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    Franne Lee, Tony Winner Who Also Costumed Coneheads, Dies at 81

    She worked on “Sweeney Todd” and “Candide” and also on the early seasons of “Saturday Night Live,” contributing to the look of the Blues Brothers and the Killer Bees.Franne Lee, a costume and set designer who while doing Tony Award-winning work on Broadway in the 1970s also made killer-bee suits and cone-shaped headwear for early “Saturday Night Live” sketches, helping to create some of that era’s most memorable comic moments, died on Sunday in Atlantis, Fla. She was 81.Her daughter, Stacy Sandler, announced the death, after a short illness that she did not specify.Ms. Lee did some of her most high-profile work in the 1970s while in a relationship with the set designer Eugene Lee. She collaborated with him on productions including an acclaimed “Candide,” directed by Harold Prince at the Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn in 1973. It moved to the Broadway Theater in Midtown Manhattan the next year and ran there for 740 performances.“The production has been designed by those experts, Eugene and Franne Lee,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times, reviewing the Broadway incarnation, “and they have knocked the innards out of this respectable Broadway house and made it into an obstacle course of seats, musicians’ areas, catwalks, drawbridges and playing platforms, with one conventional stage thrown in at the end of the space for good measure and convenience.”The Lees shared the 1974 Tony Award for scenic design, and Ms. Lee won another for costuming, her specialty. As the story goes, one person who saw that “Candide” was a young producer named Lorne Michaels, who was creating an unconventional late-night show for NBC. He was impressed and brought the Lees in as designers on the show that, when it made its debut in October 1975, was called “NBC’s Saturday Night” but soon became “Saturday Night Live.”The original “S.N.L.” cast quickly made its mark with outlandish sketches, and Ms. Lee was integral to the look of those now famous bits — dressing John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in black when they became the Blues Brothers, turning cut-up long johns into the yellow-striped Killer Bee costumes, and more.Dan Aykroyd, left, and John Belushi as the Blues Brothers on “Saturday Night Live.” Ms. Lee designed their costumes.Edie Baskin/OnyxIt was costume designing on the cheap. Ms. Lee’s father, a tool-and-die maker, came up with the bouncy springs that were the Killer Bees’ antennae, which she finished off by sticking Ping-Pong balls on the ends. John Storyk, who first met Ms. Lee in 1968 when both worked at the short-lived Manhattan club Cerebrum, recalled in a phone interview dropping by the Lees’ apartment and seeing on her work table the beginnings of the cones that became the defining feature of the Coneheads, the extraterrestrials who were a recurring presence on the show in the late 1970s and later got their own feature film.In an interview for the book “Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers and Guests” (2002), by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, James Signorelli, a longtime “S.N.L.” producer, said that Ms. Lee influenced fashion beyond the studio walls.“The way Franne Lee, our costume designer, dressed Lorne for the show suddenly became the way everybody in New York was dressing,” he said. “Lorne used to come out onstage wearing a shirt, jacket and bluejeans. Nobody had ever seen it. But before you knew it, everybody was sitting around in Levis and a jacket.”Laraine Newman, an original “S.N.L.” cast member, recalled one time when Ms. Lee herself became part of the action — not on the show, but during a photo shoot Ms. Newman was doing with Francesco Scavullo, the noted fashion and celebrity photographer. Ms. Newman was working a vampire look, complete with fangs.“Franne found me this incredible Edwardian black lace dress,” Ms. Newman said by email, “and we did wonderful shots with that, and then Scavullo had this idea that Franne should be my victim, and so there are shots of me like biting Franne’s neck. It was so hard not to laugh because Franne was making these faces trying to look horrified or drained of blood. It’s a wonderful memory, and it still makes me laugh when I think about it. She was so very talented.”Len Cariou, left, and Angela Lansbury in the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd.” Ms. Lee won a Tony Award for her costumes.Martha Swope/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman CenterThat talent earned Ms. Lee another Tony Award in 1979 for her costume designs for the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd,” the Stephen Sondheim musical about a murderous barber who has his victims made into meat pies. The show was directed by Mr. Prince, who Ms. Lee said initially told her he was reluctant to take on the project despite her urging.“He told me: ‘You’re crazy, absolutely crazy! You can’t do a musical about people eating people,’” she recalled in a 2002 interview with The Tennessean newspaper. “‘I said, ‘Why not?’”Frances Elaine Newman was born on Dec. 30, 1941, in the Bronx to Martin and Anne (Marks) Newman. Her father had a small machine shop on Long Island, and her mother was an offset printing supervisor.Ms. Lee was studying painting at the University of Wisconsin, her daughter said, when she discovered her love of theater and costume design. She was married to Ralph Sandler at the time and relocated to Pennsylvania when his job took him there, doing costume and design work for local theaters. The couple divorced in 1967, and Ms. Lee relocated to New York.