Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in Television

    Jerry Harris of ‘Cheer’ Pleads Guilty to Sex Crimes Involving Minors

    Mr. Harris, of the Netflix show “Cheer,” reached an agreement with prosecutors requiring that he plead guilty to two of seven federal charges.Jerry Harris, who shot to reality-TV fame in the Netflix show “Cheer,” pleaded guilty on Thursday to federal charges related to soliciting child sexual abuse imagery and illegal sexual conduct with a minor, reversing his earlier plea.Over a year ago, Mr. Harris, 22, pleaded not guilty to the seven felony charges brought against him in Chicago. But in a remote hearing on Thursday, he told Judge Manish S. Shah that he reached a plea agreement with prosecutors and was pleading guilty to two of those counts, which involved charges that he persuaded a 17-year-old to send him sexually explicit photos for money and traveled to Florida “for the purpose of engaging in illicit sexual conduct” with a 15-year-old.The plea agreement stipulates that after sentencing on the two counts, prosecutors would ask for the remaining charges to be dropped, Judge Shah said at the hearing.Mr. Harris’s lawyers released a statement saying that Mr. Harris wanted to “take responsibility for his actions and publicly convey his remorse for the harm he has caused the victims.”Mr. Harris, whose enthusiastic encouragement of his teammates made him into a viral star after the debut of “Cheer,” had himself been sexually abused as a child in the world of competitive cheerleading, the statement said.“There being no safe harbor to discuss his exploitation, Jerry instead masked his trauma and put on the bright face and infectious smile that the world came to know,” the statement said. “As we now know, Jerry became an offender himself as an older teenager.”Kelly Guzman, a prosecutor in the case, said at the hearing that one of the counts to which Mr. Harris entered a guilty plea was for receiving and attempting to receive child pornography. In the summer of 2020, she said, Mr. Harris repeatedly requested that a 17-year-old send him sexually explicit photos and videos, in exchange for a total of about $3,000.The other count involved Mr. Harris traveling from Texas to Florida with the intent of engaging in illegal sexual conduct with a 15-year-old, Ms. Guzman said. Mr. Harris directed the teenager to meet him in a public bathroom in Orlando, Fla., where he sexually assaulted him, the prosecutor said.Mr. Harris said he understood the nature of the charges and possible prison time before entering his guilty plea.Mr. Harris was arrested and charged with production of child pornography in September 2020, months after the release of “Cheer,” which follows a national champion cheerleading team from a small-town Texas community college.Around the same time, he was sued by teenage twin brothers who said he sent sexually explicit messages to them, requested nude photos and solicited sex from them. (Mr. Harris befriended the boys when they were 13 and he was 19, USA Today reported.)In a voluntary interview with the authorities in 2020, Mr. Harris acknowledged that he had exchanged sexually explicit photos on Snapchat with at least 10 to 15 people he knew were minors and had sex with a 15-year-old at a cheerleading competition in 2019, according to a criminal complaint.After federal agents interviewed other minors who said they had had relationships with Mr. Harris, they filed additional felony charges against him. The charges that Mr. Harris did not plead guilty to on Thursday include four counts of sexual exploitation of children and one count of enticement. The seven charges involve five minor boys.Mr. Harris has been held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago since his arrest.One episode of the second season of “Cheer,” which was released last month, centers on the case against Mr. Harris and includes interviews with the teenage plaintiffs, Mr. Harris’s former cheerleading teammates and the team’s coach, Monica Aldama, about the charges.Mr. Harris will be sentenced on June 28. The plea agreement noted that sentencing guidelines “may recommend 50 years in prison” for the offenses, Judge Shah said, adding that he may decide differently.The statement from Mr. Harris’s lawyers said he has been participating in therapy in prison and “will spend the rest of his life making amends for what he has done.”Robert Chiarito More

  • 150 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    The Creators of ‘On Sugarland’ Build a Site of Mourning and Repair

    Ritual and healing are at the center of Whitney White and Aleshea Harris’s new play about a Black community that loses its members to a perpetual war.In the mobile home-lined cul-de-sac at the center of the new play “On Sugarland,” grief is pervasive. A memorial of dog tags, boots and other personal items of fallen soldiers sits center stage, a reminder of a community’s losses. Daily rituals, from services with singing, dancing and shouting to a boy shaving his father’s chin, move mourning from expressions of sorrow to utterances and activities that keep the dead in communion with the residents.“We got a frequency other folk can’t pick up on,” one character says.“On Sugarland,” about a community that is constantly losing its members to a perpetual war, gives new meaning to what Ralph Ellison called the lower frequencies. A register, in this case, that situates life and death on a continuum. The play itself is the latest collaboration between the playwright Aleshea Harris and the playwright and director Whitney White, who previously worked together on the acclaimed “What to Send Up When It Goes Down.” That work, combining an interactive ritual performance with an absurdist parody, bore witness to the many deaths of Black people to police and vigilante violence. Bearing witness is a responsibility that expands justice, James Baldwin wrote.“On Sugarland,” in previews at New York Theater Workshop, follows a preadolescent Sadie as she comes to terms with her mother’s death in combat. The weight of the loss, however, does not prevent her from tapping into her superpower — invisibility. Sadie uses it to her advantage. She can make the dead walk. She can also make the dead talk. And she can act as a conduit to help ease the sting of death. The naming of gods, references to super powers and the repetition of language heighten the play’s sense of reality.Kiki Layne, left, as Sadie and Adeola Role as Odella in “On Sugarland” at the New York Theater Workshop. The play draws elements from Greek tragedy, Southern gothic, Afro-surrealism and hip-hop.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHarris, 40, who is also a spoken word poet, uses her text to reshape words. Her characters whisper, shout, elongate a vowel or express rhythmic cadence, allowing language to escape the familiar. “I’m not really a singer, but I can hold a tune,” Harris said. “I think a lot about the sonic experience of the things that I’m writing. I feel like they need to hit the right note in order to resonate the way that I want them to.”She showcased her ability to mix genres — spaghetti western, tragedy and hip-hop — in “Is God Is,” a tale of twins enacting a revenge fantasy. Just as multifaceted, “On Sugarland” features a Greek chorus called the Rowdy and draws elements from Southern gothic, Afro-surrealism and hip-hop, producing sounds that prepare the audience for the otherworldly occurrences that eventually unfold.White, 36, also an actor and musician who grew up in Chicago, often incorporates aural traditions into her work as well. Music was always there. Reflecting on her time at Catholic school, she said: “We had liturgical music, which is where you sit and learn the songs, old school, and you look at the hymnals, and you learn to read music and sing. Religious music was how I started loving the arts and loving music. Then I got involved with theater.”Of Harris’s work, White said: “It has a rhythm and a feeling. It feels like you’re hearing notes, and tones and movements.”Echoing Ntozake Shange’s choreopoetic drama “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf,” which is set to return to Broadway in April, and the works of other Black arts movement playwrights, including Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins and Sonia Sanchez, “On Sugarland” mines the wealth of characteristic Black expression without reproducing stereotypes. It presents a vengeful young girl, her aunt who is suffering from addiction and a sensuous elderly neighbor who finds frumpiness offensive.In a recent interview, Harris and White talked about their new work and how their collaborations have helped them evolve as artists. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“Black work can be as experimental and aesthetically excellent as anything else, and we shouldn’t settle,” said White, right, about the lessons she’s learned from working with Harris. Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesHow does the play create new ways to see Black women?WHITNEY WHITE None of them are stereotypes. None of them are tropes I’ve seen before. While they do dip into things that are familiar to me, they’re not flat, they’re quite complex, they’re just delicious. If you look at all of the roles [in Harris’s work], from “Is God Is” to “What to Send Up” to “On Sugarland,” these three plays create work that people can sink their teeth into for their whole lifetime and what a gift is that.ALESHEA HARRIS It was with great delight that I presented the elder women. I was very excited to create a role for two elder Black women who had a lot of meat inside of their stories and got to be very engaged and activated inside of the tale. I hope it feels like a boon to other Black women who are bearing witness to the work.What types of cultural and theatrical rituals does your work draw from?HARRIS I remember when I started writing “What to Send Up When It Goes Down” that my grad school mentor, Douglas Kearney, reminded me that a ritual is meant to bring something into being, and that just felt like a provocation. For the residents of the cul-de-sac in “On Sugarland,” I was really interested in exploring what their ritual of grieving could be. That wasn’t quite a funeral; that was another spiritual expression of care.WHITE There’s a great range of emotion, and ritual is complex. You’ll go to a family service, one person’s laughing, one person’s crying, one person’s being inappropriate. It is like this multifaceted emotive color wheel of Black life that I feel like it is my job to make sure it’s onstage. Because so often the way Black ritual is depicted onstage and onscreen is this very grim, one-noted thing. Actually, like the life cycle, communities and individuals within those communities possess so much. I want to make sure that my people are as alive, and specific, and colorful, and human as possible.What inspired the chorus, or as they are named, the Rowdy?HARRIS The chorus is embodying the innocence of the community and the Black community at large, an innocence that’s criminalized. There’s this language from Evelyn [a character in the play] about the chicks being snatched up from beneath their mothers, and they’re conscripted, they’re being sent off to fight in the war, so their numbers are dwindling.My psychic proposition is to remind us that we are complex, that there’s nothing inherently bad. That there’s great joy in what we do. Just in Black expression, Black mundane expression around the block is gorgeous. It isn’t always held up as such. The proposition is to see ourselves with great complexity and love.WHITE Aleshea sent me a video early on in the process, and she said, “This is the video that inspired the Rowdy.” It’s this beautiful group of young Black people with this speaker, just radically taking up space in a celebratory way that moves through their bodies.When I watch that video, it reminds me of being young in Chicago, growing up, spending time on the South Side with all these other young Black people my age. We would just take over the community, and that wasn’t a negative thing — it was a beautiful thing. It’s so sad that our communities so often are criminalized and viewed in these negative ways. What does it mean to see a group of young people in the prime of their lives die off one by one? What does that say about what these characters are experiencing in the world?How have you, as artists, changed through your collaboration?WHITE Aleshea is making work that is giving voice to the deepest parts of the Black experience. I feel that the way she has changed my work is that I realize I don’t have to settle on stereotypes. I don’t have to settle with naturalism. I don’t have to do things the safe way.The work can be as aesthetically challenging as it is culturally significant. I don’t have to settle until I have work that is as strong and rigorous as possible. Working with her has changed my understandings of what I know to be possible and what I’ve always believed was possible. Black work can be as experimental and aesthetically excellent as anything else, and we shouldn’t settle for anything less.HARRIS Working with Whitney has emboldened me and reminded me that what I want to do is possible. The weird things that I’m doing with language on the page can ring, can scream in a body. Let’s be disruptive of respectability politics. Whitney also understands my desire to present Black women with great muscularity onstage. We understand the rules. We understand how we should conduct ourselves. We were taught how to present ourselves in the world so that we could stay safe. I think she agrees with me that those things aren’t keeping us safe. So, we might as well be fearless. More

