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer), closed his final broadcast reciting Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”So let me begin my thoughts on “Frasier,” the Paramount+ revival of the long-running “Cheers” sequel, with words that its leading man of letters might attend to, from the poem “Terminus,” by his fellow Harvard man Ralph Waldo Emerson:It is time to be old,To take in sail:—The god of bounds,Who sets to seas a shore,Came to me in his fatal rounds,And said: “No more!”Alas, “No more!” is not a phrase in the streaming TV industry’s vocabulary. On Thursday, Frasier Crane becomes the latest classic character to set sail for a mediocre, anticlimactic return, the god of bounds be damned.When last we saw Frasier, he had passed up a chance at TV stardom and left Seattle for Chicago to be with his new love, Charlotte (Laura Linney). The new “Frasier,” developed by Chris Harris and Joe Cristalli, dispenses with that inconvenient narrative closure in about ten seconds of exposition. Frasier landed a TV show after all — he recently quit it after many years — and Charlotte has dumped him. (At least the premiere doesn’t Etch-a-Sketch the no-longer-a-finale quite as brazenly as the “Will and Grace” and “Roseanne” revivals.)Single again, loaded with TV money and having just buried his father, Martin (John Mahoney, who died in 2018), he’s off for a sojourn in Paris. But he makes a pit stop in Boston to reconnect with his son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), who disappointed Frasier by dropping out of Harvard and becoming a firefighter. (His choice may also surprise the audience, who might recall him as an awkward chess nerd going through a goth phase, but hey, people change.)Freddy, who resents Frasier’s dismissal of his work, isn’t eager for the reunion, but the inexorable logic of sitcom revivals kicks in. While Paramount+ has declared some twists of the first episode — none of them surprising — to be spoilers, suffice it to say that Frasier cancels his Paris plans, has a Harvard teaching gig fall into his lap and ends up spending a lot of quality time with his estranged son.If you are scanning this review for familiar names besides Grammer’s, I have some bad news. Beyond some reportedly upcoming guest appearances, the new “Frasier” joins “Night Court” as a revival that surrounds one returning lead with new sidekicks who, if you squint, might pass for versions of the old gang.So Freddy is Freddy, but he’s also a version of Martin, the down-to-earth ex-police officer who took the air out of Frasier’s swelled head. As David, the son of Frasier’s brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) and his wife Daphne (Jane Leeves), Anders Keith channels the absent Hyde Pierce, right down to pronouncing the word “Sahara” the way Sting does.Well, he’s half a Niles; Nicholas Lyndhurst, as Frasier’s old college chum and new faculty colleague Alan, supplies the other half, playing Frasier’s erudite contemporary. Freddy’s roommate Eve (Jess Salgueiro) is sort of a Daphne. Olivia (Toks Olagundoye), the department head who recruits Frasier to teach, is sort of a Roz.And “Frasier” is … sort of “Frasier.” It is also, returning to Boston, sort of “Cheers.” The callbacks flow like drafts at happy hour. Frasier says that the last time he lived in the city, “I may have spent too much time at a certain bar.” And his run-in with a firehouse Dalmatian sets up a callback to his canine frenemy, Eddie: “I outlasted that little mongrel. I’ll outlast you.”The result is something that feels less like Season 12 of “Frasier” or Season 1 of a new series than a sort of museum of itself — be sure to visit the gift shop! — weighed down with knickknacks and nostalgia.The people orbiting Frasier in the new sitcom, including his boss (Toks Olagundoye) and a professor colleague (Nicholas Lyndhurst), resemble characters from the original.Chris Haston/Paramount+Frasier Crane, of course, has a lot of history even by sitcom-revival standards. He first appeared on TV nearly four decades ago, as the stuffed-shirt romantic rival to Sam Malone (Ted Danson) on “Cheers.” The 1993 premiere of “Frasier” mellowed him out and put him in his own element. The lead-character version of Frasier was haughty but soulful.You can’t say Grammer doesn’t know Frasier after all these years. He falls into the old bluster as if he’d time-traveled straight from 2004, and his new staff writes in the character’s voice well enough. (It did stop me in the first episode when he references “the hoi polloi”; surely the purist polymath Frasier would hold that “the” is redundant since “hoi” is a definite article.) The show even returns the formidable sitcom