“Franne and I both answered the same ad,” Mr. Storyk said, recalling how they found themselves working at Cerebrum. Mr. Storyk designed the club; Ms. Lee was what was called a guide, leading patrons through the place, which promoted consciousness-raising and featured various interactive environments. It closed in less than a year.Ms. Lee, though, continued to pursue her theatrical interests, creating costumes for groups including Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. She also met Mr. Lee. Among their earliest collaborations as scenic designers — with Ms. Lee still credited as Franne Newman — was a version of “Alice in Wonderland” staged by the director André Gregory in 1970 that drew rave reviews.Ms. Lee in 2015.Amber Arnold/Wisconsin State JournalThe two became a couple and Franne adopted Mr. Lee’s name, though the nature of their relationship remained hazy; Patrick Lynch, a longtime aide to Mr. Lee, said the two were never formally married. (Mr. Lee died in February.) In any case, their personal and professional partnership continued until 1980, the year Ms. Lee left “Saturday Night Live.”She continued to design costumes for shows in New York in the 1980s and ’90s, including a few short-lived Broadway productions and, in the mid-’90s at the Public Theater, Christopher Walken’s examination of the life and legend of Elvis Presley, “Him.”She also tried the West Coast for a time, working on a few television shows and made-for-TV movies. In 2001 she settled in Nashville, where she was involved in founding Plowhaus, a gallery and artists’ cooperative. She later lived in Wisconsin, and since 2017 she had lived in Lake Worth Beach, Fla., about 65 miles north of Miami, designing costumes for theaters in that area.In addition to her daughter, from her marriage to Mr. Sandler, Ms. Lee is survived by a son from that marriage, Geoffrey Sandler; a son with Mr. Lee, Willie Lee; a brother, Bill Newman; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.The frugal D.I.Y. ethos of her “S.N.L.” years stayed with Ms. Lee throughout her costume-designing career. In 2018 she worked on costumes for a production of Conor McPherson’s thriller “The Birds” (based on the same source material as the Alfred Hitchcock movie) at the Garden Theater in Winter Garden, Fla. It required a wedding dress, which she bought at a thrift shop for $45.“I’m a senior citizen,” she told The Orlando Sentinel, “so if I go on Wednesday, things are half price.” More

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    Theater to See in September 2023: ‘Ulysses,’ ‘The Pianist’ and More

    Six shows and a fringe festival are among this month’s highlights in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and a bit beyond.Headlines about the theater industry’s troubles have been easy to find lately: layoffs, closures, shrinking audiences and seasons. The good news? There’s still a lot of theater out there.Philadelphia Fringe FestivalFringe theatergoing is a crapshoot; that’s pretty much a rule. But there is adventure to be had in plotting your way through hundreds of events, almost all of them uncurated. Circus, dance, comedy, cabaret, kids’ fare and more are part of the 27th year of this festival. Ticket prices are low, and offerings include a handful of digital shows. Sept. 7-24 at various locations in Philadelphia; phillyfringe.org‘The 12’The playwright Robert Schenkkan, a Pulitzer Prize winner for “The Kentucky Cycle,” dips into musical theater as the book writer of this show, with music by Neil Berg and lyrics by both of them. The Tony Award winner John Doyle directs this tale, which unfolds among the terrified disciples of Jesus, who have gone into hiding in the chaotic aftermath of his and Judas’s deaths. Sept. 8-Oct. 29 at the Goodspeed, East Haddam, Conn.; goodspeed.org‘Bulrusher’Jordan Tyson, left, and Robert Kellogg in rehearsals for a new production of Eisa Davis’s “Bulrusher,” a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist.Dave TavaniDuring the pandemic shutdown of in-person theater, when the playwright Paula Vogel championed underproduced plays by staging them virtually, this linguistically inventive drama by Eisa Davis got her full-throated support, and a high-profile digital production. Here is a chance to see it live, in a McCarter Theater Center-Berkeley Repertory Theater co-production. Set in a mostly white California town in 1955, it tells the story of a clairvoyant multiracial teenager who grew up there, and whose world finds new dimensions with the arrival of a Black girl from the South. The play was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2007, when Vogel was on the jury. Sept. 13-Oct. 7 at the McCarter Theater Center, Princeton, N.J.; mccarter.org‘Lunar Eclipse’A deftly nuanced, easily knowing depiction of marriage won the playwright Donald Margulies the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his domestic comedy “Dinner With Friends.” Now he returns to that territory with this new play, starring Karen Allen and Reed Birney as a long-wed couple having drinks on their Midwestern farm, watching a lunar eclipse on a summer night. James Warwick directs the world-premiere production. Sept. 15-Oct. 22 at Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, Mass.; shakespeare.org‘Ulysses’Not even Elevator Repair Service, the venerable experimental troupe best known for “Gatz,” a marathon-length enactment of the full text of “The Great Gatsby,” is heedless enough to stage the whole of James Joyce’s run-on, epic masterwork about Leopold Bloom’s daylong odyssey through Dublin. Directed by John Collins, the company’s artistic director, this world-premiere production instead samples chunks from each of the novel’s 18 episodes, letting them erupt in all their verbosity, vulgarity, vivacity and — it is Joyce, after all — opacity. Co-directed by Scott Shepherd, who is also part of the seven-actor ensemble, it has an entirely reasonable projected running time: two hours and 15 minutes. Sept. 21-Oct. 1 at the Fisher Center at Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; fishercenter.bard.edu‘The