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    New Playwrights’ Voices, in the Land Where Directors Rule

    Bold takes on classic works defined theater in Germany for decades. But many playhouses are turning to new works by international dramatists.BERLIN — Germany has a rich tradition of dramatists, from Goethe to Brecht, but ask people here to name a contemporary German playwright and you’ll probably draw a blank. Over the past few decades, the creative space once occupied by playwrights in Germany has largely been filled by directors, whose takes on the dramatic repertory — and notably the classics — are often so refreshingly different that their productions can be considered new works in their own right.This season, however, some of the country’s leading playhouses are putting a renewed emphasis on cultivating new literary voices, stories and approaches to drama. And because this is happening in globalized 21st-century Europe — or perhaps because of a paucity of A-list homegrown playwrights — a surprising amount of new work on German stages comes from the pens of international dramatists.One of the most prominent places where that’s happening is the Berlin Volksbühne, a rare German theater run by a playwright. After debuting three of his own works earlier this season, the Volksbühne’s new leader, René Pollesch, ushered in 2022 with the world premiere of Kata Weber’s “MiniMe.” Like many of this Hungarian writer’s works (she’s best known for the play and film “Pieces of a Woman”), the production was directed by Kornel Mundruczo, her artistic and romantic partner. Sadly, the couple, who also recently worked on the premiere of an opera at the nearby Staatsoper, failed to hit the mark with their latest collaboration — which, for better or worse, has nothing to do with the diminutive character played by Verne Troyer in the “Austin Powers” movies.With “MiniMe,” Weber and Mundruczo have fashioned a nasty 90-minute domestic horror sitcom about a preteen girl (the exceptional 10-year-old newcomer Maia Rae Domagala, whose performance is one of the evening’s few saving graces) and her mother, an ex-model who is grooming her as a JonBenét Ramsey-type child beauty queen. But Weber never entirely makes us buy the disturbing premise of a mother so intent on fashioning her daughter in her own image that — spoiler alert — she gives the child Botox injections.“Doughnuts,” by Toshiki Okada, at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. Fabian HammerlMini’s ineffectual father is a dead weight at the center of the play, which expends far too much time on the parents’ boring marital issues rather than exploring the perverse mother-daughter relationship.Things aren’t much enlivened by Mundruczo’s elegant production, featuring fluid video work and a live soundtrack as well as an underutilized onstage pool with a flamingo float. The handsome set of a slick yet sterile suburban house lends the production a degree of naturalistic detail uncommon on German stages, which generally favor abstract or stylized approaches; it underscores the materialism and superficiality that destroy the play’s characters.Realism is the last thing you would associate with Toshiki Okada, the prolific Japanese theater artist, whose newest work, “Doughnuts,” recently premiered at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. (“Doughnuts” will also play in Berlin in May, as part of Theatertreffen, an annual celebration of the best theater from around the German-speaking world.) Over 75 minutes, six actors inhabit a stranger and more claustrophobic world than that of “MiniMe,” and yet, paradoxically, it seems somehow truer and more in touch with now.The play’s absurd premise, in which a group of notables are trapped in the lobby of a fashionable hotel — perhaps they are academics, perhaps businesspeople — brings to mind the work of Beckett and Buñuel. As they converse with one another and a comically ineffectual receptionist, the actors perform precise movements that update traditional Japanese Noh theater techniques and seem to illustrate, interpret or even contradict their dialogue. The actors are pitch perfect as they accompany their precisely declaimed monologues, on subjects ranging from the hotel’s amenities to a bear terrorizing a nearby supermarket, with cryptic and often hilarious gestures.“Our Time,” by the Australian writer-director Simon Stone, at the Residenztheater in Munich.Birgit HupfeldIn Germany, Okada is one of several prominent playwrights who frequently stage their own works in aesthetically distinctive productions, allowing them to exert a rare measure of control. Another is the Australian writer-director Simon Stone.Stone’s latest play, “Our Time,” at the Residenztheater in Munich, is a sprawling five-and-a-half-hour contemporary saga loosely inspired by the works of Odon von Horvath. That Austrian writer vividly chronicled life in Europe shortly before World War II, but Stone’s drama plays out in our own troubled age.Over three acts, we follow 15 characters over the course of six years, from 2015, when Germany began welcoming over a million refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, up to the coronavirus pandemic. This makes for absorbing theater, despite a few soap-operatic touches, wild coincidences and some speechifying toward the end. Performed entirely in and around a hyper-realistic mock-up of a gas station convenience store, “Our Time” works best when the dialogue settles into a natural, unforced register. The impressive cast is drawn from the Residenztheater’s vast ensemble, which has been getting quite a workout in a series of marathon productions this season.“Our Time” currently shares the program at the Residenztheater with work by Shakespeare and Molière. A different Munich theater, however, has shown a more extensive commitment to new dramatists: The Münchner Kammerspiele, like the Volksbühne, is betting on new plays to form the backbone of its repertory under a new artistic director, Barbara Mundel.From left, Vincent Redetzki, Stefan Merki and Gro Swantje Kohlhof in “Jeeps,” written and directed by Nora Abdel-Maksoud, at the Kammerspiele in Munich.Armin SmailovicThe pandemic has complicated these efforts. Luring audiences into theaters has been difficult everywhere, but it’s a particular challenge when the playwrights are unfamiliar. Many recent Kammerspiele shows I’ve caught were poorly attended. So I was glad to see that Munich theater lovers turned up in droves for a recent performance of “Jeeps,” a new comedy from the young German writer and director Nora Abdel-Maksoud, which has one of the best premises of any play I’ve seen in a long while: In the not-too-distant future, inheritance has been abolished. Instead, estates are distributed by a lottery administered by the Job Center, a dreary office where both the unemployed and the recently disinherited gather in hopes of scoring a winning ticket.“Jeeps” is a smart, loopy and fast-paced farce, but the actual satire seems slight and, judging from the all the belly laughs, mostly harmless. Who or what exactly is being skewered here, I wondered. The audience was having too good a time to be provoked, let alone discomfited. Still, there is no doubt about the talents and charisma of the four actors who embellish Abdel-Maksoud’s firecracker dialogue and simple, unadorned staging — a far cry from Stone’s and Okada’s more stylish productions — with verbal and physical high jinks. The Kammerspiele clearly has a hit on its hands. That’s an encouraging sign for the direction that Mundel is charting for her house as an incubator of new dramatic voices.MiniMe. Directed by Kornel Mundruczo. Through March 28 at the Volksbühne.Doughnuts. Directed by Toshiki Okada. Through March 28 at the Thalia Theater.Unsere Zeit. Directed by Simon Stone. Through March 13 at the Residenztheater.Jeeps. Directed by Nora Abdel-Maksoud. Through March 29 at the Münchner Kammerspiele. More

