Eliana Willis

Drew Droege’s new solo show — “Happy Birthday Doug,” at SoHo Playhouse — is packed with killer lines. Last Friday, people in the audience laughed pretty much nonstop. Yet it’s not all that funny on the page. What elevates the text is Droege’s supercharged performance as he brings to life a handful of the gay men attending Doug’s 41st birthday party at a Los Angeles wine bar. A simple “hello” becomes an elongated growl filled with sarcasm and a pinch of contempt. “Bitch” is a simultaneous attack and exclamation point. It can be glorious.“Happy Birthday Doug” is a natural follow-up to Droege’s breakout Off Broadway hit, “Bright Colors and Bold Patterns,” from 2016. Both plays are acid-etched satires of a certain type of middle- or upper-middle-class white gay man, often working or aiming to work in something creative, as he descends into whirlwinds of booze- and drug-fueled introspection and recrimination during a social event (a Palm Springs gay wedding in the earlier show).Droege’s favorite prop is a glass, from which the various characters of “Happy Birthday Doug” sip in between torrents of words: We’re eavesdropping not so much on conversations as narcissistic monologues. One of his funniest creations here is Jason, an actor who claims to be both retired and sober, and pats himself on the back for pseudo-provocative declarations like: “Instagram is so fake — hot take — sorry not sorry — I’ll say it — I’ll go there — Insta is fake, Mama.” Brian, a waiter-screenwriter-D.J., is so woke that he doesn’t play hip-hop “because it’s appropriation.”As the evening progresses — or rather, deteriorates — we start getting the guests’ perspectives on one another. Jackson calls Jason “the Beaujolais Bandit”; Doug himself refers to Jackson and his husband, Harrison, as “Valley trolls.” Droege and the director, Tom DeTrinis, keep the show moving so fast, you almost feel as though the production itself were on something illicit.Yet “Happy Birthday Doug,” unlike its predecessor, fails to move beyond the vignettelike social sendup. “Bright Colors” doubled as a sly commentary on the virtues and drawbacks of assimilation, puzzling over what it means to be a gay man in a world where homosexuality is no longer an obstacle to marriage, parenthood, social status.“Happy Birthday Doug” does introduce two characters who act as bridges between a seemingly rosy present and an outlaw past: Oscar Wilde (“I’m a ghost, bitch”) and Christopher, who is old enough to have lived through the worst years of the AIDS crisis.Christopher regales the crowd with stories of wild parties with Linda Blair, Natalie Wood and Roddy McDowall. “Honey, who knows if I was there and who cares if it was true,” he says. But he also marvels at the younger men’s hedonistic antics and their apparent freedom.As for Oscar, he is ambivalent about what he sees. “Everyone here looks the same,” he sniffs. “No, I used to find it tedious, but now I find it rather comforting.”Droege is onto something with these two interlopers, but Christopher and Oscar retreat quickly, and in the end it’s unclear what they are meant to say. That the dangerous days of yore were fun, but the “normal” present is at least somewhat safer? Droege’s previous show made pretty much the same point, and in a much sharper way.At least we are left with a series of comic diatribes, each of which could stand on its own as a stinging monologue. You might not want to spend a second with these men in real life, but an hour in their theatrical company is more than fine.Happy Birthday DougThrough March 1 at SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan; 212-691-1555, sohoplayhouse.com. Running time: 1 hour. More

A few years ago, a friend went to an academic conference and saw a reading of Anne Carson’s adaptation of “Antigone,” with the celebrated academic Judith Butler as the Theban king Kreon. “She was hilarious,” my friend, a theater professor, wrote to me. “Maybe she has a future onstage.”The future is now.Butler, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, currently stars in “Fragments, Lists & Lacunae,” a performance piece enjoying a brief run at New York Live Arts. Her role: A professor of comparative literature.Over the course of the semester, in a series of punchy, truncated lectures, the professor hips her undergrads to the idea that “absences are more than merely meaningful; rather, they are the material that governs that which is present.” Her examples include doughnut holes, the Nixon tapes, Sappho. Pay attention. This is going on the final.Divorced from an academic context, lectures have negative connotations. A lecture functions as a knuckle-rap, a don’t-do-it-again form of verbal deterrence. But lectures used to qualify as entertainment, with traveling speakers trekking from town to town, obliging a populace eager for diversion and instruction. P.T. Barnum