Pianist’This new play with music retells the story of the musician and composer Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose 1946 memoir of surviving the Holocaust as a Polish Jew in Warsaw was the basis for the Roman Polanski movie “The Pianist.” The director Emily Mann has adapted Szpilman’s book for the stage, with an original score by Iris Hond. Sept. 26-Oct. 22 at New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, New Brunswick, N.J.; georgestreetplayhouse.org‘Lizzie’When a murder case is so notorious that it’s commemorated with a children’s rhyme, enduring curiosity about it is almost guaranteed. Cross that with the trans-Atlantic success of “Six,” and you arrive at this production: a Lizzie Borden rock musical with an all-female cast. Written by Steven Cheslik-deMeyer, Tim Maner and Alan Stevens Hewitt, and directed by Lainie Sakakura, this show promises “to explore the historical record.” Sept. 29-Oct. 22 at TheaterWorks Hartford, Hartford, Conn.; twhartford.org More

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    Review: ‘Next to Normal’ Is Back, With Extra Pathos

    A London revival of the hit musical brings extra warmth to the story of a woman in psychological free fall.A mind in torment is making for some terrific theater at the moment in London, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “Next to Normal” is belatedly having its British debut 14 years after it opened to acclaim on Broadway. The local premiere at the intimate but important Donmar Warehouse runs through Oct. 7, and this engagement looks unlikely to be its last.In between its Broadway run and now, the show has been seen in an immersive production in Barcelona and its composer, Tom Kitt, has written a handful of other Broadway musicals.But as staged afresh in London under the astute eye of the director Michael Longhurst, “Next to Normal,” a portrait of a woman in psychic turmoil, has a renewed sting.Longhurst is soon to depart his post as artistic director of the Donmar (Timothy Sheader takes over the job next year) so is easing his way out on a high. In casting “Next to Normal,” he has plucked a supporting performer, Caissie Levy, from his lauded 2021 Broadway revival of “Caroline, or Change” to inherit from the Tony winner Alice Ripley the demanding lead role of Diana Goodman, a bipolar wife and mother whom we witness in accelerating degrees of distress. The result is transformative: Whereas the show I recall in New York (with a different cast) was commanding but chilly, this version owes its extra pathos to Levy’s innate warmth: You feel for Diana at every step, even as you fear where her wayward emotions may lead her next.Jamie Parker as Dan and Caissie Levy as Diana. Marc BrennerA Broadway alumna of “Hair” and “Frozen,” Levy from the start pulls you into her character’s increasing confusion. We see at the outset the difficulty Diana faces in simply making sandwiches, the bread laid out before her as if as if this routine domestic task were an unusual challenge.From there, the musical darkens to embrace shock therapy, attempted suicide and multiple hallucinations, the specifics of which are best left unrevealed. Some may chafe at the cumulative effect of a through-sung musical that lets neither its characters nor its audience off the hook; we witness Diana’s reluctant surrender to electroconvulsive therapy, followed by memory loss that further amplifies her trauma.Some may flinch at the unyielding nature of the despair that unfolds, but those attuned to its candor may emerge from the show with clarity: It’s no surprise that the final song is entitled “Light.” This musical opts not for fake sentimental uplift, but for the courage that comes from facing down mental illness, acknowledging human frailty and somehow finding a way to carry on.Several references move the world of the show on from a decade ago. Mentions of X, formerly known as Twitter, and climate change suggest the present day, and Chloe Lamford’s sliding, bleakly antiseptic set — representing both home and hospital — exists in colorless contrast to the blood that gets spilled upon it. (The London-based American performer Trevor Dion Nicholas ably doubles as the two doctors struggling to diagnose Diana’s condition.)Trevor Dion Nicholas doubles as two doctors struggling to find a diagnosis for Diana’s condition.Marc BrennerLevy steers the production, her voice softening on the plaintive solo “I Miss the Mountains” before acquiring the necessary steeliness for “You Don’t Know,” Diana’s furious duet with her husband, Dan. In that role, Jamie Parker, a onetime Harry Potter on the London and Broadway stage, communicates the anguish that comes from watching a loved one slip away: The sight of him, late on, curled up in despair in the family kitchen, is among the show’s most rending.As the couple’s musician daughter, Natalie, Eleanor Worthington-Cox brings some serious pipes to the part of a teenager determined not to follow in her mother’s fraught emotional path. Jack Ofrecio is properly sympathetic as her boyfriend, a good-natured stoner who attempts to keep Natalie from her own psychological free fall.And the production boasts a genuine breakout star in the fresh-faced Jack Wolfe, who seizes the role of the antic son, Gabe, and brings a darting sense of danger whenever he appears on the two-tiered stage. (The music director Nick Barstow’s expert band is positioned above the action, obscured now and again by screens that suggest a clouded mind.)In superb voice, Wolfe has an electrifying talent that more than matches Levy’s own, and when he rocks out on the character’s solo number “I’m Alive” — Gabe’s searing anthem of self-assertion — it feels as if there’s no more vital theatrical place to be.Next to NormalThrough Oct. 7 at the Donmar Warehouse, in London; donmarwarehouse.com. More

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    5 Stand-Up Comedy Specials to Stream for the Labor Day Weekend