  • 113 Shares179 Views

    in Theater

    Barrow Group Announces New $4 Million Performing Arts Center

    The 35-year-old Off Broadway company and training center will open a new space, which will include a 60-seat theater and five studios, in April.At the outset of the pandemic, prospects looked bleak for the Barrow Group, the 35-year-old Off Broadway theater company known for its actor training programs. It pivoted its existing classes online, and then, in July 2020, vacated the space on West 36th Street that it had leased for 18 years.But now — as a result of Paycheck Protection Program funding, a Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, and a robust appetite for online training and artist development programs that generated over $1.9 million in earned revenue since the beginning of the pandemic — it’s preparing to open a $4 million performing arts center at 520 Eighth Avenue, just around the corner from its old space, in April.“Our brokers were able to negotiate a way-below market deal,” Robert Yu Serrell, the company’s executive director, said of the new space; the company entered into a 15-year lease in November, with two five-year options to renew. “It’s actually less than what we were paying at our former space, and we’ve got more space and more security,” he said, referring to the building’s security system.The Barrow Group, which has grown from offering 70 classes a year in 2010 to 661 online and in-person workshops since April 2020, was searching for a bigger space even before the pandemic, said Lee Brock, who founded the theater in 1986 with her co-artistic director and now husband, Seth Barrish.The new 13,155-square-foot-space — just over 3,000 square feet larger than the previous building — will feature a 60-seat theater, five sound-attenuated studios, offices and a community gathering space. Phased renovations are expected to begin this month.The company, which counts Anne Hathaway, Tony Hale and Noah Schnapp (“Stranger Things”) among the actors who have completed its training programs, has an annual budget of approximately $1.6 million. It has served more than 5,200 actors, writers and directors since the start of the pandemic, Serrell said.In the near future, its focus will remain on developmental programming and training, Barrish said, with a plan to eventually produce shows commercially as well. Some of the theater’s recent productions have included “Awake” by K. Lorrel Manning, a series of nine short plays that tackled topics like homophobia, police violence and immigration; and a revival of Martin Moran’s “The Tricky Part,” a memoir of sexual abuse that the New York Times critic Ben Brantley called “beautiful and harrowing.”“That will be Phase Two,” Barrish said. “When we get work that we feel wants to be shared commercially, we’ll do so. As to when we’ll have that project and when we’ll rent a theater, I’m not sure yet.” (The 60-seat theater, he said, is meant as a space for developmental work, not commercial productions.)The Barrow Group has raised about $2.5 million for the two-phase, $4 million renovation project, the first phase of which will cost about $800,000, Serrell said. More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Theater

    ‘It Was a Crusade’: Karen Brooks Hopkins Revisits Her BAM Tenure

    In a new memoir, the former president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music reflects on some of the organization’s most memorable stagings and artists.“Fund-raising is like a military operation,” Karen Brooks Hopkins writes in her new memoir, “BAM … and Then It Hit Me,” an account of the 36 years she spent at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “The odds are always against you. It’s going to be 90 percent rejection with many ‘casualties’ along the way, and you must constantly shift your strategy to find new ways forward.”Hopkins, 70, who joined the organization as a 29-year-old development officer in 1979, became its president in 1999, and discovered early on she had “the fund-raising gene.” During a long tenure (she retired in 2015), her tenacity and ability to raise money for ambitious experimental projects was a vital element in establishing the academy as a cultural force and a hub for must-see work by artists like Peter Brook, Laurie Anderson, Ivo van Hove and Pina Bausch.Her memoir, which will be published by powerHouse Books on March 1, combines personal history, fund-raising strategies and an informal account of some of the academy’s most memorable stagings and artists. It will have its official book launch on Feb. 17 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Hopkins will discuss her career with Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director.Hopkins, second from right, with, from left, Bruce Ratner, Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson around 1984. BAM Hamm ArchivesHopkins recounts her early years spent working with the visionary arts programmer Harvey Lichtenstein and — after he retired — her extensive tenure as president alongside Joseph V. Melillo, the academy’s executive producer.“Karen was the person standing right behind Harvey, who took up a lot of space, quietly doing a lot of very crucial things,” Anderson said in a phone interview. “Not just with presenting work, but in the initiatives with the neighborhood and the audience.”Together, Melillo and Hopkins extended Lichtenstein’s uncompromising legacy.“We had a shared vision for BAM,” Melillo wrote in an email. “I had the confidence as I curated the artists and their works for the three stages that she would identify the financial resources.”During their tenure (Melillo retired from the position in 2018), the academy’s artistic budget grew from $21 million to $52 million; Hopkins established an endowment that now stands at $100 million; and the BAM campus expanded to include a new theater, the Richard B. Fisher Building, and a new building project, BAM Strong, to link three of its spaces.Hopkins, who has an MFA in directing, said her theater background meant that she had always remained profoundly connected to the work onstage and to the priority of an artistic vision.“I have been so lucky to have these great artistic partners, Harvey and Joe,” she said in a recent video interview. “We were all in it together. For us, BAM wasn’t a job, it was a crusade.”Over a two-hour anecdote-filled conversation, Hopkins — now a senior adviser to the Onassis Foundation — picked out some highlights of her time at the academy. “I love talking about BAM,” she said.‘The Mahabharata’Lichtenstein “would do anything,” Hopkins said, for the British born, France-based director Peter Brook. So when Brook, in 1986, suggested a nine-hour adaptation of an ancient Hindu epic, which he had developed with Jean-Claude Carrière, the answer, naturally, was an immediate yes. “The Mahabharata” was produced by the academy the following year.Peter Brook’s nine-hour production of “The Mahabharata” in 1987.Gilles Abegg“We created a new theater just for that show,” she recounted, describing the renovation of the dilapidated Majestic Theater into what is now called the BAM Harvey, a block away from the main theater, which Brook felt was too formal a space for the work.“It was like moving a small country to New York and having them live here for a month,” Hopkins said. “And we had no money to do it.” But after she heard Brook describe the genesis of the work she decided “this was the greatest fund-raising story of all time.” She took the director and a group of donors to see the play in Paris, where it had been staged at Brook’s home theater, the Bouffes du Nord, raising the money in a relatively short time.“In the world of Brook, there is no real separation between spectator and performer, between the past and the present; they exist side by side in the theater and in life,” Hopkins said. “What you saw was the most profound combination of theatricality and the human condition finding an expression that was mind-blowing.”‘United States Parts I-IV’The pioneering, avant-garde work of the composer Laurie Anderson came to the academy soon after Lichtenstein started the Next Wave Series (which became the Next Wave Festival in 1983). “In 1982, we did ‘United States,’ Hopkins recounted. “It was risky to put an artist who wasn’t that well-known in a 2,000-seat opera house, but the work was a masterpiece. She held the stage for hours as a musician, a storyteller and a visual artist, and the entire show, a remarkable comment on America, was her conception. You felt you were watching an artist really come into her own.”A poster advertising what Hopkins called Laurie Anderson’s “masterpiece.”BAM Hamm ArchivesAnderson’s work was everything Lichtenstein wanted: “genre-bending, breaking forms, offering new ways of bringing shows to the stage,” Hopkins said.‘The Island’Many South African plays were presented at the academy over the years, but one that resonated most forcefully for Hopkins was “The Island,” in 2003, starring John Kani and Winston Ntshona, who wrote the play with Athol Fugard.“‘The Island’ was a piece that was like an arrow to your heart,” Hopkins said, “like the most intense short story you ever read.” She added: “It was simple, dark and profound. You were on the island with them, and in an hour you understood what they had been through for so long. Of course, it was really about Mandela, and you understood that when people are confined in an utterly inhospitable place, yet find each other and are committed to the same cause, there is a beauty and purity to the friendship that is a life bond.”Winston Ntshona, left, and John Kani in “The Island” in 2003.Richard TermineKani and Ntshona were “a partnership, a chemistry made in heaven,” she said.Watching a post-apartheid play by Nicholas Wright, “A Human Being Died That Night,” at BAM in 2015, offered “a remarkable historical trajectory told by theater,” she added. “When you stay in a place for 36 years, you realize it’s not about one season, even 10 seasons. It’s about generations of artists, and about history.”The Work of Pina BauschWhen Lichtenstein, who was a dancer before becoming an arts administrator, saw the work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch, “he absolutely went berserk,” Hopkins said.“Café Müller,” one of the first shows Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble presented at the academy in 1984, was a revelation, Hopkins said. “Each artist had a distinctive personality and role, and you knew them like you knew actors.”The works were often “crazily difficult” to stage, she added. “For ‘Arien,’ we needed tons of water to rain on the stage, and by mistake toxic waste was delivered and had to be removed from our parking lot by guys in hazmat suits.” In “Palermo Palermo,” a wall stretching across the stage had to fall; in “Nelken” thousands of carnations had to be installed over the whole stage.Pina Bausch’s “Palermo Palermo” in 1991.Martha Swope/The New York Public Library“One year we did ‘Bluebeard,’ which had a million dead leaves onstage,” Hopkins added. “It was June, 90 degrees and we had no air conditioning. One critic said it smelled like a compost heap.”The Tanztheater Wuppertal was a huge audience draw for the academy. “Pina was a discovery who became a blockbuster,” Hopkins said.‘Happy Days’ and ‘Endgame’Samuel Beckett’s experimental, difficult and poetic work was a natural fit for the academy, Hopkins said, and Melillo was particularly keen on finding new productions of his work. Two in particular, stand out for her.In “Happy Days,” directed by Deborah Warner, “the great Fiona Shaw found the yin and yang of that role in a way I had never seen,” Hopkins said. “It’s not every actress who can be buried up to her neck, and communicate both the desperation of her circumstances and an optimism despite them. You were laughing and crying at the same time.”Fiona Shaw in Deborah Warner’s 2008 production of Beckett’s “Happy Days.”Brooklyn Academy of Music The other enduring memory, she said, was of John Turturro playing Hamm in a wheelchair, with Max Casella as Clov, in the “unrelenting and unforgiving” play “Endgame.”One night, she recalled, the wheelchair collapsed, sending Turturro flying through the air. “He never broke character, even when the stagehands came on to pick him and the wheelchair off the floor,” Hopkins said. “The audience went nuts that night.”‘Einstein on the Beach’Lichtenstein discovered the work of the American director Robert Wilson, who was making a name for himself in Europe, around the time he took over at the Academy in 1967. “Harvey, in his most avant-garde heart, loved Robert Wilson, and felt he was on a divine mission to make sure that Bob’s large-scale work was seen in the U.S.,” Hopkins said. “There was almost no one in the audience for early pieces like ‘Deafman Glance,’” she said. “Or they would go home, do some laundry, come back; the pieces went on for hours!”In 1984, Lichtenstein told his team that they needed to raise $300,000 to present a Wilson collaboration with the composer Philip Glass, called “Einstein on the Beach.” Hopkins agreed. “I don’t know how, but we’ll do it,” she said.“Einstein” was a success. “After that the legend just grew and grew,” she said; the show returned to the Academy in 1992 and in 2012. “Bob works in a very inside-out way, not traditionally theatrical and very stylized,” Hopkins said. “But it comes from the gut and although the pieces can look cold, they are not. The heat comes from the ice around it; it’s an artistic trip.”She added that she particularly loved his 2014 adaptation of the Soviet writer Daniil Kharms’s “The Old Woman” with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe. “It was devastating, about someone starving to death, and you felt it,” she said. More

