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      ‘Let’s Call Her Patty’ Review: Rhea Perlman as an Uptown Matriarch

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      Rhea Perlman stars as a quintessential Upper West Sider in Zarina Shea’s snapshot of affluent, self-flagellating motherhoodShe shops at Zabar’s, does Pilates on Columbus Avenue and resides comfortably in a prewar high rise between West End and Riverside, where she gossips about private lives as though they were front-page news.That she could be any number of women, of some advanced years and moderate means, who live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is suggested by the taxonomic title “Let’s Call Her Patty,” a new play by Zarina Shea that opened on Tuesday night at the Claire Tow Theater, overlooking its subject’s natural habitat.Close your eyes to picture the type, and the production’s star, Rhea Perlman, may spring directly from a sidewalk crack, with her featherweight frame, babka-colored curls and voice like gravel and honey.Patty is introduced to the audience, chopping onions behind a long and luxe marble-topped kitchen island, by her niece Sammy (Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer). Scene-setting banter between the two demonstrates their shorthand intimacy, and Patty’s reflexive tendency to make other people’s business her own (and, more specifically, about her). That notably includes the triumphs but mostly troubles of Patty’s daughter Cecile (Arielle Goldman), an artist who struggles with body image and addiction.Patty’s maternal relationships with Cecile and Sammy are the play’s sources of conflict (Patty’s offstage husband, Hal, we’re told, is “fine”). When Cecile, who appears onstage only in brief interludes, falls out of touch, Patty considers it personal punishment, simultaneously convinced that she’s to blame for her daughter’s problems and defensive at her own accusation. Sammy, a font of patience as she is of exposition, gently suggests, “I think this is not about you.”Of course, she’s right. Patty is presented as a quintessential Jewish mother, but the qualities she exemplifies are not culturally exclusive; anyone who recognizes her narcissism from their family dynamics might appreciate a trigger warning. And yet, the play’s own narrow focus on Patty works to its detriment.The matriarch is little more than an amalgam of stereotypes; that there is truth to them is hardly a revelation. But the play does little to question or disrupt the preconceived notions it assumes New York audiences will have about “an Upper West Side lady” like Patty. Nor does Perlman mine much unseen depth from a character exclusively defined by circumstance.The production, from the director Margot Bordelon, confines Patty behind her cutting board, where she chops imaginary onions without shedding a tear for much of the play’s brief 70 minutes. If this is a character study, Patty’s pungent, messy center is largely withheld from view.Goldman’s Cecile occasionally drags a folding chair onstage to insert herself into her mother’s narrative, trembling like a frazzled live wire. Unfortunately, Cecile is kept at arm’s length from a story in which she seems to have the most compelling inner life. Sammy is likewise sketched mostly in relation to her aunt; that Sammy’s mother-in-law is near death is relevant only insofar as it keeps her from being with Patty.Patty’s co-op apartment, one of her primary distinguishing features, is suggested with chic austerity by Kristen Robinson’s set, reflecting a fixation on wealth that the play seems unsure whether it means to critique. Pivots in focus and time are punctuated with abrupt shifts in lighting (by Oliver Wason) and sound (Sinan Refik Zafar) that drum up tension and surprise the drama otherwise lacks.“Let’s Call Her Patty” gestures toward an oral tradition of storytelling that aims to preserve local, and often endangered, histories. Sammy’s narration acknowledges the Lenape tribe, who once lived on the land now occupied by New York City, and suggests that one day it will all be underwater. Dutifully recording for posterity the era of the affluent and self-flagellating mother seems to be as much an act of ambivalence as of love.Let’s Call Her PattyThrough Aug. 27 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Review: This ‘Summer Stock’ Cast Is Having a Blast