    Todd Barry, Tracy Morgan, Sasheer Zamata, Chris Fleming and Jason Fried riff on weird characters, middle age, lost histories and more.Todd Barry, ‘Domestic Shorthair’Stream it on YouTubeTodd Barry speaks fluent sarcasm. After decades of refinement, honing his low-key deadpan into something flexible and distinctive, he can turn a sentence inside-out with the mildest shift in intonation, instantly divorcing what he says from what he means. The pivots in his jokes are subtle but crisp. Ever since David Letterman retired from late night, sarcasm has no better champion. Barry starts waving its flag as soon as the applause settles down on his very funny new special. “That is the type of forced fraudulent crowd response that will propel this whole show,” he says, enough of a hint of a smile to soften the blow.Barry is a taut joke teller more than a yarn-spinner. But his punchlines emerge from anecdotes filled with details about curious characters he’s met, tales that have the quirkiness and surprise of what you find in a sensitively observed short story. There’s the Uber drive who apologizes for not talking during the ride, the waiter who warns against the Italian dressing in a whisper and the cabinet salesman who says he loves his job because it allows him to eat with his customers. He filters the slightest interactions with them through his arch responses, mocking but not mean. His real adversaries are not people but hyperbole, nonsense or any pointless excess of emotion. And some of his most unexpected laughs are in his own mixing up of mountains and molehills. “My printer broke recently,” he said, gently shifting gears to a parody of concern. “Sorry to bum you out.”Tracy Morgan, ‘Takin’ It Too Far’Stream it on MaxIt’s been a rough couple of years for Tracy Morgan, the veteran comic, “30 Rock” scene stealer and all-time great talk-show guest. He almost died after being hit by a Walmart truck, then during the pandemic, his marriage fell apart. In his baggy new special, he says his wife “took that social distancing too far.”If you were looking for a bracing and introspective hour on his troubles, you came to the wrong place. Morgan just brings up his problems to crack wise about them. There is little attempt at timeliness (the expiration date on jokes about the slap at the Oscars has passed) or ambitious set pieces with tight jokes snapping into place. This is a comic coasting on charisma, which he can do as well as anyone. His main subject is middle age. He’s out to prove you don’t need to be mature in your 50s. Instead, he doubles down on sex and fart jokes, yanking his shirt up, rubbing his belly, finishing with a dozen or so minutes on what it’s like to sleep with older women. Ultimately, there’s no escaping the fact that aging changes you. Morgan confesses he pushed a lap dance away at a strip club, shouting: ‘You know my sciatica flared up!”Sasheer Zamata, ‘The First Woman’Stream it on YouTubeWhy does everyone know Amelia Earhart but not Jerrie Mock, the first woman to fly solo around the world? According to the comic Sasheer Zamata, whose second stand-up special is full of hidden histories, it boils down to marketing. Mock kept to herself, saying, “The kind of person who enjoys being alone in a plane is not the kind who enjoys being continuously around other people.” Zamata says she doesn’t “like going places or doing things,” so perhaps she can relate. Earhart married her publicist, and Zamata calls her the “original Kim Kardashian.”Her digression, filled with punchlines, is just one example of how this special unpacks lost or taboo stories. The political centerpiece of the set is about how we should talk more about female sexuality, especially for girls. She relates a story about masturbating for the first time with a lint roller, then opens the topic to the audience, resulting in some colorful crowd work. Zamata, a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, turns jokes into carefully crafted vignettes, often hinging on a twist that leads her to widen her eyes for a long pause. She’s a poised performer, effortlessly moving from crowd work to dating tales to political gibes. Her description of being hit by a car becomes a peg for how people (including doctors) ignore Black women when describing pain but pay attention to them on the question of what is cool. Her solution? Black women should champion illness (“Sickle cell is sick as hell!”), and disease will be “gentrified out of our bodies.”Chris Fleming, ‘Hell’Stream it on PeacockWhenever a new Chris Fleming video appears on my feed, I stop and pay attention. In a scroll of sameness, he’s thrillingly unexpected, a shaggy-haired Los Angeles absurdist who often begins with an offhand and narrow idea (sitting in his car, considering the appeal of Adam Driver, say), then riffs on it with a gusto and flamboyance that accumulates its own comic momentum. His is a pointedly niche sensibility but responsible for some of the biggest laughs I have had on social media. His debut, a scattershot affair that mixes a performance at a theater with sketches, has some very funny oddball ideas, like his celebration of the Nissan Cube as the “one true asexual icon in American culture.”His precise dissection of basic families who think they’re really eccentric is a characteristic hobby horse. But these bursts of lunacy don’t build on one another. In the translation to long form, the pacing gets a little slack. Part of the problem might be editing (you must kill your darlings, especially when they involve sketches that go on too long) and an undercooked overall conceit. Fleming can’t seem to entirely decide if his aesthetic is going to be polished or ragged, his material revealing or purely absurd. He’s smart enough to commit to the personal and the weird, but absurdity requires its own rigor.Jared Fried, ‘37 & Single’Stream it on NetflixIn the crowded field of dating jokes, Jared Fried, an amusingly hyperventilating self-deprecator exploring red flags, online profiles and tensions between millennials and Generation Z, distinguishes himself in a couple of ways. In his very strong act-outs, he does an inspired impression of fake laughing that projects real discomfort. It gooses a familiar bit about married people talking to singles about the perils of matrimony into something spiky and layered. Secondarily, not since Leslie Jones has a comic done more with bulging eyes. While dead eyes can kill an act, expressive ones can illuminate it. More