built a lecture hall into his American Museum — alongside the trained bears and the mummified mermaid — as one more attraction.Theatrically, the form has come back into fashion, with works both esoteric, like the French artist Fanny de Chaillé’s re-creation of a Michel Foucault talk, and popular, like John Leguizamo’s “Latin History for Morons.” Last season’s “What the Constitution Means to Me,” nominated for a Tony Award, interleaved memoir with constitutional law analysis.There is something elemental, ascetic about the lecture and the way it strips performance to its simplest constituent forms — a speaker, an audience, a stool if you’re feeling fancy. Besides, you can only sit through so many kick-lines and dysfunctional family get-togethers before the idea that you might be made to think as well as to feel tantalizes.Intellectually, “Fragments, Lists & Lacunae” is a treat; theatrically, especially after the first hour, it’s less digestible. It’s not exactly theater, and Butler’s performance isn’t exactly acting, but it isn’t fully anything else either.The piece, written by Alexandra Chasin and directed by Zishan Ugurlu, takes place in a classroom with Butler, as the nameless professor, speaking to three onstage students — Hailey Marmolejo’s Noë, Aigner Mizzelle’s Quin, Jackie Rivera’s Wyler — and several hoodied young men seated in the front row.The rest of the audience is constituted, vaguely, as other students, and as the professor takes attendance, you may hear your name called. (Relax, no 15-page research paper is required.) As the professor lectures, cameras and large screens reveal the notes taken by the onstage students — doodles and all.Butler is a household name, provided that your household bookshelf buckles beneath critical theory texts. Put it this way: She gets a shout-out in the final season of “BoJack Horseman.” (Take that, Fredric Jameson.) “Fragments, Lists & Lacunae” does and doesn’t suggest what it must be like to sit in on her seminars. The words and habits of mind are not hers. Chasin, whose faculty bio notes an interest in “the limits of sense; white space; repetition; and fragments,” adapted the piece from one of her own courses.But I would bet that Butler lends the professor her own mannerisms. Her voice is low and gently burred, her affect is a funky mix of playfulness and precision. Clad in a trim black suit, clutching a laser pointer, she gestures lavishly from her elbows and wrists and sometimes wields a funny, Groucho-esque shrug — an intellectual who is down to clown.Chasin’s talks, as delivered by Butler, are brisk and deft, cognitive chew toys to worry as you walk or ride home. But where the piece falters is in its more theatrical aspects, especially its tawdry imagining of the students. At the end of several of the lectures, the classroom lights dim and silent scenes play out upstage — alcohol poisoning, an unplanned pregnancy, a bacchanal with shirtless dancing. Do these students ever go to the library? Or call their moms?By contrast, the off-hours glimpse of the professor shows her in a comfortable armchair, perusing a student’s presentation. The play also generally avoids professor-student interaction, though Butler had a nice improv as she handed a student a dropped earring. “A little fragment,” she said.The play runs two hours — about the length of a seminar meeting — and as it continues, the work of listening and reading, of thinking and watching, of trying to reconcile the romance of the classroom with the melodrama of the students’ lives, becomes more difficult and less pleasurable. Why couldn’t this just be a lecture, I scribbled, as I made my own fragments and lists and the occasional doodle in my notebook.Fragments, Lists & LacunaeThrough Feb. 15 at New York Live Arts, Manhattan; 212-691-6500, newyorklivearts.org. Running time: 2 hours More

Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last-chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater.Previews & Openings‘ANATOMY OF A SUICIDE’ at the Atlantic Theater Company at the Linda Gross Theater (in previews; opens on Feb. 18). Alice Birch (“Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.”) wants to know if trauma can be inherited. In this triptych, which won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, she organizes a grandmother, a mother and a daughter in conjoined stories across seven decades or so. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs a cast that includes Carla Gugino, Celeste Arias and Gabby Beans. 866-811-4111, atlantictheater.org‘BLUES FOR AN ALABAMA SKY’ at Theater Row (in previews; opens on Feb. 18). The Keen Company presents the long-delayed New York premiere of Pearl Cleage’s ensemble drama, set among a group of artists in the waning days of the Harlem Renaissance. Alfie Fuller stars, as the lounge singer Angel, alongside Jasminn Johnson, John-Andrew Morrison, Khiry Walker and Sheldon Woodley. LA Williams directs. 