Eliana Willis

A play that’s a smash on one side of the Atlantic is sometimes a flop on the other, and the reasons can be hard to pin down. But when London threw its arms around Robert Ardrey’s Broadway reject “Thunder Rock” in 1940, timing had a lot to do with it — that and a cast led by a young Michael Redgrave.Already at war, people there were in need of bucking up, and “Thunder Rock” provided that with its story of a wounded idealist who retreats from a world that is verging on self-destruction, only to have a band of ghosts reignite his spirit and send him back into the fray. Maybe Elia Kazan’s New York production, in late 1939, fizzled because Americans didn’t yet sense much danger.Might the play feel more urgent now, in these fever-pitch times? That perfectly reasonable possibility seems to be the catalyst for Alex Roe’s revival at Metropolitan Playhouse — a regrettably fitful, stilted staging that muffles most of the humor and humanity of this creaky, peculiar play.Ardrey’s themes are enduring enough, though: creeping nationalism, rising isolationism, the despair that descends when one is unable to see a way through current troubles to a better future, or any future at all.Such is the predicament of David Charleston (Jed Peterson), the hero of “Thunder Rock.” A journalist who once bestrode the world, he lost not only his objectivity but also his hope when he covered the Spanish Civil War.Back home, he has turned quasi-hermit, keeping a lighthouse on a tiny island in Lake Michigan, where he gets visitors once a month, when his pilot friend, Streeter (Jamahl Garrison-Lowe, in the role James Mason played in the movie), flies in supplies.“It’s a privilege, my boy, living in the world today,” Streeter tells Charleston, sardonically. “It’s a storybook, sheer stark drama. How’s everything going to come out?”Charleston wants not to care about the answer to that question, but his idealism isn’t dead, only dented. So he does what many of us do in dire times: He looks to history for solace, to see how humankind has survived thus far.A plaque on the wall of the lighthouse (the set is by Vincent Gunn) describes a shipwreck off the island 90 years before, and Charleston has found the list of drowned passengers — European immigrants in search of a safer, more prosperous existence. These are the ghosts he conjures to keep him company, and talk him back into relishing life.In a spotty cast that includes a fine Thomas Vorsteg as a disillusioned Spanish Civil War veteran, Peterson brings an appealing naturalness to Charleston, whose most vivid ghosts are the British women’s rights activist Miss Kirby (Teresa Kelsey) and the Viennese doctor Stefan Kurtz (Howard Pinhasik).“There is a time, I presume,” Kurtz says, “in every man’s life when the lights grow dim and the battle seems lost, and he needs all the dead men of history to arise, and to assure him with a single united voice that battles can be won.”That may be true, and certainly Ardrey meant his play to be a beacon in encroaching darkness. But the battle for “Thunder Rock” has been lost again this time around.Thunder RockThrough Feb. 9 at the Metropolitan Playhouse, 220 East 4th Street, Manhattan; 800-838-3006, metropolitanplayhouse.org. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. More

Margo Lion, a theater producer who was largely responsible for bringing “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Hairspray” to Broadway and played a major role in other important shows, including “Angels in America,” died on Friday in Manhattan. She was 75.Her son, Matthew Nemeth, said the cause was a brain aneurysm. She had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, one of several causes she supported, and had a lung transplant in 2018.In an era when big-budget theater was an increasingly corporate affair, bankrolled by companies like Disney Theatrical Productions, Ms. Lion was an independent producer, putting up her own money and recruiting other investors to get a show mounted.“She was passionate,” the producer Rocco Landesman, who worked with her on “Angels in America” and other shows, said in a telephone interview, “and she was always all-in.”Unlike some producers, who commit to a show only after it has proved itself in workshops or out-of-town trial runs, she was known for getting on board early — often initiating a project, as she did with “Jelly’s Last Jam” (1992) and “Hairspray” (2002). And she stuck with shows she believed in despite the considerable risk of losing money, as most Broadway productions do. She often put up her West Side apartment as collateral in support of a project.“People think I’m nuts,” Ms. Lion told The New York Times in 2002. “But once you get going on these shows, you have so much invested in them emotionally, you have to believe completely in the purpose of what you’re doing, so you risk the farm.”People who worked on her productions knew her to be interested more in the art than in the bottom line. One admirer was Susan Birkenhead, the lyricist for “Jelly’s Last Jam,” a show about the jazz pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton that Ms. Lion began developing in the mid-1980s. Where other producers might be cautious, Ms. Birkenhead found Ms. Lion to be encouraging and open.