  • 138 Shares169 Views

    in Theater

    How Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster and ‘The Music Man’ Withstood Covid

    Nearly 60 cast and crew members have tested positive since rehearsals began. Now, following a 10-day shutdown during previews, opening night is near.As soon as Hugh Jackman learned that the leading lady of “The Music Man,” Sutton Foster — whom he spent a substantial portion of every night breathing on, sweating on and locking lips with onstage — had tested positive for the coronavirus, he knew it was just a matter of time.“I’m pretty sure on every C.D.C. guideline, making out with someone with Covid is not recommended,” Jackman, 53, said in a phone conversation in late January. He is starring opposite Foster as the scam artist Harold Hill in the high-profile revival of Meredith Willson’s 1957 musical, which is scheduled to open Feb. 10 at the Winter Garden Theater.And, sure enough, five days later, came the positive proof on his at-home Covid test. Already down about a third of the show’s 46-person cast, and with both leads out, the producers canceled the next 11 performances. (The cast and crew were still paid during the shutdown, Kate Horton, one of the musical’s producers, said.)Though performances resumed a little over a week later, it was just the latest setback for a starry, star-crossed revival of the feel-good comedy, which won the Tony Award for best new musical in 1958. Originally scheduled to begin previews in September 2020, the show had already pushed back its opening night twice and weathered the departure of its lead producer, Scott Rudin, amid renewed scrutiny of his bullying behavior.The production, which is capitalized for up to $24 million, reunites much of the creative team behind the Tony-winning 2017 revival of “Hello, Dolly!,” including the director, Jerry Zaks. Its cast includes six Tony winners: Jackman; Foster, who plays the librarian Marian Paroo; Shuler Hensley; Jefferson Mays; Jayne Houdyshell; and Marie Mullen.In phone interviews last month, six members of the show’s cast and creative team outlined the measures they took to keep the show going amid a coronavirus outbreak; the vital role of actors known as swings, who have no regular role in a show and cover up to a dozen ensemble parts; and how they kept their spirits up amid a challenging preview period. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.When the “Music Man” revival was announced in March 2019, it looked as if it would be the marquee event of the fall 2020 Broadway season. Amid the industrywide shutdown, opening night was pushed to May 2021, and then again to Feb. 10, 2022. Finally, this past October, the show started rehearsals.The show’s director, Jerry Zaks, left, and its choreographer, Warren Carlyle, overseeing rehearsals.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesJERRY ZAKS (director) We felt we had gotten past Covid, and we were just happy to be there. We dived in and went nonstop.HUGH JACKMAN (Professor Harold Hill) It was so great to be back in the room.KATHY VOYTKO (swing/Marian understudy) It was a thrill to test negative every day.On Dec. 20, amid the Omicron surge, “The Music Man” had its first preview. Four covers — an actor who goes on for another actor who calls out of a show — were onstage.KATE HORTON (producer) I would look at the situation we were facing each day, and I would have conversations with stage management and the creative team and we would decide what to do.SUTTON FOSTER (Marian Paroo) At one point, there were 14 people out of the show. We had swings covering seven roles and trying to hold up that show. And they did. It was remarkable. One of our swings, Emily Hoder, is 10 years old, and she was covering three tracks.ZAKS I couldn’t do the critical work of addressing the material, making changes in the lighting, fixing the sound, because we had so may people out. There was a moment when we asked ourselves if we’d have to push opening night.Then it happened: On Thursday, Dec. 23, the morning of the fourth preview, Foster tested positive.FOSTER We’ve been vigilant, but I have a 4 ½-year-old daughter who goes to preschool. On December 20, the night of our first preview, she hadn’t been feeling good, and my husband took her to the doctor and she tested positive. But every day I was testing negative, negative, negative. Then on Thursday morning, I did a rapid test at home, and it immediately was just this rude red line. And I was like, “OK, here we go.”But the show still went on that night, thanks to Voytko, a swing and an understudy for Marian, who mainlined the role in eight hours.VOYTKO I had an 11 o’clock costume fitting, and, just before noon, our costume designer, Santo [Loquasto], said “Kathy, call Thomas [Recktenwald],” who’s our production stage manager. And I sort of had that sinking feeling. And sure enough, he said, “You’re on.” I voice-texted my husband because my hands were shaking so much that I couldn’t possibly have used my phone. Then I put my phone on silent, and I grabbed my emergency cheat sheet I had made.“I want people to understand that these are unprecedented times in theater,” said Jackman, who plays the scam artist Harold Hill opposite Foster’s Marian Paroo.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesJACKMAN She had her first rehearsal as Marian at 1; we had until 5. We got through every scene once. I think maybe she got to redo something twice.WARREN CARLYLE (choreographer) There are three really tricky sequences that could take an actress down: the finale; “Shipoopi” at the top of Act II because there’s a lot of dance for her there; and the library sequence, which is very prop heavy. There are something like 75 library books and a million different things that have to go in a million different places.VOYTKO A big goal post was getting through “My White Knight” because the lyrics have a patter section, which is a bit of a tongue twister. And I only had two shots at the dance for “Shipoopi” with Hugh and the tap finale before we had to do them in front of an audience.And she did. She got a standing ovation, and Jackman delivered a curtain speech praising understudies and swings that went viral.JACKMAN I want people to understand that these are unprecedented times in theater. I was so moved by what Kathy had gone through. I’ve never seen anything like that.After other breakthrough cases, the production canceled its Saturday evening and Sunday matinee performances on Dec. 25 and 26. On Tuesday, Dec. 28, Jackman tested positive.JACKMAN I was already feeling a bit funky when I was doing the show the night before, even though I was testing negative at the time, so it wasn’t a surprise. I was pretty nauseated, with a scratchy throat and a runny nose. My wife was amazing — we’d been sleeping in the same bed together, obviously, so I think she expected to get it too, which she did. But I’m vaccinated and boosted, so I was fine after a few days.The show eventually canceled its next 11 performances, through Wednesday, Jan. 5.HORTON Every time somebody is out when you’re so early in the life of the show, you need to do a technical rehearsal with the stand-in. But when you get to a certain number of people being out, there isn’t enough time to do that and make sure everyone onstage is safe. We got to a point where there were over 10 people off, so it was a very straightforward decision, actually.But the production never considered postponing its opening or following in the footsteps of “Mrs. Doubtfire,” whose producer, Kevin McCollum, decided in January to pause performances for nine weeks, with plans to resume in March (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” like “The Music Man” co-produced by Barry Diller, announced a hiatus later that month).And there was music: The show is scheduled to open on Feb. 10 at the Winter Garden Theater.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesHORTON We knew mathematically we would get through it. Once a certain number of people are out and you know they’re coming back, it was just a revolving-door situation, like who was going to be back when. And the demand for the show is so huge that we knew we had audiences waiting for us.Previews resumed on Thursday, Jan. 6. Finally, the full company was onstage together for the first time, with no covers or swings.ZAKS It wasn’t until the end of January that I was able to make the changes and cuts that I wanted to make.FOSTER We had an extraordinarily long preview process — over six weeks. In shows I’ve done in the past, the preview period has been about four weeks. So even though we lost 10 days, we’re still in good shape.HORTON Things have stabilized hugely. Advance sales have been fantastic. We’ve gone a couple of weeks now with no positive tests.VOYTKO I did three shows in a row with Hugh — smooching, panting under dance numbers in each other’s faces — but I never tested positive! We were joking that an epidemiologist should do some sort of study.Now, with opening night in less than a week, the cast, crew and creative team are ready to celebrate.JACKMAN It’s amazing to be on a stage with a cast that’s near 50 people and a 25-piece orchestra. It’s a story about faith, belief and community that’s so timely. It’s one of those perfect musicals.VOYTKO Nothing will ever be as stressful as going on in a fourth preview as Marian. My greatest hope is that everyone is healthy on opening night, and I can cheer them on from the audience! More