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      The Goodspeed Opera House takes on Charles Walters’s 1950 film with zest and humor.At this point we have been burned by many musical adaptations of beloved movies, and reactions have ranged from “Why did they even bother?” to “Dear God, please make it stop.” So it was with some trepidation that I traveled to the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut to check out its take on Charles Walters’s “Summer Stock,” from 1950.The movie’s plot in shorthand: Gene Kelly and Judy Garland put on a show in a barn, and then she sings “Get Happy” at the end. Naturally, that last exhortation pops up in the world-premiere stage version (twice, even) currently running in East Haddam, but it is easy to take to heart: The show may not be perfect, but its craftsmanship, zest and good humor — which are deceivingly hard to achieve without falling into bland cheerleading and forced joy — are perfectly dosed and on target.The book writer Cheri Steinkellner stuck to the movie’s spirit rather than its letter, though she wisely did not mess with the central conceit: A group of theater kids led by the director Joe Ross (Corbin Bleu, last seen on Broadway in the 2019 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate”) find themselves rehearsing a musical on the struggling farm of one Jane Falbury (Danielle Wade).A notable change is that in the director-choreographer Donna Feore’s production, the local businessman and Jane’s sort-of antagonist, Jasper Wingate, has become the stern Mrs. Wingate (Veanne Cox, in supreme form), who wants to take over our heroine’s land to create “the largest commercial farming operation in the Connecticut River Valley.” The Wingate heir is still an oaf named Orville (Will Roland, from “Be More Chill”), but this time around he has a secret — no, not that one. When Jane must find money to save her farm, Joe suggests using his show for a benefit.In the movie, Jane’s barn looks to be of an average New England size from the outside, but magically turns out to be capacious enough to accommodate big numbers. In contrast, the Goodspeed building is impressively large when you walk up to it, but the theater nestled within only has about 400 seats and a fairly small stage, lending “Summer Stock” a welcome intimacy and suggesting the gee-whiz enthusiasm the story requires.Steinkellner and Feore know when to update, when to leave well enough alone, and when to have it both ways. In the reprise of “Get Happy,” for example, the ensemble wears the same black suits and coral shirts as in the movie, though now we also get amusing explanations for how Jane ended up in a fedora and a tuxedo jacket, and how the painted background acquired its pink hue. Hint: The beefed-up character of Jane’s sister (Arianna Rosario) has a hand, or foot, in both.But what really makes this “Summer Stock” pop is its cast, which appears to be having a blast — another element that is too often missing. Bleu, who got his start portraying a young basketball star in the “High School Musical” franchise, has become a terrific interpreter of golden-age fare. His athleticism and deceptively casual nonchalance allow him to effortlessly lead energetic dance numbers like “Dig for Your Dinner,” and his voice has matured into a warm baritone that works wonders on “It Had to Be You” (one of the too many songs added to the show). As Jane, Wade can’t quite summon up the same firepower, but they still make a fine couple.Chewing up the barn with great gusto, Cox, Roland and J. Anthony Crane (playing the hammy, vain thespian Montgomery Leach) leave behind contrails of laughter every time they exit the stage. As Garland sang in another classic “let’s put on a show!” movie, “Girl Crazy”: Who could ask for anything more?Summer StockThrough Aug. 27 at the Goodspeed Opera House, East Haddam, Conn.; goodspeed.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      ‘The Half-God of Rainfall’ Review: Basketball Under the Heavens