“It was a nurturing I’d never experienced in a producer,” Ms. Birkenhead told The Baltimore Sun in 1993. “She allowed us to fail, and she allowed us to experiment, and the more innovative and dangerous it became, the more willing she was.”Margo Allison Lion was born on Oct. 13, 1944, in Baltimore to Albert and Gloria (Amburgh) Lion. Her father was chairman of Lion Brothers, a company that made embroidered emblems, and her parents were supporters of arts institutions in Baltimore. Both were killed in a plane crash in Egypt in 1963 when Margo was finishing her freshman year at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.Ms. Lion transferred to George Washington University and earned a bachelor’s degree in history and politics before going to work on Capitol Hill for Senator Daniel B. Brewster, Democrat of Maryland, and then for Senator Robert F. Kennedy in his New York office. After Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, “I just said I never wanted to do politics again,” she said.She became a teacher at the Town School in Manhattan, but when her husband at the time, Ted Nemeth, enrolled in the playwriting division of the Iowa Writers Workshop, she followed him there and rediscovered a love of theater she had nursed in school productions as a girl.“I loved hanging out with the playwrights, the theater world,” she said.She and her husband soon separated and later divorced, and, back in New York, she grew more serious about theater.“I really thought I would have three kids, four dogs and be the woman behind the man,” she said. “But I found when Ted and I separated that I had all of this energy and this passion to do something.”A second cousin, the choreographer Martha Clarke, introduced her to Lyn Austin, who had founded the nonprofit Music-Theater Group, which produced idiosyncratic performance works. Ms. Austin brought Ms. Lion aboard. She eventually became a producing director alongside Ms. Austin.“She was the perfect person for me to learn from,” Ms. Lion said. “She was a gambler.”After five years there she struck out on her own, and by 1984 she was working on a musical tentatively titled “Mr. Jelly Lord.” The show, retitled “Jelly’s Last Jam,” didn’t make it to Broadway until eight years later — a measure of how long it can take before a new musical reaches the stage. Gregory Hines played Jelly Roll Morton; his wife at the time, Pamela Koslow, was Ms. Lion’s co-producer.To keep the show afloat during its development, Ms. Lion put up as collateral a Matisse sculpture she had inherited from her parents.“She put that in hock to meet the payroll on ‘Jelly,’” Mr. Landesman recalled, and it wasn’t the last time. “She must’ve pawned it half a dozen times. If she was determined to do something, she did it and worried about how later.”The show ran for 569 performances. It was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won three, although it lost out on the prize for best musical to “Crazy for You.”By then Ms. Lion already had three Broadway credits, as associate producer on two shows and a producer on one, “I Hate Hamlet” (1991). Her Broadway credit after “Jelly’s Last Jam” was atypical, in that it was not a project she had been with from the beginning; it had been developed in productions in San Francisco, London and Los Angeles.The show was Tony Kushner’s two-part work about AIDS and homosexuality, “Angels in America.” Mr. Landesman’s company, Jujamcyn Theaters, had won the competition to bring it to New York, and Ms. Lion bought in, becoming a significant voice in the still-evolving work as it headed to Broadway.“She really loved discussion,” Mr. Kushner said in a phone interview. “And she would have ideas and make suggestions, but they were done with the utmost respect, and always with the preface of, ‘I don’t know if you’re going to want to do this, but here’s what I’m thinking.’”Perhaps her biggest contribution to “Angels” was to help recruit George C. Wolfe — the young director she had used on “Jelly’s Last Jam” — to direct the New York production. He had been nominated for the best-director Tony for “Jelly,” his first Broadway credit, and he went on to win the award for each of the two parts of “Angels in America.”“Because of Margo, I had my first Broadway show,” Mr. Wolfe said by email. “She was the first person to suggest I direct ‘Angels in America.’ I was on President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities because of her. The list goes on and on. She was a true friend, protective, caring, loving, loyal.”Ms. Lion had her share of failures, perhaps none bigger than “Triumph of Love,” a musical that died on Broadway 85 performances after opening in 1997. But it wouldn’t be long before she was struck by the brainstorm that would become her biggest hit.Ms. Lion had seen the movie “Hairspray” (1988), directed by her fellow Baltimorean John Waters, soon after it came out, but admitted that she didn’t embrace it initially.“To be candid,” she told The Sun in 2002, “I think I wasn’t sophisticated enough when I first saw ‘Hairspray’ to appreciate its many virtues.”But in 1998 she rented the video and watched the movie again while recovering from a cold.“Halfway through,” she recalled in the 2002 interview with The Times, “I literally said: ‘Yes, this is it. I found it.’”She had not yet met Mr. Waters. By the time she did, she had acquired the rights and had sent him the first few songs for the musical, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. When they finally did meet, Mr. Waters said in a phone interview, she promised him that she would make sure that the musical, about a chubby Baltimore teenager who wins a spot on a local television dance show, stayed true to his voice and vision.