  • 88 Shares169 Views

    in Television

    Bob Odenkirk’s Long Road to Serious Success

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.When Bob Odenkirk’s agent first called him about playing an oily bus-stop-ad lawyer named Saul Goodman on “Breaking Bad” — at the time a little-watched cable show in production on its second season — Odenkirk hadn’t seen a minute of it, much less heard about it. But he readily accepted the gig.He was in no position to turn down good work — even if it was a minor role, intended to last only a few episodes. “I needed money!” he told me. Odenkirk’s pedigree was in comedy, where he enjoyed a paradoxical status: legendary and obscure. He studied improv under the visionary teacher Del Close and performed for packed crowds at Second City alongside buddies like Chris Farley. He had a hand in writing sketches that helped define the ’90s era of “Saturday Night Live.” He acted on “The Larry Sanders Show” (excellent and underseen), wrote for “Get a Life” (excellent and canceled swiftly) and did both for “The Ben Stiller Show” (excellent and canceled even more swiftly) and for one of the all-time-great American sketch series, “Mr. Show,” a cult hit that he created for HBO in 1995 with his friend David Cross. When it ended after four seasons, Odenkirk tried directing feature films with decidedly mixed results, failed to get a litany of other projects off the ground and turned to mentoring younger talents whose love of sketch comedy matched his own.So when the offer came in 2009, he flew from Los Angeles to Albuquerque, watching “Breaking Bad” — about a mild-mannered New Mexico chemistry teacher named Walter White who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and, in the midlife crisis that ensues, becomes a coldly calculating meth kingpin — for the first time on the plane. “I didn’t even watch a whole episode, but I didn’t need to, I got it,” Odenkirk recalled. He also didn’t bother to memorize the reams of cascading, hucksterish dialogue that the writer Peter Gould had crafted for him, certain that these lines would be cut way down by the time he stepped on set.They weren’t. And, 12 years later, on a Friday night this December, Odenkirk was still in Albuquerque, still playing Saul Goodman. The role had not merely changed his life but, to a significant and not-unwelcome degree, commandeered it.“Breaking Bad” grew into a prestige-TV-defining smash on the order of “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men.” And Saul proved such an enjoyable part of it that, when the series ended, its creator, Vince Gilligan, decided his next TV project would be a prequel, created with Gould and titled “Better Call Saul,” focused on the surprisingly poignant question of how this scumbag lawyer came to be quite so scummy.Odenkirk and Bryan Cranston in Season 5 of “Breaking Bad,” in 2013.Ursula Coyote/AMC“Better Call Saul,” Season 1, 2015.Lewis Jacobs/AMCMy first glimpse of Odenkirk came via a pair of monitors wedged into the open garage of a suburban home, on the northeast side of town. It was a punishingly cold evening, which seemed even colder thanks to a scattering of fake snow arranged outside the house. Crew members huddled in winter coats, and production vehicles sat humming up and down the block. Odenkirk, who’d recently turned 59, was here to shoot a scene from an episode that will air later this year during the show’s sixth and final season. Gilligan himself was on hand to direct, adding to the last-hurrah ambience: “We have to be out of here tonight,” Gilligan told me in the garage, eating a slice of pizza from the catering truck before darting back inside, “so there’s a little time pressure.”It was Odenkirk’s fourth consecutive night shooting in the house, his workday starting around dusk and ending around dawn. But when I said hello to him between setups in a spare bedroom, where he sat reading Mel Brooks’s autobiography, he was feeling voluble and introspective. “This has been the biggest thing in my life,” Odenkirk told me from behind a Covid-protocol face shield, “and it’s emotional to say goodbye to it, and to all these people I’ve been working with for so many years.” He grinned, then added, “I guess people who work on, you know, ‘N.C.I.S.’ would say the same thing. But would they mean it?”If “Better Call Saul” hasn’t been a hit on quite the epochal scale of “Breaking Bad” — few things are — it might wind up being the greater artistic achievement. Odenkirk and the show’s writers are close to pulling off a tricky double transformation: First, they wound Saul back from the two-dimensional opportunity for levity he was on “Breaking Bad” into a tragicomic antihero called Jimmy McGill — the man Saul Goodman used to be, who wrestles with near-pathological unscrupulousness while trying to win the respect of a prideful older brother (Michael McKean) and a devoted girlfriend and fellow lawyer (Rhea Seehorn) whose belief in him he can’t seem to help betray. And then they started to turn Jimmy, piece by piece, back into Saul again.The show’s central question is whether a flawed person can truly change for the better, and the implicit answer, given that we know who Jimmy is on his way to becoming, is grim. The result has been a decade-plus, nonlinear experiment in character development spanning multiple seasons of two different series, the closest precedent to which might be Michael Apted’s “Up” documentaries. Emmy voters nominated Odenkirk for best lead actor in a drama four times, and you can imagine the shock of those who knew him from “Mr. Show”: How did the guy who did that manage to do this?Talking in the spare bedroom, Odenkirk was dry and earnest, underscoring that the lunatic places he has been able to push himself onscreen are exactly that: places he pushes himself. Now, with the role that made him an unlikely star finally ending, it was clear that Odenkirk was ready to push somewhere new. He’d parlayed a frustrating yet fruitful comedy-writing career into a frustrating yet fruitful comedy-acting career, pivoted to a frustrating and unfruitful directing career, then stumbled into a celebrated dramatic-acting career so fruitful that Alexander Payne (“Nebraska”), Greta Gerwig (“Little Women”) and Steven Spielberg (“The Post”) all cast him in movies. Odenkirk, of course, foresaw none of this, nor that he would write a memoir of his life, “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,” to be published next month by Random House — much less that he would star in an action movie called “Nobody,” written by the creator of “John Wick,” which grossed $55 million worldwide last year, about an ex-government assassin who, seeking revenge after a home invasion, leaves a trail of destruction that puts his family in far more danger than the initial intruders ever did.Odenkirk in the film “Nobody,” 2021.Universal Pictures“I’ve done all these different things, and there’s been a great degree of failure,” Odenkirk told me later, adding, “I don’t wanna be a dilettante. I would feel horrible if that’s how I was characterized.” He paused, then assumed a tone of mock grandiosity. “Or!” he said, smiling. “Am I the best dilettante that ever lived?”Inside the house, a cameraman captured a beguiling tableau: There was a glass-topped watch winder, lined with felt and fitted with three fancy-looking timepieces, each traveling in its own hypnotically undulating orbit. A few inches away stood a framed photograph of a dog and, next to this, a squat urn.Framed from overhead, Odenkirk shuffled into the shot and planted himself in front of these things, telegraphing a faint, happy drunkenness, with just a few grunts and an impressive economy of motion. He set down a glass of liquor next to the urn and proceeded to pluck the watches from the winder, stuffing them into his coat pocket. Slowly, the camera tracked forward, making clear that Odenkirk stood on a balcony overlooking a living room — and, a beat later, revealing a jarring sight on the floor below. Lagging behind the camera, Odenkirk casually peered over the balcony’s edge and, spotting the thing in question, reacted with a jolt, his boozy contentedness giving way, abruptly, to a silent-comedy pantomime of terror.“This is the God’s-eye view,” Gilligan called out to Odenkirk, explaining the mechanics of the shot. “We see something a second before you do.” They filmed one take, then another, the sequence short but demanding precisely timed interplay between camera and actor. “It’s really funny,” Gilligan told Odenkirk of his performance. “Let’s do one where you hang out there a touch longer.”“Maybe the camera shouldn’t move till I touch the urn?” Odenkirk suggested.“Yeah,” Gilligan replied, “but let’s perfect this version first, where we see it before you do. That’s how the Coens would do it, and I love those guys.”Much like Coen brothers’ films, “Better Call Saul” is a show about audacious schemers — some of them drug lords, some thieves, some hit men, some cops, one veterinarian and many lawyers — who put elaborate plans in motion that those of us at home are routinely kept in the dark about, left to guess where they’re headed.Saul is, first and foremost, a rhetorical safecracker. Odenkirk realized early on that virtually every time the character speaks, his aim is to entrance people with a slick spell of words until he gets what he wants. “He’s trying different tacks, looking at the person he’s talking to, going down one road, seeing if it’s working,” Odenkirk told me. But one of the dramatic tensions of “Better Call Saul” is that his mouth rarely stops running when it should, even when it gets him into trouble. “It’s almost like he thinks the more complicated his scheme is, the better,” Odenkirk said. “Like Huck Finn: I know how we’ll sneak into the house — first, you pretend to be a widow. … ” Odenkirk laughed. “Like, Hold it, why not just go through the window?”That night’s shoot required something besides verbal acrobatics, though. Gilligan showed me an iPad with a schematic of the set, upon which he’d diagramed Odenkirk’s looping path through the house and the camera angles he devised to capture it. “I think it’s going to be a very shocking and dismaying sequence for the audience and one that does not have the benefit of dialogue,” Gilligan told me. “Bob doesn’t say a single word, and what he’s known for is his mouth,” but “he really made himself indispensable to this show because we realized there’s so much more to him than his mouth.”Like its predecessor, “Better Call Saul” is about a man who descends in fits and starts into his worst possible self, and who finds that descent irresistible in comparison with a straight-and-narrow life spent, as Henry Hill puts it at the end of “Goodfellas,” as “a schnook.” Or, as Saul himself puts it at the end of “Breaking Bad,” as “just another douchebag with a job and three pairs of Dockers,” managing “a Cinnabon in Omaha.” One of the dark jokes on “Better Call Saul” arrives in a series of flash-forwards, when we discover that, after fleeing New Mexico, Saul is indeed living under an assumed identity in Omaha, overseeing a food-court Cinnabon — a drab and joyless existence, shot in black and white.Both shows resemble updated westerns, depicting lawlessness on the onetime frontier of a now-fading empire. And both suggest that the impulse to cheat, cut corners and get over on chumps, if not inflict harm upon them outright, is far from some aberrant pathology in the American identity but rather a constitutive force. One of the more provocative implications of “Better Call Saul” is that Jimmy’s truly unforgivable transgression isn’t that he behaves unethically but that he does so as an uncouth underdog: driving a junky yellow car, wearing garish suits and lacking the decency to launder his self-serving behavior behind a fancy law-school diploma.From behind his face shield, Odenkirk explained that his first impulse as an actor and a writer is to search for layers of buried motivation and stress-test the script for emotional falsity — even when that material consisted of him descending a staircase as quietly as possible, hoisting a makeshift weapon over his head. But he acknowledged that there was “no subtext here.” When he was younger, he said that he could be a “pissy guy” with a “chip on his shoulder,” but after this many years of playing Saul, he’d learned when to trust people like Gilligan and Gould — to simply shut up and do what his collaborators told him.Odenkirk’s abiding conviction is that “the best comedy has anger in it.”Photo illustration by Zachary Scott for The New York TimesFor five hours I watched as he sneaked around the house, engaging in a weird cat-and-mouse game with another character. “This is optional,” Odenkirk told Gilligan after some sneaking, his brain unable to resist subtextual probing, “but I think part of him enjoys this? The romance of danger?”Gilligan nodded, by way of saying no: “I think you need to play it more like, Ah, I gotta get outta here,” he replied, “otherwise it’ll play weird.”Whenever a new shot was being prepared, Odenkirk retreated to the bedroom to read, chitchat with the scene’s only other actor (rather than risk a possible spoiler, I won’t name him) and make phone calls. At one point he sent for me, and I found him on his cellphone with someone on the crew, proposing a plot that, I soon gathered, involved hoodwinking Gilligan.