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      Borrowing its powers from Greek and Yoruba mythologies, Inua Ellams’s play tells the story of a demigod who becomes an N.B.A. superstar.Turning verse into action is tricky, especially with ideas as lofty as the ones in Inua Ellams’s epic poem “The Half-God of Rainfall,” now appearing in theatrical guise at New York Theater Workshop.The poem is a melodious, sky-high tale of a basketball superstar born as a result of a celestial contest between the Greek and Yoruba gods of thunder, Zeus and Sango. But the stage adaptation, which opened on Monday, runs into some flaws that, while not fatal, strand this Nigerian writer’s work in the mortal realm.A storm of plot and themes is squeezed into an intermission-less 90 minutes: After defeating Sango (Jason Bowen) in a race, Zeus (Michael Laurence) has his pick of Sango’s subjects. To Hera’s (Kelley Curran) defeated disdain, Zeus rapes Modúpé (Jennifer Mogbock), a Nigerian woman, and soon the mixed-race half-god Demi (Mister Fitzgerald) is born.Neighborhood boys ostracize Demi, who can turn the soil to swamp with his tears. But he gradually comes into his powers and makes his way to the Golden State Warriors, learning about other demigods who had to suppress their own supernatural talents on the court. Demi’s growing celebrity eventually lands him face to face with Zeus, providing a chance to avenge his mother.As the deities Elegba and Osún (Lizan Mitchell and Patrice Johnson Chevannes, fantastic as always) narrate Demi’s ascent to sports stardom, they intersperse meditations on the gendered violence that permeates Greek mythology, and later, on the imperialist violence the West perpetrated to obscure African traditions.Ellams’s scope is staggering, and he mostly pulls it off. Each line, heavy with information and emotion, is shot back and forth by the able actors, who turn Ellams’s vibrant, poetic flow into a nonstop athletic match.But there are few scenes of interactions between characters — instead presentational, narration-driven exposition makes up the bulk of the play. And Taibi Magar’s direction displays an uncertain grasp over whether the piece should play naturally or at a distance: There’s the work’s traditional methods of self-aware, oral storytelling — having the cast address the audience, and change into Linda Cho’s athleisure costumes onstage — and the production’s sumptuous, almost immersive elements, courtesy of Stacey Derosier’s lighting, Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound and especially Tal Yarden’s gorgeous projections.Though Orlando Pabotoy’s fluid movement direction, along with Beatrice Capote’s Orisha choreography, strikes a powerful balance between the seamless and more Brechtian styles, the production finds itself stuck between them.I was reminded of Ellams’s “Icarus,” a short piece presented during the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival in 2021. It transformed the parable into the heartbreaking tale of a young Nigerian refugee who, detained at an Italian entry point, takes to the sky. Recited by just two performers, the work, in its simplicity, soared. The poignancy and concision left me wanting a one-by-one re-envisioning of Greek mythology through a contemporary African diasporic lens.Ellams certainly has it in him to assemble a universe of distinctive characters connected by their shared humanity, as he proved in his globe-trotting play “Barber Shop Chronicles.” But here, his ideas, vast and evocative as they are on the page, overwhelm the story onstage, and the sheer amount of talking at the audience becomes draining. Ninety minutes becomes too long for one solidly conveyed story; too short for an entire pantheon of players.His interest in and approach to mixing and remixing Western and African traditions is fascinating, however. This is a writer whose intuitive understanding of the common threads of tradition, globalization and human instinct could very well create a new mythological tapestry for our interwoven times.The Half-God of RainfallThrough Aug. 20 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Liz Kingsman’s ‘One Woman Show’ Lands in N.Y.C.

