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    ‘Urinetown’ Review: More Than Toilet Humor

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    The Encores! revival of the musical from Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis seems even more relevant today.About halfway through the first act of “Urinetown,” the characters Hope Cladwell and Bobby Strong reveal their emotions and desires in “Follow Your Heart.” Their names could have been lifted from a Depression-era musical, and the song itself evokes such romantic classics of that time as “I Only Have Eyes for You.”“We all want a world / Filled with peace and with joy,” Hope (the comic revelation Stephanie Styles) and Bobby (an effortlessly charismatic Jordan Fisher, fresh from a stint as Orpheus in “Hadestown”) sing in the Encores! revival that opened Wednesday night at New York City Center. “With plenty of water for each girl and boy,” they continue.You see, our lovebirds, whom Fisher and Styles portray with a precisely calibrated mix of earnestness and goofiness, live in a dystopian world where water is scarce. Exacting payment for the privilege of peeing has become a profitable business for Hope’s tycoon father, Caldwell B. Cladwell (Rainn Wilson, not quite villainous enough), the head of the Urine Good Company corporation.Bobby, on the other hand, is very much from the downtrodden side of the tracks. More specifically he’s the assistant custodian at the public toilet known as Amenity No. 9, run by the imperious Penelope Pennywise (Keala Settle, amped up to 11 as if rehearsing for Norma Desmond).The jarring reference to a commodity perhaps more essential than peace and joy in such a lovely number confirms that the “Urinetown” team of Mark Hollmann (music and lyrics) and Greg Kotis (book and lyrics) was not just a new version of Harry Warren and Al Dubin, the bards of 1930s Warner Bros. musicals. A bespoke pastiche of a specific vintage style, “Follow Your Heart” also contains a streak of modern sarcasm and political commentary that helps explain why “Urinetown” has aged so remarkably well since its premiere a little more than a quarter of a century ago.The show, which started life at the International New York Fringe Festival in 1999, had an Off Broadway run in the spring of 2001 and reopened on Broadway on Sept. 20 that same year. It won the Tony Awards for best book, original score and direction of a musical, and ran for two and a half years. The inclusion of “Urinetown” — an unlikely hit but nevertheless a hit — in Encores! underlines the mission drift of a series that used to be dedicated to flops and obscurities but nowadays simply “revisits the archives of American musical theater.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Urinetown’ and Other Plays and Musicals to See in February

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      Also onstage in February: Calista Flockhart in a Sam Shepard revival, boldface names in Joy Behar’s “My First Ex-Husband” and a marionette made of ice.Let some brilliant theater artists — like Jeff Hiller in “Urinetown,” Susannah Flood in “Liberation” and Tonya Pinkins in “My First Ex-Husband” — tell you a story this month. Here are 10 shows to tempt you, Off Broadway and beyond.‘Urinetown’If you are allergic to bathroom humor, Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann’s Tony Award-winning musical satire probably is not for you. Winkingly Brechtian, with echoes of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” it’s set in a dystopia where private toilets are illegal and public facilities charge for use — a situation ripe for rebellion. Directed by Teddy Bergman (“KPOP”) for New York City Center Encores!, this brief revival stars Jordan Fisher, Rainn Wilson, Keala Settle and Jeff Hiller. (Through Feb. 16, New York City Center)‘Anywhere’Ashwaty Chennatt as Antigone with a melting Oedipus in Théâtre de l’Entrouvert’s “Anywhere” at Here.Richard TermineA marionette made of ice plays a wandering, melting, disappearing Oedipus accompanied by his daughter Antigone in this puppet piece by the French company Théâtre de l’Entrouvert, which uses bits of text from Henry Bauchau’s novel “Oedipus on the Road.” Conceived and directed by Élise Vigneron, whose interest in ephemerality has led her to work repeatedly with ice puppets, it is presented with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival as part of Basil Twist’s Dream Music Puppetry program. Recommended for ages 11 and up. (Through March 2, Here)‘My Man Kono’The New York Times once described Charlie Chaplin’s longtime assistant, Toraichi Kono, as “the keeper of his privacy.” An immigrant from Japan who made fleeting appearances in Chaplin films, this “combination valet, bodyguard and chauffeur” is the title character of Philip W. Chung’s historically based play, which follows Kono’s fortunes as he is suspected of espionage and imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II. Jeff Liu directs the world premiere for Pan Asian Repertory Theater. (Through March 9, A.R.T./New York Theaters)‘Grangeville’This new two-hander by the Obie Award winner Samuel D. Hunter (“A Case for the Existence of God”) stars Brian J. Smith and Paul Sparks as estranged brothers with different fathers, discrete wounds and far-flung lives — one in their Idaho hometown, the other in a city thousands of miles away. But they have a shared filial task: caring for their sick mother. Jack Serio (“Uncle Vanya”) directs for Signature Theater. (Through March 16, Signature Theater)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Choreographer Chris Gattelli Sends Love Letters to His Dance Heroes