“They say we’ll be done at 2 a.m., but it’s not gonna happen,” Odenkirk said into his phone, sketching out a subterfuge that he thought would help “motivate Vince” to bring things in on schedule. This required leveraging a 45-minute break in some mildly duplicitous way, and I was amused to see that Odenkirk, making his show about an inveterate schemer, wasn’t above a little scheming of his own.When the call went around the set for “lunch” — at 11 p.m., disconcertingly — there was much left to finish. For some people on the crew, this was a chance to nap, but for Odenkirk it was an opportunity to read the script for the series finale, which Peter Gould had written and delivered to him under strict orders to share it with no one. An assistant on the show said, “I’m supposed to take anyone out who tries to read it besides Bob.”“Peter’s coming to the house tomorrow afternoon, and we’re gonna talk about it — you can’t be there for that,” Odenkirk told me. “But why don’t you come over beforehand?”Odenkirk shares a home in Albuquerque with Rhea Seehorn and another actor from the show, Patrick Fabian (who plays the manicured law partner Howard Hamlin). I arrived the next morning and found Odenkirk in the kitchen, wearing jeans and running sneakers, showing no signs of the all-nighter he pulled. The house was built in the 1940s, Odenkirk said, by a contractor who specialized in office buildings, which accounted for its slight resemblance, from the outside, to a dental clinic, down to a ribbon of ornamental glass bricks installed beside the front door.Photographs of his wife, the comedy manager Naomi Odenkirk, and their two children hung on the walls alongside pictures of his roommates’ families. (Seehorn got the master bedroom, downstairs, while Odenkirk and Fabian claimed bedrooms upstairs.) Odenkirk decided to live with fellow cast members a few years ago, to help alleviate the isolation he felt when “Better Call Saul” began. “It’s about loneliness,” he said, when I asked if the roommate arrangement reflected some method-style immersion. Making the first season, Odenkirk lived by himself at a condo owned by Bryan Cranston, the star of “Breaking Bad,” who vacated it when that show ended. Odenkirk likened that experience to living “on an oil rig,” his mind gnawing at its own edges after draining shoots. “It gave me great sympathy for someone like James Gandolfini, who talked about how he couldn’t wait to be done with that character, and I think Bryan said similar things: ‘I can’t wait to leave this guy behind.’ I finally related to that attitude.”This surprised Odenkirk, at first: “I always used to scoff and roll my eyes at actors who say, ‘It’s so hard.’ Really? It can’t be.” And yet, he discovered, “the truth is that you use your emotions, and you use your memories, you use your hurt feelings and losses, and you manipulate them, dig into them, dwell on them. A normal adult doesn’t walk around doing that. Going: ‘What was the worst feeling of abandonment I’ve had in my life? Let me just gaze at that for the next week and a half, because that’s going to fuel me.’”In Odenkirk’s case, this meant dwelling on painful childhood memories, “putting myself back to being a 9-year-old,” he said, “and my dad wakes me up at 2 a.m. to tell me he’s leaving and he’ll send me money to pay the bills, and I’m thinking, I don’t know cursive enough to write the check, so how am I going to pay the bills? ‘Let me just make myself that kid again, because I’ll take that feeling of loss and fear and play it tomorrow!’” He added, “If there was one thing that let me do this, it was some access I have to the emotional, even traumatic spaces inside me that maybe isn’t the most healthy person to be.”Growing up outside Chicago, in the town of Naperville, Odenkirk was one of seven siblings. He readily discusses his father, and his loathing for him, referring to him in his memoir as “a hollow man” with a short temper, who spent his days with drinking buddies when he was around at all and who did an abysmal job of caring for his children. “It’s not that I didn’t love my dad,” Odenkirk told me. “He just wasn’t around, and he was a kind of a blank, shut-down guy, and he did things that were tortuous to me and my older brother, because he was drunk. He was always telling us, ‘The family’s broke, I don’t know what we’re gonna do and where we’re gonna live.’ And we’re little kids! Like: ‘I’m 5! I can’t help you with that!’”Odenkirk’s response was to dissociate, “reading” his father as though he were some literary grotesque out of Dickens. In his memoir, he describes his father’s death — which came when Bob was 22, by which point the two were fully estranged — with remarkable coolness: “Saying goodbye to him was a shrugging affair.” When I asked if the wound had really cauterized so neatly, Odenkirk said: “I’ve often felt like I must be hiding something, or not acknowledging something, or can’t see something. There’s no question I wish I had a father figure in life, especially as a kid, especially a good one. Wouldn’t that have been nice? There are definitely things I’ve had to deal with there, because I had nothing, an emptiness.”Odenkirk says that the “tension and trauma” his father generated is “one reason my brothers and sisters and I are so close.” His younger brother Bill earned a Ph.D. in chemistry before Bob assisted him in achieving his own dream of becoming a comedy writer, on shows like “The Simpsons” and “Mr. Show.” Their older brother, Steve, is a banker in Tucson, Ariz. Other siblings have pursued various careers: water-table tester, retail worker, funeral director and real estate agent. “Bob was born with a really independent streak,” Bill Odenkirk told me, “more so than anyone in our family. He’d probably argue that he’s had to discover who he is, but I feel he was born with a very strong sense of what he didn’t want to do and what he did want to do, which was performing and being out there doing something other than a conventional job.” Which, Bill added, “wasn’t the thinking at our house.”Bob’s role at home was the resident ham, putting on shows in the kitchen for his mom and siblings. By adolescence, the negative influence of his father and the positive influence of “Monty Python,” which began airing on PBS in the 1970s, instilled in him a mocking disrespect toward authority: “With any authority figure, I had so much resentment, and of course that was all unfair and unhelpful — except, maybe, in my comedy.” His abiding conviction, in a paraphrase he attributes to Eric Idle of “Monty Python,” is that “the best comedy has anger in it.”“You have to be a guy who doesn’t fit and says, ‘I’m doing my own thing and you guys don’t get it!’” Odenkirk said.Photo illustration by Zachary Scott for The New York TimesOdenkirk’s belief that truly great jokes carry some irreducible amount of anger — and that this anger’s noblest function is to torpedo pieties and hypocrisies — helps explain his lifelong commitment to sketch comedy. Sketch can be irreverent verging on assaultive, not merely in terms of content, but on the level of form itself. An audience goes into a sketch ready for all manner of rapid-fire experimentation, a wildly porous fourth wall and extreme narrative deconstruction. There are internal laws of physics governing a good sketch, keeping everything on the right side of total nonsense, but these laws tend to be mutable, ephemeral and contradictable to a degree seldom seen in, say, sitcoms or feature films. For a few minutes, everyone agrees to inhabit a world radically untethered by the kinds of rules they teach in screenwriting classes. In any given sketch, as Odenkirk put it, “there’s a disrespect for the form itself.” You can end a sketch by trashing it, he said, “and that’s perfectly fine and wonderful.”For this reason, he said, “most people have a phase of liking sketch comedy, and it ends around 30. And I get it, because it’s just ideas and ideas and ideas, and somewhere around that age, life clicks in and people can’t take 10 more ideas every night. They go: ‘Can you just have the friends show up and do the same thing and behave the same way? I have enough going on in my life.’” That sketch comedy is a young person’s game, he went on, is compounded by its driving ethos that “the world is a bunch of clowns. As a young person, you get such delight out of someone saying that. You’re so happy to hear it, for a couple reasons. One, part of you is an angry young person. And another, which I can see in my own kids, is the intimidation factor of the world. It’s a safety mechanism of saying: ‘I don’t have to feel intimidated by this insurmountable world that I’ll never make my way in. I can just call it all [expletive].’”Odenkirk was describing a perspective that he is proud to have only partly outgrown. Even as he has worked in other forms, his commitment to sketch comedy has been unwavering, whether this has meant shepherding younger acts like Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim or reuniting with David Cross and most of the old “Mr. Show” roster for “W/ Bob and David,” a resuscitated version of the show that they made for Netflix in 2015. (The first episode featured a time machine, capable of traveling in real time only, fashioned from a porta-potty.) “Nothing Bob does creatively is more important to him than sketches,” Cross told me, praising “the ability and patience he has to go, ‘This seems like a really awful idea, but let’s dig through it, and there might be a nugget we can take everything else away from, start from this tiny, dismissible joke and build out from there.’”Odenkirk with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim in “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” in 2008.Adult SwimOn “Mr. Show,” which refracted the silliness and social bite of “Monty Python” through a Gen-X prism, Odenkirk frequently sublimated his anger into deranged satires and loopy parodies. In one celebrated sketch, called “Thrilling Miracles,” he played a sadistic daytime-infomercial cookware pitchman who, it emerges, thinks that saucepans talk to him and scalds a kindly homemaker with boiling milk. In another, he played a tracksuit-wearing mob boss named Don Corelli: a tyrannical paterfamilias who insists to his lackeys that “the highest number is 24” and threatens violence against any who challenge this inane edict. Other sketches achieved an anarchic silliness: In “The Story of Everest,” which Odenkirk co-wrote with Jay Johnston, he plays an aged father who guffaws and bellows and speaks in an old-timey voice as his son, back from a triumphant ascent of the mountain, keeps losing his balance and falling into wall-mounted shelves lined with his mother’s thimble collection — over and over and over.Odenkirk’s path to “Mr. Show” was bumpy. In the late ’80s, Lorne Michaels hired him for the “S.N.L.” writing staff, where Odenkirk wrote one of the show’s most famous sketches — about a self-hating motivational speaker named Matt Foley, played by Chris Farley, who lives “in a van down by the river” — and co-wrote another, about schlubby Chicago-area dudes obsessed with “Da Bears.” But Odenkirk says that the triumphs were few and that he struggled to find his stride. He incorrectly assumed that he and his cohort, that included Robert Smigel and Conan O’Brien, could radically remake “S.N.L.,” when in fact they were there to serve the prerogatives of an institution. “My inability to grasp what was happening around me, and what that show was, speaks to my myopia and the kind of myopia you need to have when you’re young and doing creative work,” Odenkirk said. “You have to be a guy who doesn’t fit and says, ‘I’m doing my own thing and you guys don’t get it!’”Odenkirk in various “Mr. Show” sketches from 1995 to 1998. Clockwise from top left: “Prenatal Pageant,” “24 Is the Highest Number,” “Thrilling Miracles” and “The Story of Everest.”HBOThat attitude was bred into Odenkirk by Del Close, the acting teacher, in Chicago. Close’s earlier students included Gilda Radner and Bill Murray, and his later students included Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert. Close died in 1999, but he remains an enormously important shadow figure looming over contemporary comedy — one who never enjoyed a fraction of the mainstream success of his best-known disciples. In “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,” Odenkirk quotes Close as saying, “I belong in struggling organizations,” which he took to mean that there was more freedom to experiment if you remained a scrappy upstart, pleasantly installed on the culture’s fringes.Odenkirk internalized that lesson. His brother Bill told me: “I think I have a wider love of comedy than Bob. He’s more of a purist and someone who wants his comedy to be more challenging and more to the bizarre side of things.” Until “Breaking Bad” came along, Odenkirk had in fact conducted his career almost entirely on the fringes, leaping from one struggling organization, as it were, to the next. When he writes in his memoir that “I had no intention, ever, of making it big,” you believe him, instead of suspecting false modesty, because while he’s inarguably ambitious, that ambition has always seemed to point somewhere other than mass adoration. It’s important to remember that, while “Breaking Bad” finally did confer fame, the show wasn’t a hit until a few seasons in, when Netflix began streaming it and put it in front of millions more people than had seen the original broadcast, on AMC. In that light, you could argue that Odenkirk never left the fringes for the mainstream; rather, the mainstream finally came to him.Odenkirk stood with Rhea Seehorn at the kitchen island in their house, talking about the finale of “Better Call Saul” — very carefully, because I was there. Odenkirk read Gould’s script the night before, and Seehorn didn’t try to hide her curiosity.