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      The comedian talks about her slightly goofy, slightly surreal style, and why New York has proved to be “the hardest translation” yet.When it came time to create a trailer for her one-woman show — which is titled, of all things, “One Woman Show” and is playing at the Greenwich House Theater — Liz Kingsman researched what other productions had done. One video especially made her laugh.“It was for one of the Shakespeare histories and it was just close-ups of a man fondling his cuffs and touching his tie,” Kingsman said on a recent afternoon. “You’re like, ‘Is that Kit Harington?’ And then a bit of hair. It’s teasing Kit Harington, and in the end it is Kit Harington.”She decided to deploy the same gimmick for her own promotional trailer, complete with none other that Harington himself (though that “Game of Thrones” star, to be clear, is not in Kingsman’s show). “I’m not famous, so a trailer where it teases me…,” Kingsman said. “No one’s ever heard of me, so who cares?”A similar slightly goofy, slightly surreal style is at work in the Olivier Award-nominated “One Woman Show,” in which Kingsman sends up both a specific subgenre and its stars — boldly confessional, sexually frank, endearingly messy young women — for a “sharply observed satire,” as Jason Zinoman put it in his review for The New York Times.“Liz’s comedy has a sense of authorship that not lots of other comedians are lucky enough to have,” the comedian Alex Edelman said on the phone. (His Broadway solo, “Just for Us,” and “One Woman Show” were directed by Adam Brace, who died in May.) “She’s both totally committed to the character and totally committed to the laceration of the character.”And she has found an audience: Since a one-off outing of the concept in 2019, “One Woman Show” has traveled to the West End and at the Sydney Opera House. Now Kingsman is ready to move on, and says the New York run, which ends on Aug. 11, will be the production’s last.Jason Zinoman called Kingsman’s show a “sharp satire” about a messy attention-seeker grasping at relevance.Joan MarcusAfter growing up in Sydney, Australia, she attended Durham University in England. There she formed the sketch-comedy trio Massive Dad with Tessa Coates and Stevie Martin, and they performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2014 and 2015. Kingsman went solo, firming up a drolly understated sensibility. Most notably, she has spent three seasons as the eye-rolling, unflappable British assistant-turned-lobbyist Rose Pilkington in the French series “Parlement,” a witty cross between “Veep” and “The Thick of It.” (It’s available on Topic in the United States.) “No one I know has ever seen the show so it feels like I’ve made the job up,” she said, laughing.Kingsman, who declined to give her exact age but said “I remain 12 years old,” arrived for the interview with her cockapoo, Emmett, and marveled at the access he enjoyed in New York. “You can go shopping with your dog here,” she said. “Like, you can take them into clothes shops, and you can’t do that in London. That’s really revolutionizing things.”The pair sat down for some hummus and a doggy biscuit at a West Village restaurant near Kingsman’s rented home away from home. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you move to Britain?My mom is British, one of the “Ten Pound Poms”: They needed an immigration boost in Australia so they handed out 10-pounds tickets to British people. When it came to [university], I just went to England — I wanted to go and live in an old building and read books in a little nook somewhere. I quickly learned that it is cold and damp [laughs]. But there is a brilliant industry in London and once I started working, it was very hard to leave.How does humor travel?I’ve definitely found New York to be the hardest translation of the show because I think an American audience believes things that are meant to be ironic at the top. When my character says “Women’s voices aren’t getting heard in theater,” a U.K. audience knows that’s me doing a joke about a woman who would say that very sincerely onstage. But an American audience has been clapping at that line. I don’t know what to do with that because I can’t be, “No, that’s ironic!” I don’t want to generalize too much, but my experience is that there has been a tendency to sort of buy into it a little bit more here.What makes you laugh?I find very serious theater amusing. I saw “Sweeney Todd.” I really enjoyed it, but there’s a sort of big moment where a character dies and the next line was “Oh, no.” The actor had to deliver it with gravitas and I was like, “How are you going to do that? Somebody’s died: ‘Oh no.’ ” I just started laughing at a very serious-themed play. I can’t help it, I just find it funny.The lady does not prefer dungarees: “It was never a specific reference but people started saying that my costume was a reference to one episode of one TV show. And I was like, ‘ecch.’” OK McCausland for The New York TimesOK, but what kind of comedy do you find funny?Commitment to something incredibly stupid makes me laugh — really stupid stuff taken very seriously. There’s a clip from “Parks and Recreation” when [Leslie Knope] is on her campaign run and she has to give a speech in the middle of an ice rink. I’ve watched the clip so many times. It’s quite physical and I love slapstick. The scene generally is very funny, but I also like the idea of how much fun those actors would have had that day. It makes me want to be in a show like that more than anything.I love that you’re wearing dungarees in “One Woman Show,” although apparently it’s a nod to one Phoebe Waller-Bridge wore in “Fleabag”?It’s not, actually. All the one-woman shows I saw, they wear overalls or dungarees because there’s a little bit of “girl next door” about it. If you ever go to any of those festivals like Edinburgh or Brighton, it’s just a sea of women wearing overalls, dungarees or boiler suits. I couldn’t do the show in a boiler suit so I was like, “It’s got to be dungarees.” It was never a specific reference but people started saying that my costume was a reference to one episode of one TV show. And I was like, “ecch.” Also, if I wanted to parody a costume, I’d do a better parody.American female comedians don’t appear to be into dungarees to the same extent.It’s just an unflattering outfit, basically.I think they’re cool! Like something the tomboy George would wear in an Enid Blyton book.But don’t you think there’s a slight kink about that? It’s very hard to describe. Maybe it’s very specific to the U.K. In the script it’s written that she’s wearing messy braids that have been made to look deliberately a little bit messy. She basically has to look casual, like she’s thrown it on but thought has gone into it. It’s all character: It’s what this woman would wear — I would not wear that outfit. Now I will never wear dungarees ever again. And I’m never doing a French braid ever again after August 11! More

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      Review: Young Bros and Maidens Harmonize in ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’

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      This peculiar early Shakespeare comedy gets updated with 10 songs for a youthful alfresco production.“Let’s rock!” is something I’m pretty sure no character in Shakespeare ever said. But on a sandy stage under a jaunty tent, with a green hillside as a welcoming backdrop, it seemed an apt way to begin “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”It is, after all, a young man’s play, both in its authorship (Shakespeare was about 30) and story (four callow bros fall madly in love with four sharp maidens). And this production, directed by Amanda Dehnert for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, intensifies the youth-crush factor with 10 emo songs. Neither fully true to the strange original nor completely remade as a viable musical, it swings between those poles in ways that are both tiresome and charming.Let’s start with the charming: The catchy songs, by Dehnert and the Chicago-based composer André Pluess, tap the sappy heart of summer and are danceable to boot. (You may be the audience member asked at one point to prove it.) Whether folky or funky, and despite lyrics that sound little like Shakespeare — “she’s a nice girl, always thinking twice girl” — they match the story emotionally, with titles like “The Infinite Ones” (as youth always sees itself) and “Change to Black” (as youth at some point must do).That the songs don’t match the story structurally is probably an insuperable problem. “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” with or without the British “u,” is a very youthful, disjointed text, its thin thread of plot repeatedly cut by clowns, dullards, puns, pomposities and noodling that goes nowhere. Misdelivered letters and absurd disguises contribute. By the time you get to the masque near the end, featuring impenetrable spoofs of the nine classical “worthies,” you may doubt young Shakespeare’s judgment of worthiness.And yet his ear for the painful paradoxes of love is already fully in evidence. The four young men of Navarre, who form a “Seinfeld”-like pact to abjure the company of women for three years, break it almost instantly when a delegation of four visiting gentlewomen arrives from France to resolve a diplomatic issue. (After many readings and viewings of the play, I still don’t know what that issue is.) In supple pentameter, Shakespeare explores the difference between the book learning the young men meant to engage in and the learning that emerges, despite their plans, from “the prompting eyes of beauty’s tutors.”From left, Mayadevi Ross, Emily Ota, Antoinette Robinson and Phoebe Lloyd in the play, with music and lyrics by Amanda Dehnert and André Pluess.