212-239-6200, keencompany.org‘COAL COUNTRY’ at the Public Theater (previews start on Feb. 18; opens on March 3). In 2010, a thousand feet underground, coal dust exploded, killing 29 of the 31 miners on site. The documentary playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen interviewed survivors and family members, learning how a community reckons with disaster and loss. Steve Earle supplies original music. Blank directs a cast that includes Mary Bacon and Michael Laurence. 212-967-7555, publictheater.org‘DRACULA’ at Classic Stage Company (in previews; opens on Feb. 17). What’s your type? O-positive? AB-negative? Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel investigates the themes of gender and sexuality that course through its heart and major arteries. With Matthew Amendt as Dracula, Kelley Curran as Mina and Hamill as the insect-munching Renfield. The play is running in repertory with “Frankenstein.” 212-677-4210, classicstage.org‘ENDLINGS’ at New York Theater Workshop (previews start on Feb. 19; opens on March 9). On a Korean island, three elderly women — the last of their kind, known as “haenyeos” — dive for shellfish. A world away a Korean-Canadian playwright, now based in New York, wrestles with how to write about race and ethnicity. Sammi Cannold directs Celine Song’s aquatic comedy-drama, with Jiehae Park. 212-460-5475, nytw.org[Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead.]‘FRANKENSTEIN’ at Classic Stage Company (in previews; opens on Feb. 17). The monster is alive, and running in repertory. Joining Kate Hamill’s feminist “Dracula” at Classic Stage Company is Tristan Bernays’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s science fiction chiller, directed by Timothy Douglas. Stephanie Berry plays both Victor Frankenstein and his murderous creature, with Rob Morrison as the chorus. 212-677-4210, classicstage.org[embedded content]‘MACK & MABEL’ at New York City Center (performances start on Feb. 19). A pair of silent movie stars find their voice. Encores! revives Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman’s 1974 Broadway comedy, with revisions by Francine Pascal, about the silent film king of comedy Mack Sennett (Douglas Sills) and his leading lady, Mabel Normand (Alexandra Socha). Josh Rhodes directs and choreographs. Send roses. 212-581-1212, nycitycenter.org‘SIDEWAYS THE EXPERIENCE’ at the Theater at St. Clement’s (previews start on Feb. 20; opens on Feb. 23). Napa comes to New York with a bibulously interactive theatrical version of Rex Pickett’s novel, which also inspired the 2004 movie. Before this tale of a wine-soaked bachelor weekend unfolds, patrons are invited to eat and drink. Glasses of wine are available throughout the show, too. Will it intoxicate? Dan Wackerman directs. sidewaystheexperience.com‘TUMACHO’ at the Connelly Theater (previews start on Feb. 17; opens on Feb. 22). Ethan Lipton’s mostly western musical, which Ben Brantley called an “impeccably inane horse opera,” rides back into town. Can the townspeople — and a three-legged coyote — survive a villainous man in black? Leigh Silverman directs a cast that features Phillipa Soo and John Ellison Conlee, who periodically dress as cactuses. clubbedthumb.org‘UNKNOWN SOLDIER’ at Playwrights Horizons (previews start on Feb. 14; opens on March 9). A late work by the composer Michael Friedman, who died in 2017, and the book writer and lyricist Daniel Goldstein comes to New York. Spread across three time periods and nearly a century, it follows a Manhattan obstetrician’s investigation of her family’s past. Trip Cullman directs a cast that includes Kerstin Anderson, Estelle Parsons and Margo Seibert. 212-279-4200, playwrightshorizons.org‘WEST SIDE STORY’ at the Broadway Theater (in previews; opens on Feb. 20). Does Broadway feel pretty? Does Ivo van Hove? The celebrated and sometimes controversial Belgian director revives this Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents musical, with new choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and one song and one ballet extracted. Isaac Powell and Shereen Pimentel star. 212-239-6200, westsidestorybway.comLast Chance‘AMERICAN UTOPIA’ at the Hudson Theater (closes on Feb. 16). A knockout concert and an occasional meditation on civics and community, David Byrne’s musical theater experience, choreographed by Annie-B Parson, drops its chain curtain for the final time. The erstwhile Talking Head frontman’s show, Ben Brantley wrote, “repositions a onetime rebel as a reflective elder statesman, offering cozy cosmic wisdom.” 