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    Review: In Central Park, ‘The Tempest’ Sings Farewell to Magic

    A joyful, bumpy musical version of Shakespeare’s late romance closes the Delacorte Theater before an 18-month renovation.“The isle is full of noises,” sings Caliban, and on Tuesday night it certainly was. Helicopters, radios, sirens and birdsong were competing to be heard in the Manhattan air.Yet all of them melted away, as they usually do, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where the Public Theater’s new musical version of “The Tempest” was giving its opening-night performance. (It runs only through Sunday.) The seventh in the Public’s series of Public Works productions, it will also be the last for the time being; this fall, the Delacorte begins much-needed renovations that will put it out of commission until 2025.“The Tempest” makes for a fitting farewell, having opened the series, in a different adaptation, in 2013. That “Tempest” introduced the innovative Public Works idea: civic theater made for everyone, with members of local community organizations performing alongside professional actors. This new “Tempest,” adapted by Benjamin Velez (whose songs are tuneful and sweet) and Laurie Woolery (whose staging is bumpy but joyous), continues the tradition but emphasizes a new note: the pang of goodbyes.The goodbyes are generally the same ones Shakespeare plotted around 1610. Prospero, a sorcerer living for 12 years in exile on an enchanted island, must forswear the magic that has helped him survive and, with it, his fury over the betrayal that landed him there. He must also release from servitude his chief sprite, Ariel, and his monstrous slave, Caliban. And when his daughter, Miranda, having little experience of men, falls for one who washes up on shore, Prospero, deferring to love, must give her up too.“Am I not the liar/If I deny her?” he sings in the oddly named “Log Man,” a highlight of the nine-song score.Actually, make that “she sings,” because in this production, Prospero, played by Renée Elise Goldsberry in gorgeous voice, is a woman, and not gratuitously so. Her interactions with Miranda are specific to her gender. “Innocence flies like the last gasp of summer/Childhood dies in the arms of a lover/And no one tries to hold on like a mother,” she notes in a later verse of “Log Man,” getting a big laugh on the inevitability of that last word.Renée Elise Goldsberry, as Prospero, knows how to shape a moment for maximum impact, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least for the first half of the 100-minute show, the Shakespeare is effectively translated to musical theater — perhaps not so surprising given that musical theater is in many ways a translation of Shakespearean templates to begin with. (Songs and monologues often do similar structural work.) Here, Velez’s poppy melodies and gentle slant rhymes usually serve a second function, crystallizing the themes in quickly recognizable and memorable gestures, as the harsh economy of musicals requires.So Prospero’s opening number, “Cast a Spell,” sets up her conflict instantly: She must “finally be free of the tempest in me.” When Miranda (Naomi Pierre) meets Ferdinand (Jordan Best), the Disneyesque “Vibin’ on to You” characterizes their instinctual infatuation in its first funky measure. A merry operetta drinking song (“A Fool Can Be King”) gives Joel Perez, as the soused clown Stephano, a rousing production number, and the song that introduces Sebastian (Tristan André) and Antonio (Anthony Chatmon II) might as well have “comic villain specialty” stamped on it.Of course, those villains aren’t so comic in the Shakespeare, where their threats recall the culture of deceit and violence bred by greed and politics. But that’s one of the trade-offs of Public Works. You do get to see charming nonprofessionals like Pierre (from the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, Brooklyn) work side-by-side with Broadway talent like Jo Lampert (who makes an acid-queen Ariel) and Theo Stockman (a piteous Caliban). But you’re not likely to see any of them get the chance to dig terribly deep.The production’s rushed second half shows why, as the late-night subway schedule bears down and the plot gets ruthlessly trimmed to beat it. We don’t miss the cut scenes so much as the connective tissue that might hold up what’s left. Also missed: the rich language that creates emotional context for a story that, with its spirits and spells, can otherwise seem almost inhuman.And though there’s a lovely finale called “A Thousand Blessings” — with members of Oyu Oro, an Afro-Cuban experimental dance ensemble, flooding the stage — the songs now come too close together to represent peaks of feeling. A landscape with only peaks is flat.Woolery, who leads Public Works and directed its terrific “As You Like It” in 2017, too often exacerbates that problem. With as many as 88 people moving about, plus five musicians in a tipped-over house remaindered from this summer’s “Hamlet” (the sets are by Alexis Distler), the stage can sometimes look like a busy airport instead of a nearly deserted island. And the clown scenes, so dependent on imaginative physical comedy, exceptional timing and an understanding of pathos, are not reliably funny.But one