Eliana Willis

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

BERLIN — When a new play from one of Germany’s leading avant-garde theatermakers sells out a 2,000-seat venue, you know the world’s gone topsy-turvy. Imagine Robert Wilson debuting a show to a full house at Radio City Music Hall!Yet, since October, a huge revue theater in the heart of Berlin, the Friedrichstadt-Palast, has been selling out every night it presents a new work from the acclaimed writer-director René Pollesch. (In 2021, Pollesch will become the artistic director of the high-minded Berlin Volksbühne.) At the cavernous Friedrichstadt-Palast, the show shares the schedule with “Vivid,” an over-the-top, Vegas-style extravaganza that is about as far in tone from serious theater as you can get. This irony clearly hasn’t been lost on Pollesch, whose play seems to refute “Vivid’s” sleek, razzle-dazzle aesthetic at every turn, starting with its mouthful of a title.“Believing in the Possibility of the World’s Complete Renewal” (“Glauben an die Möglichkeit der völligen Erneuerung der Welt”) is a minimalist chamber drama set loose on one of the world’s largest stages. Don’t expect death-defying acrobatics or rousing musical numbers. It’s a mordantly funny monologue about isolation and alienation that fuses personal reminiscences with critiques of capitalism. As its star, Fabian Hinrichs, pontificates about loneliness, 27 dancers from the “Vivid” cast follow him around the stage like dutiful children, imitating Hinrichs’s gestures and poses and occasionally breaking into a choreographed number.Wandering the auditorium and stage in a gold bodysuit, the sad, funny figure of Hinrichs, who is billed as co-director, intones his laconic and disjointed soliloquy with consummate theatricality (and often without a microphone). Is this melancholy poetry or tragically chic drivel? Pollesch seems to want it both ways.In addition to the dance troupe, “Believing in the Possibility” also recycles staging elements from “Vivid,” including a gliding futuristic bridge and trippy laser lights. Such allusions seem intended to send up that vacuous blockbuster, whose non-songs and bizarre sets are periodically enlivened by muscular acrobatics and outlandish costumes. (Think second- or third-rate Cirque du Soleil.) At the same time, there’s a note of poignancy to Pollesch’s text and Hinrichs’s delivery: Against the odds, they make you believe in the sincerity of this undertaking.Local critics have gone gaga for “Believing in the Possibility,” and much of the enthusiasm probably is owed to Pollesch’s cult status here. But despite Hinrichs’s blistering performance and Pollesch’s unmistakable prose, the show feels slight, dwarfed less by the Friedrichstadt-Palast’s massive stage than by the all the hype. Inviting a serious avant-garde director to work at such a huge commercial venue is both an act of folly and a publicity stunt, and I wonder how much the show’s success has had to do with its breathless marketing, which promises the event of the century. The show’s initial run has been limited to a dozen performances, but the Friedrichstadt-Palast’s website teases that more may be coming in 2021. Few could have foreseen that Pollesch would ever play the Friedrichstadt-Palast; but I suspect the Friedrichstadt-Palast is also playing him.“Believing in the Possibility of the World’s Complete Renewal” could also serve as the slogan for Stefan Pucher’s production of “King Lear” at the Münchner Kammerspiele in Munich. In this new translation by Thomas Melle, Lear’s ungrateful daughters are radical feminists calling for the dismantling of the patriarchy by any means necessary. Surprisingly, it works.The production shifts the emphasis away from Lear’s madness and focuses on the king’s refusal to stand aside after ceding power to the next, female generation. While he clings to his privileges, his heirs set about dismantling those traditional power structures.Regan and Goneril are usually portrayed as scheming, bloodthirsty villains, but here they are guided by noble ideas. Understanding them as feminist crusaders neither cheapens their struggle nor excuses their wickedness. Melle does not go for moral relativism, and he does not exonerate the daughters for their villainy. Despite Melle’s deep cuts — including to the dramatis personae — the plot is left pretty intact. But there are some unexpected changes, including a much-younger-than-usual Lear (played with abrasive bluster by Thomas Schmauser) and a clever gender-switch for Gloucester (the commanding Wiebke Puls), who chastises the king’s rogue daughters at her peril. Another standout is the charming and chameleonlike Samouil Stoyanov, who does double duty as Kent and the Fool.The unnatural cruelty of children to their parents registers with forceful immediacy in this visually vibrant production. Set loose on Nina Peller’s pop-glam set (a single-story, rotating house topped by a billboard announcing “The End”), nine exciting actors from the Kammerspiele’s permanent company bring the story to contemporary life, fabulously attired in Annabelle Witt’s eclectic costumes.Increasingly, “Lear” feels like the play of the moment on Germany’s stages. While the world seems to go to hell in a handbasket, directors from Hamburg to Stuttgart have turned to Shakespeare’s bleakest tragedy to comment on the broken times in which we live. The Kammerspiele’s absorbing production proves that an old chestnut can be refreshed with clever and sensitive modification.Another contemporary take on a classic currently at the Kammerspiele is far less successful. In “Die Räuberinnen” (“The Robbers”), an all-female deconstruction of Friedrich Schiller’s 1781 play, the director Leonie Böhm reduces the five-act melodrama to a plotless 80 minutes. Schiller’s memorable characters represent Enlightenment values, but Böhm refuses to treat them as avatars of abstract ideals. Instead, they address the audience in confessional monologues that can be painfully personal, or funny, or both.Throughout the brisk performance, the focus remains on the protagonists’ psychological profiles. The direct addresses, developed by Böhm together with her actresses, are lively, and the acting is engaging, but the production meanders despite the energetic performances. These include Julia Riedler’s ultracool Karl, the play’s hero, who leads a band of honorable robbers in the Bohemian forest, and Gro Swantje Kohlhof, who as Karl’s rival, Spiegelberg, ad-libs a lengthy and increasingly manic speech while standing on a seat in the middle of the audience.A massive cumulous cloud dominates the production. Eventually, a storm arrives, dousing the stage in rain for the last 20 minutes. The actresses peel off their clothes and slide around sopping wet wearing next to nothing. Does the rain come to wash away the male-dominated canon of Western culture? There is something both exhilarating and weary about this zany finale. As gleefully anarchic as it is, it feels sloppy and vague. When it comes to renewing the world onstage, more precision and focus is required. Creating a utopia, even a theatrical one, is serious business.Glauben an die Möglichkeit der völligen Erneuerung der Welt. Directed by René Pollesch. Friedrichstadt-Palast, Berlin. Through March 5.König Lear. Directed by Stefan Pucher. Münchner Kammerspiele. Through March 17.Die Räuberinnen. Directed by Leonie Böhm. Münchner Kammerspiele. Through March 31. More

LONDON — Do you remember? Don’t you remember? Can’t you remember? Why can’t you remember?Variations on those unsettling words — both explicit and unspoken — echo through the wrenching final scene of Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” which opened Wednesday night at Wyndham’s Theater in London. They are addressed to a mid-20th century visitor to Vienna, a youngish, defensively British man of slipping poise who appears to have forgotten most of his early childhood.But you could also argue that these questions have been posed, in a sustained murmur, from the very beginning of this richly embroidered portrait of Jewish life in Vienna in the early 20th century. They are questions aimed directly at us, the audience and, by extension, at a wider world conveniently prone to historical amnesia.That would include, above all, the man who wrote this play.A tone of instructional reproach is hardly a quality associated with Stoppard, whose six-decade career embraces a host of exuberantly cerebral plays, from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (1967) to the time-traveling “Arcadia” (1993). But “Leopoldstadt,” which has been polished to a burnished sheen by the director Patrick Marber, holds a singular position in its author’s canon.For starters, Stoppard, 82, has said this will probably be his last play. And, more than anything he has written (including his rueful “The Real Thing”), “Leopoldstadt” feels like an act of personal reckoning for its creator — with who he is and what he comes from. It’s not difficult to see “Leopoldstadt” as one man’s passionate declaration of identity