855-801-5876, americanutopiabroadway.com‘JACQUELINE NOVAK: GET ON YOUR KNEES’ at the Lucille Lortel Theater (closes on Feb. 16). As the encore run of Novak’s solo show ends, she can finally stand up. Ostensibly a history of fellatio, the one-hander is a fraught and dangerously funny piece about a straight woman’s embodied experience. “If someone gave me a bouquet of roses, and one of them looked like my vulva, I’d say I think someone stepped on one of the roses,” she says. All remaining performances are sold out, but the wait list opens at the box office two hours before curtain each night.866-811-4111, getonyourkneesshow.com‘MAC BETH’ at the Frederick Loewe Theater (closes on Feb. 22). A gaggle of teenage girls depart Dunsinane as Erica Schmidt’s reimagining of the Scottish tragedy closes. Laura Collins-Hughes wrote that the play’s power lies not in its true-crime-inspired violence, but in “watching a group of girls meet Shakespeare on their own electric terms — with ferocity, abandon and the occasional wild dance break.” 212-772-4448, huntertheaterproject.org More

There’s a void in my Upper West Side co-op.There’s no piano playing coming from the apartment directly above my ground-floor unit. No deep, reassuring bass-baritone.I miss that voice. It belonged to Charles Dunn, a singer, voice teacher, former co-op president and good friend who died this month at 99.Charles — a strapping Illinois farm boy who graduated from Millikin University in Decatur, Ill., with a bachelor’s degree in music in 1942, served in the Coast Guard during World War II and later came to New York to follow his passion — made the city a richer place.One great thing about Manhattan is that the density of humanity increases the chances of encountering people who bring something special to the table. Charles brought an extra serving.As he pursued a singing career in New York, one of his first jobs was working as a waiter at a Schrafft’s on the Upper West Side. Among those he told me worked there at the time: a future Oscar winner named Rod Steiger.Though Charles himself never became famous, his talent was such that he was able to make a living doing what he loved, singing — even if the war did set him back a bit. “It was almost like starting over,” he told a Millikin University alumni publication in 1995, noting that he signed up for refresher voice lessons upon leaving the military. “The war took a big hole out of my life. It delayed my start quite a bit.”But it didn’t deter him.In a note to our building this week, Daniel Shigo, the co-op’s current president and a singer who formerly worked with the New York City Opera, wrote that Charles “made his way as a concert artist and performer on Broadway” and elsewhere. Charles, he said, appeared “in many productions; including ‘Kean’ with Alfred Drake (who gave Charles a standing ovation at his audition), ‘Destry Rides Again,’ ‘High Button Shoes,’ ‘Annie Get Your Gun’ (with Mary Martin), ‘The Music Man’ (with Van Johnson), ‘Happy Hunting,’ and ‘Illya Darling.’”Charles bought into the co-op in the mid-1950s with money that he had made singing at an auto show one summer, he told us. Back then, you could do that.Through his work, he occasionally found himself at notable events that he would recount. Among them: the 1962 celebration at Madison Square Garden during which Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to John F. Kennedy.For years, Charles lived on the fifth floor of our brick-and-brownstone walk-up, a factor that his doctor told him had contributed to his longevity. His kindness was such that he inherited the top-floor unit next to his from a man whom Charles had cared for during a long illness. That apartment, which Charles rented out for years, provided a pension of sorts for him.At about age 14, Daniel noted, Charles assumed farming duties from his father after his death. Many decades later, Charles still bore scars on his arms from an attack by a sow that nearly killed him. (His two dogs saved him.)Charles’s Midwestern sensibility and practicality served him well — both in the city and in our co-op, where he had a calming effect during stressful times. And when he gave you a cantaloupe or a honeydew melon, you knew it would be perfect. “He could pick them out because he grew up knowing when to pick something,” said Sally Ann Swarm, a longtime friend and student of Charles’s.About a dozen years ago, Charles sold his two top-floor apartments. He moved down to a unit on the second floor that he rented from another co-op member.He may have slowed down some, but Charles kept an active schedule, teaching singers, attending concerts, taking walks and visiting the Muffins Cafe on Columbus Avenue.His wanderlust led him around the world. He traveled well into his 90s, visiting places like Egypt, Jordan, Australia, New Zealand and Fiji.And he kept following his passion.“I accompanied Charles six months ago in his apartment,” Daniel wrote, “he singing French and German art songs — his voice full and resonant from low F to high F. Charles was still practicing scales and exercises every morning up until eight weeks ago; a man of great vigor and stature, his 6-foot-2 frame lent him the air of a leading man.”Though frail, Charles managed to attend a production of Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” at the Metropolitan Opera in December.On the morning that Charles died, a young couple, by coincidence, began moving in to our co-op to rent a top-floor apartment — the one that Charles had inherited years ago from the person he helped care for. The couple will make their own history in our co-op.As for Charles, the large void he leaves matches his physical stature. And I really miss that bass-baritone. More