of the nice things about watching nonprofessionals in the limelight, especially the children, is that they don’t cover their excitement, which is funny (and moving) in itself. And one of the nice things about watching professionals in the limelight is that they know how to shape a moment for maximum impact.This is something Goldsberry does over and over, no more so than near the end, when Prospero must act on her insight that “the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.” As she breaks her magic staff in two, several feelings — fear, wonder, resolve — seem to scud across her face. Has she done right in making that choice?Has Public Works done right in making a similar one? Producing work that by traditional measures lacks polish, it has prioritized the virtue of engagement with actual people, and lots of them, over the secret magic known only to a few.As a critic, I feel obliged to ponder the trade-off. But as a citizen I have no doubts. Even in its lesser outings, Public Works makes its own kind of magic: a communitarian charm sorely missed these furious days. We need the series back in the park as soon as possible — albeit with better seats, more accessible bathrooms and raccoonless backstage facilities — to keep making beautiful music for our beleaguered isle of noises.The TempestThrough Sept. 3 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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    in Television

    ‘One Piece’ Review: Netflix Tries to Translate the Anime Magic (Again)

    Remember the live-action, English-language “Cowboy Bebop”?With “One Piece,” Netflix repeats history, and there isn’t much evidence that it paid attention to what happened the first time around.“Cowboy Bebop” was a cult-favorite Japanese animated series that fetishized cool American jazz and film noir and Hollywood westerns, and in 2021 Netflix returned the cultural homage by making an American live-action adaptation. It wasn’t a disaster, but it quickly fell from sight.“One Piece” is a remarkably endurable manga and anime franchise — more than 500 million books sold, 1,073 television episodes and counting — that applies a slapstick, Buster Keaton-like visual energy to an adventure story with roots in Hollywood swashbucklers and musicals like “Captain Blood” and “The Crimson Pirate.” So once again Netflix has been moved to produce an American live-action remake, whose eight episodes premiered on Thursday.The original “Cowboy Bebop” and “One Piece” are very different creatures, but they have something important in common: They are propelled by style. Texture, composition, sound and movement engage us and trigger our emotions; the moody revenge plot of “Bebop” and the rousingly affirmative coming-of-age story of “One Piece” are just serviceable scaffoldings.There’s no reason a live-action version of either anime couldn’t find its own distinctive style. But neither of these shows managed it; if anything, they seem to have avoided the attempt. To an even greater extent than the Netflix “Cowboy Bebop,” the Netflix “One Piece” feels bland and generic. It may satisfy fans of the original who are happy to see events more or less faithfully replicated, but most of the verve and personality of the anime are gone, replaced by busyness, elaborate but uninteresting production design and — a sign of the times — an increased piety regarding the story’s themes of knowing and believing in yourself.Set in a fantastical world made up mostly of ocean and patrolled by colorfully named pirate crews, some of them made up of fish-men, “One Piece” centers on a young wannabe pirate named Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy). Pursuing his childhood dream of becoming king of the pirates and finding a perhaps mythical treasure called the One Piece, he gradually gathers a crew of young misfits like himself, with unhappy pasts and missions that define them: to be the world’s greatest swordsman, or to locate a (perhaps mythical) seafood paradise.From left, Emily Rudd, Iñaki Godoy and Mackenyu form part of a crew of misfits driven by personal missions.NetflixIn addition to unnaturally high spirits and an utter refusal to take no for an answer, Luffy is defined by his ability to stretch his limbs across long distances (handy when throwing punches) and to absorb punishment, the results of eating a forbidden fruit that made his body rubberlike. This bit of comic inspiration by the character’s creator, the Japanese artist Eiichiro Oda, makes Luffy physically and psychologically congruent — he is elastic and indestructible in every way.The series does a more than creditable job of recreating Luffy’s rubbery abilities, and Godoy (a Mexican actor who appeared in the Netflix series “Who Killed Sara?” and “The Imperfects”) is a decent match with the animated character in look and temperament.But there’s not much beyond that for him to play, and the same goes for the rest of the cast, which includes capable performers like Mackenyu as the swordsman, Roronoa Zoro, and Taz Skylar as the piratical chef, Sanji. Depth of writing isn’t make or break amid the carnival atmosphere of the anime, delivered in 20-minute dollops of sensation, but the thinness of the characterizations becomes much harder to ignore in the more deliberate, more ordinary Netflix telling, with the story reshaped into hourlong episodes.That reshaping — the eight episodes correspond to roughly the first 45 episodes of the anime — was surely a major effort, and it would be understandable if there wasn’t a lot of time or energy left over for actually reimagining the material for live actors and constructed sets. The show’s developers and showrunners, Matt Owens and Steven Maeda, were able to wrestle the story to a draw. But they don’t capture the corny, goofy spirit of the anime, and without that the generalities about living your dream and making way for a new generation just sit there gathering dust.The fates of “One Piece” and “Cowboy Bebop” are, perhaps, a likely consequence of big-box streaming. Taking a show that has found a fanatical following and remaking it with the widest possible audience in mind means making it for no particular viewer at all. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Pay the Writer’ Is Just One Point in This Relationship Play