as a Jew.Judaism never figured conspicuously in Stoppard’s earlier work. For much of his life, he never thought of himself as Jewish. Born Tomas Straussler in a small town in Czechoslovakia in 1937, he grew up largely in Britain, taking the name of Stoppard from the Englishman his mother married after his father’s death.As Stoppard writes in program notes for the play, his mother rarely spoke of her own history. It was only when a previously unknown Czech relative made contact with him in the 1990s that he learned about his mother’s family, many of whom had died during the Holocaust.The image of a hand-printed family tree is prominent in “Leopoldstadt,” among the black-and-white projections and photographs that hover evanescently between scenes. For the record, it is not Stoppard’s family that is portrayed in the play, but a prosperous fictional Austrian clan in Vienna.When the play begins, the family is assembled at the comfortably upholstered apartment occupied by the matriarchal Grandma Emilia Merz (Caroline Gruber) and her son, Hermann (Adrian Scarborough), who runs the family textile business. It is Christmas Day, 1899.Yes, that holiday is being celebrated in this Jewish household, a commingling of traditions that finds droll expression when a child mistakenly tops the towering Christmas tree with a Star of David. For Hermann — whose wife, Gretl (Faye Castelow), is Catholic — cultural assimilation is a fait accompli as Austria moves into a new century.Or is it? The group assembled before us may represent a sort of cosmopolitan melting pot, in which conversation touches on the latest play by Schnitzler, the painting of Klimt (for whom Gretl is posing), higher mathematics and the theories of Freud. (This is a Stoppard play.)But as Hermann speaks of his hopes for future social and professional advancement, you sense insecurity pricking at his complacency (an uneasiness that is subtly and expertly conveyed by Scarborough, in the show’s most fully realized portrait).That disquiet assumes dramatic form before the first act ends, when a romantic triangle — or quadrangle, depending on how you look at it (again, this is a Stoppard play) — forces anti-Semitic sentiment into the open. In the second act, with scenes set during the Depression that followed World War I and in 1938, on the eve of Austria’s incorporation into the Third Reich, that sentiment festers into full-blown, terrifying form.Thus we watch the once-resplendent Merz household become increasingly shabby and bare, as what once felt like a familial fortress is transformed into a defenseless sanctuary. (Richard Hudson’s artfully evolving set is lighted in a sepia haze by the masterly Neil Austin, and images of the entire clan, posed as if for posterity, become a heartbreaking motif.) We are introduced to new generations of Merzes (in changing-times costumes by Brigitte Reiffenstuel), whose political allegiances and cultural tastes vary widely.But being Jewish is no longer a choice for them, not in the age of National Socialism. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of European history will know what to expect when the family freezes at the sound of someone pounding on the door.That does not make watching what follows any easier. In the final scene, in 1955, a man we had earlier met as a boy returns to the now abandoned apartment. Played by Luke Thallon, he is a successful writer of comic literature and, as far as he knows, a proper Englishman. It seems safe to say that he is a surrogate for Stoppard.More than any previous Stoppard play — including the sprawling “Coast of Utopia” trilogy, a 9-hour dive into the Russian Revolution — “Leopoldstadt” is a group portrait, and one of uncommon density. (You will probably feel the need to consult the family tree in the program.) The 40-strong cast is, to a person, very good, and they embody their characters with spiky defining detail.That they threaten to get lost in the play’s panoramic sweep is partly the point here. But it is also hard to avoid the impression that they exist as illustrative figures in an admonitory history lesson. There’s no denying that lesson’s emotional power, nor its frightening relevance in 2020, when anti-Semitic acts and language seem increasingly on the rise.That means that although “Leopoldstadt” is set in the past, it is Stoppard’s most topical play. It is also his most conventional drama by far.A writer who reliably bent time into pretzels in earlier works, Stoppard hews to a fully linear structure here. And while “Leopoldstadt” is