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      The dance humor in Christopher Gattelli’s shows, like “Schmigadoon!” and “Death Becomes Her,” is underpinned by affection for musical theater and its excesses.If Christopher Gattelli’s choreography looks familiar, that’s probably the point. A veteran of more than 20 Broadway shows and a devotee of movie musicals, he has an encyclopedic dance brain, a catalog of musical theater references he deploys throughout his work onstage and onscreen. Homage is his calling card.And that makes him a very clever satirist. His two current projects — the stage adaptation of the television show “Schmigadoon!,” in the Broadway Center Stage series at the Kennedy Center in Washington through Sunday; and Broadway’s “Death Becomes Her,” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater — both feature wickedly detailed sendups of “musical theater dance.”For Gattelli, 52, those scare quotes might as well be hugs. Barbed as his dance humor can be, it’s underpinned by his affection for the genre, in spite and because of its excesses and quirks.“It’s easy to get snarky when you’re spoofing something you’re so familiar with,” he said in an interview. “It’s easy to get all the digs in. But I’m truly writing love letters to all of my dance heroes.”In his choreography for “Schmigadoon!” on AppleTV+, he all but addressed those letters by name. For the show’s first season — which followed a 21st-century couple stranded in a world where every day is a Golden Age musical — Gattelli channeled the knee-slapping, heel-clicking ebullience of the choreographers Agnes de Mille and Michael Kidd. For the second season, set in the grittier environs of “Schmicago,” he brought in the pigeon-toed slinkiness of Bob Fosse and the splayed-fingers jazz of Michael Bennett.A scene from “Schmigadoon!” at the Kennedy Center.Matthew Murphy and Evan ZimmermanWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fun Things to Do in NYC in February 2025

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      Looking for something to do in New York? Enjoy laughs with Liza Treyger, learn about Clara Schumann, or see the Urban Bush Women in a Great Migration love story.ComedyLiza Treyger, above in her new Netflix comedy special, “Night Owl,” will host a “Show and Tell” at Union Hall on Friday.Netflix‘Show and Tell With Liza Treyger’Feb. 7 at 10 p.m. at Union Hall, 702 Union Street, Brooklyn; unionhallny.com.Hot off the heels of the debut of “Night Owl,” her hourlong comedy special on Netflix, Liza Treyger is presenting this showcase in which her funny friends joke about their most cherished possessions.Treyger, who was born in the former Soviet Union and grew up on the outskirts of Chicago, has made a name for herself in the New York City comedy scene over the past decade through her blunt appraisals of herself and society’s sexual politics. This reputation earned her an appearance on Netflix’s “Survival of the Thickest” and a consultant gig on “The Eric Andre Show.” She recently had a supporting role on an episode of the Amazon Prime Video series “Harlem.”Taking part in Treyger’s “Show and Tell” on Friday are Tommy McNamara, Drew Anderson, Marie Faustin and Molly Kearney. Tickets are $15 on Eventbrite. SEAN L. McCARTHYMusicFrom left, Why Bonnie’s Blair Howerton on guitar, Josh Malett on drums and Chance Williams on bass, in Boston in 2022. The band will be at Night Club 101 on Friday.Olivia LeonPop & RockWhy BonnieFeb. 7 at 8 p.m. at Night Club 101, 101 Avenue A, Manhattan; dice.fm.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Tennessee Williams-Marlon Brando Tango, and Other Riffs on Classics