    Despite its thunderbolt of a title, the focus of this memory play is on the relationship between a self-involved author and his long-suffering agent.Amid an ongoing strike by Hollywood screenwriters and actors, a play with the nifty title “Pay the Writer” courts applause before anyone has uttered a word. Never mind that its turf is mainly the literary world, not the cinematic one; the author at the center of Tawni O’Dell’s play, Cyrus Holt (Ron Canada), seems to speak for all underpaid writers when he inscribes that feisty injunction in a copy of his book that is being adapted as a movie.Holt’s agent, Bruston Fischer (Bryan Batt), has the thankless job of acting as the go-between for his client and the film producer, who has not paid anything more than a small advance. Despite its thunderbolt of a title, the real focus of this elegiac memory play is on the relationship between Holt and Fischer: one an ailing, thrice-divorced author, the other his confidant, therapist and enabler.Under Karen Carpenter’s brisk direction, the play darts back and forth between present-day New York City and Holt’s Lothario days in the East Village, Paris and Los Angeles some 40 years earlier. When we first meet him, Holt is ensconced in penthouse luxury, anxiously waiting word from his French translator Jean Luc (Steven Hauck) about his new manuscript. He is now “the Black author on every American Lit syllabus kids try to avoid reading,” as he wryly puts it.But before he became a star in the literary firmament, Holt was a struggling author. As a portrait of the artist as a young man, the play is contractually required to mention a Big Bang moment. That moment arrives in a funny, if slightly overwritten scene when the younger versions of Holt (Garrett Turner) and Fischer (Miles G. Jackson), then working as a junior editor, meet outside a publishing house. They trade opinions on the relative merits of Tolstoy and Richard Wright before Holt gives Fischer a copy of his manuscript. A beatific expression washes over Jackson’s line-free face as he reads aloud excerpts, but the tin-eared prose made me yearn for Keats’s “unheard melodies.” Holt’s novel, about a mother who kills her child, owes too much to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” — and suffers by comparison.Although its snide, knowing remarks about the cutthroat publishing world occasionally impart the fizzy pleasure of the television show “Call My Agent!,” the dialogue is blunted by cliché and frequently bogged down with exposition. Multiple characters remind Holt, with implausible regularity, about his National Book Awards, his Pulitzer and best sellers; scenes with his estranged son, Leo (Garrett Turner, giving a sensitively etched performance), are built on the creaky foundations of “Do you remember? Of course you don’t” repeated over and over.Other characters, including Holt’s standoffish, runway-ready daughter, Gigi, (Danielle Summons), his equally glamorous wife, Lana (Marcia Cross), and the subtle-as-a-heart-attack Jean Luc, are given one-dimensional roles as mild antagonists or the collateral damage of a colossal career. These people all paid a price for putting up with a supremely self-involved author, and it’s not clear if it was ultimately worth it for them — or for us.Pay The WriterThrough Sept. 30 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; paythewriterplay.com. Running time: 2 hours.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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    in Television

    H.B.O. Is Tackling Religion in the Most Remarkable Ways

    “Righteous Gemstones” remains a surprisingly complex (and hilarious) take on American faith.It’s hard to find a doctrine that better explains this country’s political and cultural trajectory over the past 50 years than the so-called prosperity gospel, which reversed the old dogma in one key, seductive way: It came to interpret the attainment of worldly wealth and privilege as proof of spiritual exceptionalism, the rewards of a life lived righteously. Jesus says in Matthew 19:24: “And I say again unto you — it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” But across the end of the 20th century, any number of figures built immense and lucrative flocks by coming at that problem from a very different direction: a promise, perhaps, that you might look great crossing into heaven in a camel-hair suit. That this sentiment aligned so well with politically ascendant strains of conservatism may or may not be coincidence, but the net effect was the same. There is the elevation of wealth as a sign of virtue. There is the sense that if only those in need had been more righteous, they, too, might have been blessed. There is, in short, the long, strange trajectory of American temperament that has, on some level, brought us to HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones.”