“You have 13?” she asked, eyes wide, referring to the episode number. “You like it?”“It’s a lot in there, a lot to think about,” Odenkirk replied. “I think I like it, but I was pretty wiped out when I read it in the middle of the night. I think it’s a challenging way to go, to finish the series. It’s not flashy. It’s substantial, and on some level it’s things I hoped for, for years, in this character’s brain. On the other hand, yeah, I have to read it again. But what I like about it is, it’s not cheap. It’s not easy. It doesn’t feel cartoonish. It’s pretty great, I think. It’s pretty great.”He added: “I would wanna end with this kind of character-development focus. That’s what it’s about, instead of something that just has guns in it. I guess there’s a few guns, but they’re not like in other episodes.” He turned to me, explaining: “I spend a fair amount of time doing crimes this season. Just stupid crimes.”By the end of the fifth season, Saul has embraced full criminality, symbolized by an unsavory pilgrimage through the New Mexico desert, with the wonderful Jonathan Banks, who plays the baldheaded heavy Mike Ehrmantraut, at which point his metamorphosis is nearly complete: from a morally elastic but ultimately well-meaning guy into one who decides his good intentions have been punished so relentlessly that he should probably set them ablaze once and for all.Of Season 6, Seehorn said: “It’s quite funny, and then very dark — brutally dark. They turned the volume up on all of it. Whatever direction someone was already going in, they made it more extreme.”Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn in Season 3 of “Better Call Saul,” in 2017.Michele K. Short/AMCSeehorn and Odenkirk interacted with an easygoing, lived-in affection — one that they’ve been building for years, onscreen and off, but that deepened last summer, when Odenkirk collapsed on set in front of her and Fabian. It was a heart attack, and as he lay there without a pulse, it was their screams that alerted a medic.“I’d known since 2018 that I had this plaque buildup in my heart,” Odenkirk said. “I went to two heart doctors at Cedars-Sinai, and I had dye and an M.R.I. and all that stuff, and the doctors disagreed” on treatment, with one suggesting he start immediately on medication and the other telling him it could wait. He listened to doctor No. 2 and was fine — until this year, when “one of those pieces of plaque broke up,” Odenkirk said. “We were shooting a scene, we’d been shooting all day, and luckily I didn’t go back to my trailer.” Instead, he decamped to a space where he, Seehorn and Fabian liked to retreat during downtime: “I went to play the Cubs game and ride my workout bike, and I just went down.” He added, “Rhea said I started turning bluish-gray right away.”The soundstages “Better Call Saul” calls home are “massive,” Odenkirk said. After a few agonizingly long minutes, the show’s health safety supervisor, Rosa Estrada, and an assistant director, Angie Meyer, arrived, administering CPR and hooking him up to an automated defibrillator. It zapped him once, then once more, producing an irregular pulse that quickly disappeared. “The third time,” Odenkirk said, “it got me that rhythm back.”An ambulance took him to Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, “and around 5 a.m. the next morning they went through right here” — Odenkirk showed me a scar on his wrist — “and blew up the little balloons and knocked out that plaque and left stents in two places.” Later that morning, Odenkirk’s wife and children arrived in Albuquerque, staying with him at the hospital as he recovered for the next week.Odenkirk has no memory of any of this. He cobbled together his account from Seehorn and the others who helped save his life.“That’s its own weirdness,” Seehorn said. “You didn’t have a near-death experience — you’re told you had one.”Seehorn asked Odenkirk how the night shoots had been going, commiserating about the disorientation of keeping nocturnal hours. “I had to do it with Vince,” she said, “when I go out to — ” here, she whispered something Kim does this coming season, that, if I heard correctly, was just enough of a spoiler to omit here. “My character doesn’t usually do things at night,” she told me. “Not outside. She’s like an indoor cat! But this year I had things to do that usually only Bob does.”Seehorn is a deft, sensitive actor, and her performance opposite Odenkirk, along with Michael McKean’s, constitutes the show’s emotional core. Whereas “Breaking Bad” explored an operatic birth-of-a-supervillain premise, “Better Call Saul” works in a more muted — and, to me, more affecting — register. Seehorn’s Kim is a Type A striver with a rebellious streak; she wants to do work more meaningful than representing a regional bank and finds something alluring in Jimmy’s reckless heterodoxy. Meanwhile, McKean’s Chuck McGill, a revered senior partner at the type of high-powered law firm that necessarily represents an array of high-powered malefactors, looks down on his brother with mistrust and scorn and tries to get Kim to do the same. These three characters love one another, and help one another, and yet they continually hurt one another too, in ways that can be as devastating as they can be small.Contrasting the two series, Peter Gould told me that “Better Call Saul” is “about a guy who, in a lot of ways, really wants to be loved and feels rejection tremendously, more than he wants to show. Walter White maybe finds out that what he really wants is power, and he’s very happy to have people fear him, but Jimmy wants love, and even when he’s trying to intimidate people, there’s an undercurrent of wanting approval and acceptance. And it’s something he never quite gets.”Odenkirk pointed out the window toward the Sandia Mountains. If we hustled, he told me, we could fit in a hike before Gould showed up. We drove to a trailhead Odenkirk knows and loves, he traded his sneakers for hiking boots and we began climbing. “We might want to hustle just to warm up,” he said, proceeding to charge up 1,015 feet of elevation on a snowy mountain trail a matter of months after his collapse.As we walked, I mentioned one of my favorite things he did in recent years. It’s a sketch on Tim Robinson’s excellent Netflix series, “I Think You Should Leave,” in which Odenkirk plays a sad-sack guy enjoying a lonely meal at a diner, who desperately pressures a stranger and his child, one table over, to help him pretend that his life isn’t as bleak as it is — to corroborate the fantasy that he has friends, owns “every kind of classic car,” including “doubles” and “triples” of some, that he doesn’t live in a hotel and that he married an ex-model whose face he first saw hanging on a poster in his garage.It’s a fantastic sketch that, despite its preposterousness, undoes any neat distinction invoked in the title of Odenkirk’s memoir between “comedy” and “drama.” To tweak Odenkirk’s paraphrase of Idle, it’s comedy with despair in it. With snow crunching underfoot and conifers looming above us, I asked Odenkirk if he thought he could have mustered a performance like that before “Better Call Saul.”Odenkirk in “I Think You Should Leave.” Netflix“I think I’ve gotten more capable of striking a tone of melancholy and making it honest in a comedy piece,” he said. He thought back to his days acting opposite Farley, at Second City. “I actually remember being onstage with Chris and Jill Talley once, doing an improv scene, and thinking to myself, If I was in the audience, I’d be watching them, not me. And I kept thinking, as we were doing the scene, If I was in a drama, I could be the funniest guy, and the way you’re watching Chris Farley in this scene, you’d be watching me. And there was a part of me that thought I could do it, maybe one day. But then I didn’t try. It was just a stray, existential thought that I noted and never acted on, because I love sketch comedy. I thought, It’s fine if you like Chris more than me. It’s fine if you like David Cross more than me. I like those guys more than me!”The best-loved sketches from “Mr. Show” contain only hints as to the depth of Odenkirk’s dramatic talent. But he reminded me of one, “Prenatal Pageants,” in which he plays the beaten-down father of an unborn child whom he and his wife enter into a beauty contest for fetuses. This role could be a total throwaway, but for some reason Odenkirk decided to play it with depth, supplying a sketch aimed at our image-obsessed society with a palpable sadness: This is a simple, slow-witted man, who takes a string of demeaning jobs in order to enter his unborn child into beauty contests. “I remember doing that and saying, ‘I’m immersing myself in this character at a level I don’t normally do, and it feels very true,’” Odenkirk said. Cross told me: “One of the things that made ‘Mr. Show’ stand out is there’s pathos to a lot of those characters. I’ve been saying this for years, but there’s a humanity to some of those characters that you don’t really see that often in sketches.”Odenkirk had been thinking about that particular performance recently, he said, in the context of an upcoming project: a faux-documentary series about cults, co-starring Cross, in which the two will play gurus. “We’re trying to go to another level with it,” Odenkirk said, adding that, after the “Mr. Show” reboot for Netflix, they decided that “we needed to move into a new area, but one that connected to our comedy.” Cross described the show as having “elements of seriousness and drama to it, not like a ‘Law & Order’ episode, but these guys are gonna be real human beings.” Playing them would require a kind of “emoting that we might have once been a little gun-shy about,” Cross added, “but not anymore.”Odenkirk said his ambition was to “do our comedy, but maybe take all that we’ve done in the intervening years and put it to some use, of digging into character and playing it with some sensitivity, having some levels but also be funny.”If you tried to unite the various strands of Odenkirk’s career, you could do worse than to say that they are by and large about “damaged men,” as Cross put it to me, living in (deranged by?) an America in decline: buffoonish authority figures he lampoons with wit and venom, underdogs he invests with a complicated, warts-and-all tenderness. Perhaps it’s because Odenkirk came of age in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, but this was true of Matt Foley on “S.N.L.,” true of any number of “Mr. Show” characters, true of Saul Goodman, true of Jimmy McGill and true of the bruiser he plays in “Nobody” — a guy whom Odenkirk regards, much like Jimmy, as a cautionary tale. (The movie was inspired by two real-life break-ins that Odenkirk declines to discuss in any detail.) “My hope is we get to do a trilogy, and he ends up with nothing,” he said. “He destroys everything he loves.”We reached a vista, some 9,500 feet above sea level, overlooking Albuquerque. “Better Call Saul” would keep Odenkirk here at least until mid-February. “I wanna stay under the radar,” he said, imagining what came next, “and get to be this guy who gets to go over here and then gets to go over there. Because some of these things I’ve done feel opposed. They don’t live in the same Venn diagram. But I think that’s cool.”Odenkirk thought about this for a second. “I like being able to get away with it,” he said. “And that’s something that gets harder if people know you too well.”Prop Stylist: Jess Danielle. Hair and makeup: Cheri Montesanto.Jonah Weiner is a contributing writer based in Oakland, Calif., and he writes the style and culture newsletter Blackbird Spyplane. His last feature for the magazine was about the actor and comedian Seth Rogen. Zachary Scott is a photographer and faculty member at the ArtCenter College of Design and California Polytechnic State University. He last photographed Adam Sandler for the magazine’s cover. More