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      Three new plays onstage in Manhattan, “Kowalski,” “Mrs. Loman” and “Nina,” mine treasures of theater history.In the summer of 1947, when Marlon Brando was young, beautiful and not yet famous, the director Elia Kazan gave him $20 to get himself to Provincetown, Mass., from New York to audition for Tennessee Williams.Less than three years after bestowing “The Glass Menagerie” on the world, Williams had a new play on the fast track to Broadway: “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which needed a Stanley Kowalski. But Brando, at 23, was in no hurry to get to Cape Cod. He pocketed the travel funds, hitchhiked there and turned up at Williams’s rented beach house days late.Enticing little anecdote, isn’t it? Gregg Ostrin has taken that historical reality and run with it in “Kowalski,” a diverting new comedy that blends fact with speculation. Brandon Flynn stars as a rough and clever Brando opposite Robin Lord Taylor as a Williams whose default setting is high dudgeon.“Let me make something clear,” the playwright tells the actor in a Southern lilt that stays, thank goodness, well this side of sorghum. “You can be late for Thornton Wilder. You can be late for Bill Inge. You can even be late for Arthur Miller. But you cannot be late for me.”Directed by Colin Hanlon at the Duke on 42nd Street, “Kowalski” neatly sidesteps the largest trap lying in wait, because neither Taylor nor Flynn is doing an impersonation. Each is after an essence of his character, and finds it, satisfyingly.That’s a crucial achievement, since mining treasures of theater history to make new work is always a double-edged endeavor. Audiences, like artists, love the prospect of a show that speaks a language we have already learned; familiarity helps at the box office. But our preexisting notions of who the characters are — whether because they were real-world celebrities or because they are borrowed from canonical dramas — can make us awfully tetchy about other artists’ riffs on them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Merle Louise Simon, a Sondheim Mainstay, Is Dead at 90

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      She originated roles in four of his Broadway musicals between 1959 and 1987, and won a Drama Desk Award for her performance in “Sweeney Todd.”Merle Louise Simon, an award-winning stage actor and the only person to play roles in the original Broadway productions of four Stephen Sondheim musicals, died on Jan. 11 in Lake Katrine, N.Y., in Ulster County. She was 90.Her daughter Laura Simon confirmed the death, in a nursing home.Ms. Simon — who worked for most of her career under the name Merle Louise — began her run in Sondheim shows with “Gypsy,” in 1959, and continued with “Company” (1970), “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (1979) and “Into the Woods” (1987), Mr. Sondheim and James Lapine’s interpretation of fairy tales. (Mr. Sondheim wrote the lyrics for “Gypsy” and the music and lyrics for the other shows.)Ms. Simon in 1987, in the Broadway production of the Sondheim musical “Into the Woods.”Martha Swope, via Billy Rose Theatre Division/New York Public Library“Steve had a real history with Merle,” Mr. Lapine, who directed Ms. Simon in three roles, including the Giant in “Into the Woods,” said in an email. Mr. Sondheim, he added, “loved the energy she brought to the rehearsal room and the stage. Merle was usually the smallest person in the room but always the most ebullient and with the most glorious voice.”When “Gypsy” opened, Ms. Simon had a minor role. But she was promoted in early 1960 to be the understudy to the actress playing June, one of two daughters pushed into show business by their ambitious mother, Rose, played by the powerhouse Ethel Merman.Soon after becoming the understudy, Ms. Simon went on for the actress in the role, who was ailing, and ended up becoming the full-time June.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Antiquities’ Review: Relics of Late Human Life in 12 Exhibits

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      According to Jordan Harrison’s museum piece of a play, we are long extinct by 2240. But the future has kept our Betamaxes.By a campfire on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816, five friends take up the challenge of telling the scariest story. Mary Shelley is clearly the winner, with her cautionary tale (soon to be a novel) of an obsessed doctor whose electrified monster achieves sentience, then runs wild. So freaked out is her pal Lord Byron that his immediate, sneering response — “you’re demented” — quickly turns into a shiver and a prayer.“May we never be clever enough to create something that can replace us,” he says.A mere 424 years later, in 2240, two post-human beings look back on that vignette, and the whole of the Anthropocene, with wonder and pity. How could people have thought of themselves as the endpoint of evolution, one of these inorganic intelligences asks rhetorically, when mankind was obviously just “a transitional species” and “a blip on the timeline”?That timeline is the compelling if somewhat overbearing structural device of Jordan Harrison’s play “The Antiquities,” which opened on Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. Starting with Shelley’s monster (which she counterfactually calls a “computer”) and ending with, well, the end of humanity, it could win a scary-story contest itself, as it maps one possible route, the Via Technologica, from Romantic glory to species demise.For the inorganics of 2240 are here not to praise mankind but to bury it. They are guides to “exhibits” in what the play’s alternative title calls “A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities.” The Shelley scene is the first of 12 such exhibits, demonstrating how inventions gradually overtook natural intelligence and then, like Frankenstein’s monster, destroyed it.From left, Aria Shahghasemi, Sieh, Andrew Garman, Marchánt Davis and Amelia Workman in a scene, dated 1816, on Paul Steinberg’s set made up of matte metal panels.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAt first, the inventions seem useful or harmless or — to us, smack in the middle of the timeline — hopelessly obsolete. A woman in 1910 (Cindy Cheung) presents a wooden finger to a boy injured in a workhouse accident. A nerd circa 1978 (Ryan Spahn) shows off an awkward robot prototype that recognizes 400 English words. (The guy who is pleasuring the nerd is impressed.) In 1987, a mother (Kristen Sieh) whose grieving son (Julius Rinzel) cannot sleep agrees to let him watch one of her soaps, recorded on that magical yet soon-to-be-discontinued technology, the Betamax videotape.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Playwright Larissa FastHorse Doesn’t Want to Be a Cautionary Tale