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, theirs is a bumpy road to maturity. Spurred on by Berowne, “a man replete with mocks,” they double down on whimsy, dressing up for some reason as Russians to bamboozle their intendeds. (In Dehnert’s staging, the “Muscovites” are a rock group.) In response, the women, spurred on by Rosaline, whose eye “Jove’s lightning bears,” disguise themselves as one another to confuse and trump the men. But just as all of this gets sorted, with a quadruple marriage (or more) in sight, a last-minute death delays the nuptials and forestalls a normal resolution.“Our wooing doth not end like an old play,” Berowne says. “Jack hath not Jill” — which if true enough to life, is way too sudden for dramaturgy.The Hudson Valley Shakespeare production is not the first to struggle with such problems in musicalizing “Love’s Labor’s Lost.” But unlike the 1973 opera by Nicolas Nabokov, with a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, or the musical comedy presented by the Public Theater in 2013, with songs by Michael Friedman, Dehnert’s version does not use its songs to deepen character and propel the story.They are generally too short and atmospheric for that, most being sung between scenes instead of during them, and by members of the multitasking cast-slash-band (guitars, drums, accordion) who are observing the action, not experiencing it. The addition of songs, however beguiling, thus winds up emphasizing the play’s ungainliness by adding another unintegrated element and stretching the run time. A full-blown musical might have worked better, but at two hours and 40 minutes, it’s already too long for a summer romp.That’s a shame, because some of the singers — including Melissa Mahoney, who plays the “wench” Jaquenetta, and Luis Quintero, one of the dullards — have great voices. Others compare favorably only with the chorus of mosquitoes that always accompanies a Hudson Valley Shakespeare outing. But if discipline is not the top vocal note, rawness verging on excessiveness is a kind of authenticity in a show about raw, excessive youth.Authenticity is not sufficient when speaking the verse, though; it requires more finesse than some of the young actors yet possess. Getting your mouth around the overlapping and oddly shaped dialogue can be like eating an unpeeled pineapple.Luckily, Stephen Michael Spencer as Berowne and Antoinette Robinson as Rosaline are standouts, fully inhabiting the process of growing up and growing wise. At first almost adversaries — he impulsive and she haughty — they gradually move toward the middle as the invented trials of infatuation give way to the real ones of love. Both are also generally spared the over-emphatic jollity that Dehnert has evidently encouraged as a way of plowing through difficult passages of dialogue and forcing the weird jokes to bloom. It’s no fun when the people onstage are having more fun than you.Still, despite its lapses and longueurs, “Love’s Labor’s Lost” remains in this version a fascinating and feelingful taste of Shakespeare to come. And if in his later works he generally improved on many of the tricks pioneered here, that too is apt. Like those tricks, this musical, as it develops for future productions, may one day improve on its first, green outing.Love’s Labor’s LostThrough Aug. 27 at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      At Two Summer Theater Festivals, Reassuring Signs of Life

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      The industry is facing challenges, but in western Massachusetts the quality of the works is as rich as ever, our critic writes.Suddenly, out of the darkness, came one of the most thrilling sounds an audience can make: a collective gasp. This is how you know that the crowd is rapt, that the storytelling has taken hold. And so it had the other night during a performance of “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at Barrington Stage Company, where a different plot twist elicited another welcome noise: a mid-scene eruption of delighted applause. Humans can be a lot of fun to see a show with.That’s something to keep in mind at this crisis moment in the theater, whose prepandemic audiences have yet to return in their former numbers, and whose programming has shrunk accordingly. But that doesn’t mean the work itself has withered. Over a couple of days in Western Massachusetts last week, I saw two plays, one play reading and one cabaret, and if you looked at the quality of what was there — rather than the quantity of what was not — you’d hardly know that anything was amiss. And Barrington Stage, anyway, has not scaled back this year.