replete, to the bursting point, with historical fact and political theory, it is mostly devoid of the intellectual jeux d’esprit that have been its creator’s signature. This may be the Stoppard play for people who don’t normally cotton to Stoppard.It is as if the playwright felt that what he had to say here was too urgent to be filtered through his usual cerebral playfulness. The unreliability of memory, an abiding Stoppardian concern, is briefly flirted with in the final scene.But ultimately, memory isn’t the capricious, fragmenting prism of classic Stoppard. Here, recollection is a laser, a tool to be focused on a past teeming with harsh and essential lessons for the present.It seems fitting that, for once in a Stoppard work, words aren’t what leave the most lasting impression. It is instead the vision of people frozen as if for a photograph, beckoning with poignantly immediate life from a distant time before they dissolve into anonymous darkness. “Leopoldstadt” demands, with gravity and eloquence, that we never let those visions disappear.LeopoldstadtAt Wyndham’s Theater, London; leopoldstadtplay.com. More

In retrospect, Max might have stood a better chance had he washed the occasional dish. But on the morning of the day that his world comes undone, he finds nothing in the kitchen to hold his cereal.“All the bowls are dirty,” he tells his girlfriend, June. “Can we share?”“Sure,” she says, companionably, and they both eat out of hers.Before you know it, she’s broken up with him, albeit not in anger. It’s more like a sudden, insistent fit of wistfulness, a yearning to become a different version of herself after almost seven years with him.And in the fever-dream world of Sarah Einspanier’s “House Plant,” June (Emma Ramos) leaps — whoosh! — right into that new life, ditching a meal-kit delivery business in New York to be a TV actress in Los Angeles.The baffled Max (Ugo Chukwu) is left to recover with June’s pushy pal Chloe (Molly Bernard), who decides, against his protestations, that she’s moving in, effective immediately. So what if he never liked her.The heightened, bizarro tone of this comedy and its head-spinning speed of events so strongly recall the style of Will Arbery’s “Plano” that an algorithm would match up their audiences: If you enjoyed that play, you’ll surely get a kick out of this one, directed by Jaki Bradley as part of the Next Door at NYTW series.You’ll like it quite a lot for the first third, anyway. Then it begins to sag, though the occasional sudden shifts into a hospital-drama world (whose amped-up disconnection from reality recalls Paula Vogel’s “The Baltimore Waltz”) jolt things amusingly.Einspanier, whose “Lunch Bunch” clocked in at a slender 60 minutes at Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival last year, goes a half-hour longer here, and it seems like more than that.That’s despite a cast whose caliber makes you feel lucky to see them — particularly the reliably stellar Chukwu, whom I would watch in anything, and Bernard, who possesses the remarkable ability to wink without, seemingly, moving a single other muscle in her face. (Clubbed Thumb and the Play Company are bringing “Lunch Bunch” back in March, and once again Chukwu will be in it.)Max, a composer trying to break into the hold-music market, and Chloe, a video artist whose well-defended heart is in danger of being breached by a musician named Agnes (Deepali Gupta), are as vivid as the creamy citrus green of Meredith Ries’s set.With its leafy title flora sitting mutely throughout in a too-small pot, “House Plant” is about drama and domesticity, stasis and growth, online posturing and real-world pain. It’s about the building of emotional walls and their necessary demolition.Written in what Einspanier labels as three movements, it is also an experiment with sound, including voice-overs (spoken by Gupta, who composed the show’s music) and effects. (The sound design is by John Gasper.)“Do You Have Any Idea How Boring Life Would Be Without Underscoring,” Chloe says to June early on. It’s a statement, not a question, and the script’s emphatic capitalization is exactly how Bernard speaks it.Even with underscoring, though, tedium can descend on a play that’s too diffuse.There are just two moments of undisguised feeling in “House Plant,” and they come almost as bookends — quick, quiet and anchoring. This frenzied play could use more of them.House PlantThrough Feb. 22 at the Fourth Street Theater, 83 East 4th Street, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More