director James Burrows to shoot the first two episodes, which both premiere on Thursday.But it has the purgatorial feel of a sitcom that returned without a purpose beyond “More of that guy I like, please.” The central father-son dynamic feels forced rather than rooted in history, and Freddy is a nonentity, undefined as a character except in relation to his meddling dad.You could forgive the lack of ideas if there were at least a few laughs. But this reproduction has the predictable beats of a mothballed 20th-century sitcom. If there is a baby seat that plays “Baby Shark” when someone bumps into it, you know that someone will bump into it again. And again.The third episode, the best of the five screened for critics, at least gives Frasier a new conflict while meta-commenting on the revival. As he prepares to teach his first class, he realizes that his students, and his colleagues, are looking not for a professor but a celebrity, wanting him to re-create his shtick from his talk show. But he’s embarrassed of those years; in a series of clips, we see that he went from giving sober advice in the first season to, by Season 13, wearing a football-referee uniform and doing ax-throwing stunts.Now that I would watch! No, not the cheesy advice program that Frasier sold himself out to do. But a show about Frasier Crane making that show, lowering himself to win the love of hoi polloi, moving outside his comfort zone, finding out that success is a kind of prison — I would hit “play all” on that. It might be great, it might be terrible, but it would be interesting. But the revival industry is not in the business of interesting.As I’ve written before, there’s an inherent sadness to bringing back a sitcom after years or decades, the twinge of time passing. You can treat that melancholy in different ways, even get laughs out of it, but to ignore it just rings false. While this “Frasier” has the occasional sentimental moment, it’s too busy re-creating the past to engage with the past. It re-tosses the salads, it re-scrambles the eggs. But it has no desire to hear the blues a-callin’. More

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    Seth Meyers Is Unsure About a House Republican ‘Therapy Session’

    “If being locked in a room with those people for two hours feels like therapy, you need to find a new therapist,” Meyers said.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.Family TherapyDivided House Republicans have been holding closed-door meetings to discuss electing a new speaker. One lawmaker referred to an intense two-hour discussion on Monday as a “therapy session.”“If being locked in a room with those people for two hours feels like therapy, you need to find a new therapist,” Seth Meyers said on Tuesday’s “Late Night.”“I would hate to be a therapist for the House Republicans: [imitating a therapist] ‘Um, OK. Normally I don’t say this to a patient, but you are all responsible for your parents’ divorce.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, they may have some competition for Kevin McCarthy’s old job, and it’s Kevin McCarthy.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Republicans will try to elect a new speaker of the House, and apparently Kevin McCarthy said that he would be willing to return as speaker. That’s right, Kevin McCarthy might run to replace Kevin McCarthy.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Prime Time Edition)“It’s October Prime Day on Amazon. It’s exclusively for Prime members, which is everyone in the world.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s that special day that only comes 12 times a year.” — JIMMY FALLON“They’ve got some great deals on some must-have items, like a pickle that yodels, a cat scratcher shaped like a tongue, a banana goose, a piece of plastic pork and a delicious can of Spam, maple flavored.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Joe Biden spent his October Prime Day trying to figure out where the hell this woman Alexa who keeps yelling at him is hiding.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingThe Roots free-styled songs from audience-supplied topics, like Taylor Swift fans and Halloween candy, on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe country music star Reba McEntire will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”Also, Check This Out“I try to only do multicamera sitcoms,” James Burrows said. “If there’s two people talking, I want you laughing at what they’re saying, not admiring the beautiful cinematic camera moves.”Alex Welsh for The New York TimesJames Burrows, one of the creators of “Cheers,” is bringing Frasier Crane back to Boston with the new Paramount+ reboot of “Frasier.” More