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      After a delay, “Fake It Until You Make It,” the writer’s follow-up to her Broadway satire, “The Thanksgiving Play,” is finally onstage in Los Angeles.In the 1980s, when Larissa FastHorse was in high school in Pierre, S.D., friends would sometimes forget she was Native American. Talk would turn to the area’s “drunk lazy Indians,” she said, and “I’d be like, ‘um, excuse me, I’m right here.’”“And then it was always, ‘Oh, well, not you!’” she continued. Even after FastHorse’s “The Thanksgiving Play” opened on Broadway in 2023, the “not you” slights continued. At one of her own plays in New York, she overheard women in the bathroom joking about how Native Americans would be late to the show because they tell time by the sun — it was an evening performance — and because they would be taking horses, not cars. “People say crazy stuff like that all the time,” she said.In Southern California, where she has lived since 1991, it rarely occurs to strangers that she is Native, or, as she noted, that anyone might be. “It’s all part of the great erasure,” she said. “Everyone speaks Spanish to me in L.A.,” she said. “Which is fine, it’s lovely. But it’s like I have to fight to be Native American here.”Over the years, FastHorse, 53, has transformed her experiences as a Native American navigating her way through the worlds of theater, nonprofits, TV writing and ballet into thought-provoking, often wickedly funny work. Her plays are both a way of confronting that “great erasure” — “the last thing people tend to think about are Native Americans,” she said — and replacing offensive stereotypes, like the “Hollywood Indians” she grew up watching on TV, with more nuanced and human portrayals.In “The Thanksgiving Play,” which premiered Off Broadway in 2018, four well-meaning white people struggle mightily to produce a more historically accurate holiday pageant for grade schoolers, replacing happy pilgrims and prayers of gratitude with a bag of bloody Native American heads. In “What Would Crazy Horse Do?” (2017), the last members of a fictional tribe encounter a pair of kinder, gentler Ku Klux Klan members.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      7 Surprisingly Busy Days in the Life of an Experimental Theater Maker

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      Peter Mills Weiss shared details of a week of “everyone doing everything all the time, and by the seat of everyone’s pants.”January is known as a time when New York commercial theater recovers from its holiday bender and takes a break from openings.It’s another story for the experimental performance scene, which struts its stuff at festivals such as Under the Radar, Prototype and Exponential. For someone like Peter Mills Weiss, it’s go time.“January is this incredible crush of everyone doing everything all the time, and by the seat of everyone’s pants,” Weiss, 36, said over the phone. “I’m happy to support in all the ways that I can.”Weiss wears many hats, most prominently as a creator with his regular collaborator, Julia Mounsey, of such unsettling, darkly funny shows as “While You Were Partying“ at Soho Rep (2021) and “Open Mic Night” at last year’s Under the Radar.In addition, he and Ann Marie Dorr are joint interim producing artistic directors of the Brooklyn avant-hub the Brick Theater and its annex, Brick Aux. Weiss, who lives in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, also juggles projects as an actor and a sound designer. “I like being a jack-of-all-trades,” he said.Weiss kept a diary of his cultural diet during a mid-January week that culminated with his participation in “Soho Rep Is Not a Building. Soho Rep Had a Building…,” a 12-hour “marathon wake” in honor of Walkerspace, the company’s former home in TriBeCa. These are edited excerpts from phone and email interviews.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More