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in Theater

    Review: In ‘Tambo & Bones,’ a Minstrel’s Guide to Making Money

    Dave Harris’s hip-hop triptych exploring racism and capitalism is meant to be a biting satire, but it has little force behind it.The minstrel show — that racist brand of theater that perpetuated stereotypes about Black people — was all the rage in the 1800s and hung around until the rise of the civil rights movement put the genre in its grave. And yet, I bet that even today, most Black Americans have witnessed or participated in a minstrel show of some sort — a performance of Blackness that simplifies and debases it.If that performance makes a profit — well, that’s capitalism for you, right? Even a young playwright with a new Off Broadway production may fall into that trap — and he knows it.This scourge of capitalism — as the engine of slavery, as a shaper of Black art and identity — is what the two characters in “Tambo & Bones” must grapple with. The play, which opened at Playwrights Horizons on Monday in a coproduction with the Center Theater Group, aims to be a sharp satire about the intersection of race and performance, especially when money is in the picture — as it always is in our country of wealth and opportunity.Written by the poet and playwright Dave Harris, “Tambo & Bones” begins by introducing us to two minstrel characters, Tambo (W. Tré Davis) and Bones (Tyler Fauntleroy). Dressed in tattered period attire, they mill around in an artificial pastoral scene, alongside fake trees and grass designed like paper cutouts from a children’s storybook. Tambo just wants to nap under his cardboard tree, and Bones is doing all he can to hustle up some quarters. (After all, their pipeline to success is “quarters to dollars to dreams.”)The setup of two friends waiting around for something to happen, discussing what they most crave and value, recalls the story of two old goats who famously waited for some guy named Godot — or, more recently, the play “Pass Over.” Though here it lacks the lyrical dexterity and layered meanings of either.In the lengthy second part of the show, which is described as a “hip-hop triptych,” we hear the promised music in the form of a concert, though songs are limited to this middle section. Tambo and Bones, dripping in diamonds and gold chains, come out on a platform surrounded by the hard lights and scaffolding of a stadium; they’re now contemporary rappers who trade lyrics, Tambo more Nas or Chance the Rapper to Bones’s 50 Cent. Their different rap styles, however, aren’t the only ways the two are at odds: Bones wants to game the system to achieve the same amount of wealth as his white peers, while Tambo thinks the system is broken and must be brought down completely.I won’t spoil the third part, but it jumps to the future, in a changed society where the story of Tambo and Bones has become a vital part of history.In the play’s second part, Fauntleroy, left, and Davis assume the roles of rappers. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHarris’s concept is promising. It brings to mind plays like “Underground Railroad Game,” “3/Fifths” and “Black History Museum,” which used music, games and immersive art installations to deliver biting satire on subjects like minstrelsy and the effects of institutional racism. But “Tambo & Bones” drops its two characters — actually, more like archetypes (the Black activist, the Black businessman) — into the supposedly satirical world of the play and shuffles them around with little development of the central themes and progression of the main ideas.The director, Taylor Reynolds, doesn’t help clarify or illuminate Harris’s shallow script, defaulting to only one mode: loud and emphatic. And the transitions between sections do little to connect the parts in service of a grand thesis. A satire and a concert and an off-road turn into speculative fiction: “Tambo & Bones” is a lot of things, but nuanced is not one of them.Harris tries to have it both ways when it comes to his play’s stance, critiquing how some creators, producers and audiences capitalize on Black trauma, while self-consciously acknowledging that he, too, is part of that practice. (In an essay in the program, Harris writes about how performances of trauma are often rewarded in the world of poetry slams.) In one scene in particular, he has his characters explicitly call him out: As if by addressing the issue head on, he can absolve himself of it.At the very least, the costumes (by Dominique Fawn Hill) and lighting (by Amith Chandrashaker and Mextly Couzin) have a clear execution and purpose, as the show shifts from the affected sunniness of the minstrel setting to the aggressive reds and roving spotlights of the concert. The scenic design, by Stephanie Osin Cohen, however, feels more functional than finessed; the bucolic setting of the first part is quickly swapped for the Madison Square Garden-style arena, and unsightly orange panels are rolled out and lined up in a row to form a makeshift wall for the final part.And even though the 90-minute show may not always be entertaining for the audience, at least the actors have fun. Davis keeps up with the sudden turns of the production but is stuck with an unremarkable character. Fauntleroy, as the more interesting Bones, brings an infectious sense of play to the production; his blithe performance in fact feels unmatched by the material, which even Fauntleroy’s enthusiasm can’t elevate.“Tambo & Bones” ends abruptly, with no bows. It’s an attempted mic drop but with no force behind it, an ineffectual grab not for the quarters or dollars that Bones seeks but for the greatest currency of any stage, minstrel or otherwise: an audience’s attention.Tambo & BonesThrough Feb. 27 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More