“Gemstones,” the brainchild of the writer-performer Danny McBride, is the story of a megachurch’s descent into corruption and chaos, rendered in the cheerfully unruly tradition of Mark Twain. Audiences may respond to McBride most immediately as a comedian of great physical gifts, but he is also a satirist of increasingly subtle intelligence, and there is a startling, possibly underappreciated depth to this critique of wealth, power and spirituality.That’s not to suggest that the show, which recently ended its third season, is averse to over-the-top parody. In one memorable moment from this summer, we’re presented with a flood of lights, hip-hop dancers and brute-force gospel music as a silver-haired preacher — a onetime child evangelist still known as Baby Billy — steps forward to host the first episode of “Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers,” a liturgical quiz show that, as people keep pointing out, is a carbon copy of “Family Feud.” Moments later, the production is interrupted by a horde of locusts descending on the building. This — the profane, the sacred and the apocalyptic — is the world of “Gemstones,” condensed.This is a portrait of damaged people born into the redemption business, trying to find anything redeemable about themselves.The show bears obvious similarities to its critically fetishized network peer “Succession.” In each, we focus on three entitled siblings, potential heirs to an empire built by their charismatically imperious father, and their desire, real or imagined, to transcend the implications of their birthright. But while the Roys of “Succession” are armored with stylish nihilism, the three Gemstone offspring, lieutenants in the family’s sprawling spiritual operation, are less mannered and far more relatable. Even as they behave badly, even appallingly, you can sense their maladroit grasping for the morality they’ve always understood to be interchangeable with their privilege. Television’s depictions of religion have often leaned either toward po-faced dogma or scouring atheism, but here is one that dares to split the difference. McBride has made a career of playing swaggering Southern blowhards, inhabiting them with such familiarity that they transcend simple mockery and become almost poignantly human; “Gemstones,” too, has a fondness for its characters that runs parallel to the humor it wrings from their failings.And the Gemstone children definitely have failings. The eldest, Jesse, is a pompous hothead whose default response to any insult is light violence and who, despite his persona as a family man, has enjoyed the sort of hard-partying lifestyle that would make early-1970s Led Zeppelin blush. His sister, Judy, is a flamethrowing libertine with a staggeringly foul mouth and a tendency to transgress against her lovingly milquetoast husband. The youngest, Kelvin, is comparatively sweet but locked in a closet of his own making, profoundly in love with his best friend and prayer partner. Like a staging of “King Lear” at a monster-truck rally, the show has a loneliness that undergirds its berserk energy. Much of it is delivered by John Goodman, who brings a touching pathos to the role of the church’s patriarch, Eli Gemstone — a man of humble beginnings whose best intentions toward his kin only seem to multiply their avarice and shamelessness. There is also the conscience of the family, his deceased wife, Aimee-Leigh, seen only in flashback. (And, once, as an ill-advised hologram.) We see her counsel that “money ain’t everything,” but these words float by, unheeded, against the ever-escalating scale and spectacle of the Gemstone Salvation Center or the family’s own theme park. Their Ferris wheels and roller coasters have replaced precisely the kind of down-home, small-town, tiny congregations that represent the family’s own roots, but the Gemstones are masters of a great American skill: They can see themselves as the salt of the earth even while surrounded by Croesus-like wealth.This year, “Succession” concluded its final season on a bracingly cynical note, suggesting that its four seasons of familial infighting were little more than a meaningless sideshow in one cul-de-sac of the corporate world. “Gemstones,” by contrast, has come to hint at a better future. Some of the first season’s action involved Jesse’s oldest son, Gideon, having scandalized the family by lighting out to Hollywood to become a stuntman. By Season 3, he is firmly back in the fold, demonstrably more mature than his own father and serving as Eli’s chauffeur. The affection that develops between the two characters culminates in the season’s finale, in which Gideon asks his grandfather if he might teach him to be a preacher — as if suggesting that the dysfunction of today’s Gemstones might be a generational blip brought on by the distorting effects of wealth and power. At its most serrated, the show has satirized the unrepentant predation that marked the heights of televangelism, as churches were remade into spiritual money-laundering operations. At its most generous, though, it has been remarkably forgiving, letting each sibling fumble toward something like self-awareness. This is a portrait of damaged people born into the redemption business, trying to find anything redeemable about themselves, continually held back by the profit motive. This is not the only fascinating vision of the church on HBO these days. There is also “Somebody Somewhere,” which recently finished its second season. Bridget Everett plays Sam, a truculent self-styled outcast who has returned to her small Kansas hometown following the death of her sister. In a cheerful twist on the usual Hollywood portrayals of “flyover” Christian America, Sam finds companionship in a church-adjacent “choir practice,” where she joins her best friend, Joel, who is both deeply devout and openly gay. In the Season 2 finale, Sam — blessed with an extraordinary singing voice she has become reluctant to use publicly — belts out “Ave Maria” at the wedding of a trans man and a cis woman. This is a rare representation of the way religious fellowship connects and enriches communities of many sorts. Tonally, it approaches the polar opposite of “Gemstones,” but what the two series share is a knack for finding the strangeness and nuance in American religion, a topic Hollywood has more often regarded as a zero-sum contest between the wholesome and the heretical. True salvation, both programs understand, may be someplace in between.Opening illustration: Source photographs by Jake Giles Netter/HBO More