MILLBURN, N.J. — Sometimes, Andrew Lloyd Webber says from a video screen onstage, a production doesn’t come together the way its creators hope.“Which doesn’t actually mean the show is appalling,” he continues, sensibly. “It just means that it didn’t work because the whole thing didn’t sort of coalesce.”“Unmasked: The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber” — a multimedia concert and career retrospective, making its world premiere at the Paper Mill Playhouse here — is a far cry from appalling. Unless of course you are allergic to Lloyd Webber’s music, in which case you might run screaming the instant an usher hands you a souvenir paper mask.But even if “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Evita,” “Cats” and the rest of his shows are your jam, this one runs the risk of underwhelming, despite the technical excellence of the singing and the rich sound of the onstage orchestra. At a presumably somewhat larval stage in its development, this would-be fan pleaser of an evening is weighed down by seriousness.Directed and choreographed by JoAnn M. Hunter, with music direction by Michael Patrick Walker, “Unmasked” is larded with earworm hits and the occasional oddity. Nothing wrong with that. But the live portion of the proceedings, carried out by a cast of 13 on an almost utilitarian set (by Alexander Dodge), makes the mistake of reverence when what’s needed is fun. The best way to honor Lloyd Webber’s music is to have a good time with it.More peculiar is the glaringly unpolished recorded video of Lloyd Webber in which he narrates his history, popping up between numbers on a screen that descends to conceal the orchestra.From the moment he gives the preshow announcement, threatening to strangle anyone who records the performance (he, at any rate, gets points for irreverence), this device has huge potential to charm. As with the video of Stephen Sondheim a decade ago in his own stage anthology, “Sondheim on Sondheim,” Lloyd Webber’s stories about the making of his musicals function as the connective tissue of the show, written and devised with Richard Curtis (“Notting Hill” and the contentious classic “Love Actually”).Though it is uncredited in the program, Curtis also did the video for the show, which reads like a rehearsal tape, not a finished product: terrible lighting, and shaky camera work that goes in and out of focus. More fundamentally, bizarre editing gets in the way of Lloyd Webber speaking straight to the audience, by cutting at random to a second camera for distancing profile views.Let him look us in the eye. But also — and I realize this is tough because he is the boss, and he is not an actor — please get him to relax so he can regale us more comfortably, not race through anecdotes and step on his own punch lines. (He does get in a good joke about the recent “Cats” film debacle, though.)The context Lloyd Webber provides is informative, if only glancingly personal; for childhood stories and the like, his entertaining 70th-birthday memoir from 2018, also titled “Unmasked,” is on sale at the concession stand. So are CDs of its compilation album, “Unmasked,” whose song list is not the same as this medley-heavy concert’s.Vocally, the evening is a showcase for Lloyd Webber veterans, including Mamie Parris, with both “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” and “Memory”; Mauricio Martinez, scaling the heights of “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say),” from “Jesus Christ Superstar”; and Alyssa Giannetti, with a particularly pretty “Love Never Dies,” from the ill-fated sequel to “Phantom.”Rarer, though, are numbers that feel connected to a character, given an actor’s spin. Alex Finke accomplishes that with “Another Suitcase in Another Hall,” from “Evita”; Jeremy Landon Hays with “Sunset Boulevard”; and Andrew Kober, playfully, with “Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat.”You can feel the rush of oxygen each time a song gets an interpretation rather than a recitation. If “Unmasked” is going to do justice to its material, it needs much more of that vitality.UnmaskedThrough March 1 at Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, N.J.; 973-376-4343, papermill.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More