“She stuck to her word,” he said, “and we were lucky. It went right, right from the beginning. She honored everything about the original intentions of the movie.”The musical version of the Waters movie, with a book by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, opened on Broadway on Aug. 15, 2002, and ran for almost six and a half years, a total of 2,642 performances. It won eight Tony Awards, including best musical.Ms. Lion’s other Broadway producing credits included the August Wilson plays “Seven Guitars” (1996) and “Radio Golf” (2007), as well as “Elaine Stritch at Liberty” (2002), “Caroline, or Change” (2004), “The Wedding Singer” (2006) and “Catch Me if You Can” (2011).Ms. Lion was an early supporter of Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy. In 2009 he named her to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.In addition to her son, she is survived by two grandchildren.In a 1997 interview with The Associated Press, Ms. Lion described what drew her to producing despite the long odds of making money.“There is something that is very compelling about the live theater,” she said. “It’s a family. You create this very warm community within the production. And, of course, you have the satisfaction of actually making something that may last.”Mr. Kushner commended both her nuts-and-bolts knowledge and her passion.“She was one of those people who really knows how to get things done,” he said. “A fantastic practical mind married to a great love.” More

Campus comedies are not all that common at the theater, so it’s a rare treat to spend quality time with a pair of humorously mismatched college roommates in the new Off Broadway show “La Breve y Maravillosa Vida de Oscar Wao.”Oscar and Yunior have been thrown together by the Rutgers University housing gods and the imagination of Junot Díaz, whose novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” inspired this Repertorio Español production. They are both Dominican and members of the class of 1992, and both are aspiring writers. The similarities end there; the young men embody radically different visions of Dominican masculinity, one boldly self-assured and the other emphatically feeble.Oscar (the terrific Jesús E. Martínez) is a chubby, bespectacled uber-nerd obsessed with comics books, anime, science fiction and video games. Since this takes place before those genres’ stranglehold on pop culture, he is an alienated weirdo rather than a social-media influencer or Hollywood wunderkind. Oscar is also a virgin with little prospect that will change any time soon, though he is resigned to his fate rather than resentful about it.Yunior (Mario Peguero, casually confident), on the other hand, is a cocky ladies’ man with worldly tastes — he likes to “partake in a little smoke,” for example. At first, he is stunned by his new roommate’s commitment to his passions. “You talking Elvish from ‘Lord of the Rings,’” an incredulous Yunior tells Oscar, who promptly corrects him: “Actually, it’s Sindarin.” (The production is in Spanish, with English supertitles.)Yunior is the novel’s narrator, so we tend to see Oscar through his eyes. But the adapter and director Marco Antonio Rodríguez abandoned that storytelling approach for a more straightforward, third-person one. He also simplified Díaz’s dense, flowery writing, which is filled with long digressions ranging from footnotes to entire chapters.The play’s streamlined style is most effective in the first act (entirely focused on the college scenes) and less in the second, which suffers from awkward tonal shifts and attempts to pack a lot of emotional load into a short amount of time. Yunior falls for Oscar’s activist sister, Lola (Altagracia “ANova” Nova). She is less than enthusiastic at first, but eventually she relents and instructs Yunior to look after Oscar, who is also smitten — with a goth named Jenni (Belange Rodríguez). Lola is afraid he’s going to get hurt. And he does.The book breathlessly weaves in and out of timelines as it fills us in on the tragic history of Oscar’s family, burdened through generations by a kind of bad juju our hero calls fukú. Marco Antonio Rodríguez’s decision to get rid of most of those elements is understandable from practical and dramatic standpoints (the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, whose presence looms over the entire novel, is pretty much gone, for instance).But while the pared-down show moves at an energetic clip, it often does so at the expense of the female characters: Lola’s rich story has vanished; Oscar’s cancer-stricken mother, Beli (Maite Bonilla), appears only in Act 2; and his abuela, La Inca (Arisleyda Lombert), loses her quasi-mythical aura.The key relationship between Oscar and Ybón (Rodríguez again), a prostitute he meets on a visit to Santo Domingo, also feels undernourished. His sexual awakening flies by too quickly, and the impact of his passion for her does not quite register — and it needs to in order for the title’s deterministic reference to Oscar’s brief life to be fully realized.What keeps the production together is its focus on the friendship between Oscar and Yunior, bolstered by a stage rapport between Martínez and Peguero that feels earned. Their spiky banter is Díaz at his best, a shrewd exploration of male mores under often hilarious Ping-Pong dialogue. Poor Oscar: Becoming the man he thought he wanted to be is exactly what took him down.La Breve y Maravillosa Vida de Oscar WaoAt Repertorio Español, Manhattan; repertorio.nyc. Running time: 2 hours. More