“Blues for an Alabama Sky,” directed by Candis C. Jones on the Boyd-Quinson Stage in Pittsfield, Mass., is a tone-perfect production of Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play, set in the summer of 1930, that has plenty of resonance in the summer of 2023. It also shimmers with the charisma of a terrific cast playing funny, likable, fully dimensional friends.Angel (Tsilala Brock), a role originated by Phylicia Rashad, is a Harlem nightclub singer with a voice to fit her name. Guy (Brandon Alvión) is a chicly fabulous costume designer with exquisite taste. In the middle of the Great Depression, they are both freshly out of work — since the night Angel told off her gangster ex from the stage, and Guy defended her. Now they’re roommates, sharing his apartment.Angel hopes that Leland (DeLeon Dallas), a conventionally religious Southern stranger, will swoop in and save her, even though they are a catastrophic mismatch. Guy plans to be rescued by Josephine Baker, whose portrait hangs from his wall like a deity. He sends his designs to her in Paris, fantasizing that she will whisk him there.Across the hall, Angel and Guy’s earnest, impassioned social worker friend, Delia (Jasminn Johnson), is helping to open a family planning clinic — and maybe falling for their nightlife-loving doctor friend, Sam (Ryan George), who delivers babies all over the neighborhood.“I’m not trying to make a revolution,” Delia says, and if her drably sensible suits are any indication, she means it. “I’m just trying to give women in Harlem the chance to plan their families.”But self-determination — control over one’s own body in particular — has always been revolutionary, and freedom from straitjacketing social mores is what Angel and Guy have been chasing ever since they left Savannah for Harlem. As a Black woman and a gay Black man, they’ve each encountered violence aimed at them for that.“Blues for an Alabama Sky” is about the tenacity of hope, the limits of forgiveness and the romance of defiance. It’s a glittering spoken blues, layered with yearning.Bill Irwin in master-clown mode at the Williamstown Theater Festival, which is hosting a series of cabaret performances this summer.Emilio MadridAbout 20 miles north of Pittsfield, Williamstown Theater Festival is producing a drastically cropped season, none of whose offerings are open to review — because, a publicist said, they “are all in active development.” Fair enough. But the festival — which landed in trouble in 2021 when workers accused it of exploiting them, and in response produced a streamlined 2022 season — hasn’t lost its stardust, even without its customary fully staged productions.In the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance at Williams College, the festival’s longtime home, the WTF Cabaret set (by Se Hyun Oh) is stark, the lighting (by Emily Schmit) glamorous. Both audience and performers are onstage, with the auditorium’s rows of empty seats forming the backdrop for the show. A sculptural array of illuminated bulbs hangs in the air, like a constellation of ghost lights. Simplicity, this summer, is the festival’s friend.So, last weekend, was the actor Jeff Hiller. Lately risen on the cultural radar thanks to HBO’s heart-stirring friendship dramedy “Somebody Somewhere,” he hosted the cabaret, trying out comic material for an August show at Joe’s Pub. Bill Irwin performed in master-clown mode, and Jacob Ming-Trent knocked his songs so far out of the park that he could not have been a better advertisement for seeing him down the road in Lenox, Mass., playing Bottom in Shakespeare & Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Aug. 1-Sept. 10).The cabaret hosts and guests change each weekend, but the band and the core performers (Eden Espinosa, Asmeret Ghebremichael and Jon-Michael Reese) are constants. Reese’s fresh, textured interpretation of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” given a soulful flourish by the music director, Joel Waggoner, ought to be a constant, too.Nearby at the Clark, I saw a Williamstown Theater Festival reading of Cindy Lou Johnson’s “Plunder and Lightning,” directed by Portia Krieger. It would be unfair to evaluate the play, about a family of schemers teetering on the edge of ruin, but it was a genuine joy to watch Annie Golden rip into a substantial comic part, with the brilliant Johanna Day alongside her. Not a bad lineup for a Friday afternoon, or for a $15 ticket. And the legroom? Miles of it.Barrington Stage Company presented the world premiere of Mike Lew’s “tiny father,” a comedy set in a neonatal intensive care unit, featuring Andy Lucien as the father of a premature baby.Daniel RaderBack in Pittsfield, Barrington Stage Company was also engaged in new work: the world premiere of Mike Lew’s “tiny father” — a comedy set in a neonatal intensive care unit, where Daniel (Andy Lucien) has become the father of a daughter born 14 weeks premature, and is soon a solo parent. Caroline (Jennifer Ikeda), a nurse on the unit, is his guide through this alien landscape — and sometimes, Daniel thinks, his opponent there.Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, it’s a smart play about parenthood, and the ways race and gender play into expectations and outcomes in health care and elsewhere. (Daniel is Black, his baby’s mother is Asian, and Caroline is written to be played by an Asian or Latina actress.) But the script demands an exceptionally tricky balance of comedy and emotional complexity in the portrayal of Daniel, which this production has yet to find. Talking to the baby, Sophia, though, Lucien is lovely always.Good news, then, from a theatrical landscape lately festooned with co-productions. Though this “tiny father” has ended its Barrington Stage run, it will get a chance to go deeper when it moves to Chautauqua Theater Company in Chautauqua, N.Y., next week. Butts in seats, please.Blues for an Alabama SkyThrough Aug. 5 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org.tiny fatherAug. 4-17 in the Bratton Theater at the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, N.Y.; chq.org. More

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      A Guide to Summer Theater Festivals in New York and the Berkshires

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      In summertime, a lot of stage talent heads for the Hudson River Valley and western Massachusetts, where curious audiences follow. Here is some of what theaters there have on tap this year.Hudson Valley Shakespeare FestivalAmong this summer’s offerings at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival is a production of “Henry V,” directed by Davis McCallum, the company’s artistic director.T. Charles EricksonThis company has a knack for magnificent vistas. Its new home is high above the Hudson River in Garrison, N.Y., with breathtaking views. Picnicking, should you care to, is very much part of the preshow experience, and performances are alfresco, under a sturdy, festive, big white tent. But productions here often use the landscape just outside for striking tableaus, with the tent’s wide, arced entrance framing bits of action on the sloping lawn.This season’s shows are Shakespeare’s “Henry V” (through Aug. 21), directed by Davis McCallum, the company’s artistic director; a musical spin on Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labor’s Lost” (through Aug. 27), adapted and directed by Amanda Dehnert, who wrote the pop-rock score with André Pluess; and “Penelope” (Sept. 2-17), a solo musical re-envisioning of “The Odyssey,” directed by Eva Steinmetz, with music and lyrics by Alex Bechtel, who wrote the book with Grace McLean and Steinmetz. (hvshakespeare.org)New York Stage and FilmThe dance musical “Paradise Ballroom,” featuring choreography by Princess Lockerooo, above, will close out New York Stage and Film’s season next weekend.Kenny RodriguezThere is a particular excitement to seeing theater by daring artists while it is still taking shape. Such is the allure of New York Stage and Film’s readings and workshops, on the campus of Marist College in Poughkeepsie. Last weekend, people filing in to see Lauren Yee and Heather Christian’s new musical adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” were handed a slip of paper advising that many lyrics would be spoken, not sung. “There is much music still to be written,” it said. Disappointing? Not if you approach these shows knowing that they are incubating. Also, Katrina Lenk was playing Mrs. Whatsit, fabulously.The company’s new-play readings this weekend are “The Good Name” (July 29), written by Sopan Deb, a New York Times reporter, and directed by Trip Cullman; and “Downstairs Neighbor” (July 29), by Beth Henley, directed by Jaki Bradley. The season closes with the dance musical “Paradise Ballroom” (Aug. 4-6), directed by Colette Robert, with book, lyrics and choreography by Princess Lockerooo, and music by Harold O’Neal; and a workshop presentation of “Like They Do in the Movies” (Aug. 5-6), a solo show written and performed by Laurence Fishburne, directed by Leonard Foglia. (newyorkstageandfilm.org)Williamstown Theater FestivalFrom left, Jon-Michael Reese, Natalie Joy Johnson and Eden Espinosa at a recent WTF Cabaret performance. The loose and lively weekend concert series has a rotating roster of performers.Emilio MadridWestern Massachusetts’s most powerful magnet for boldface-name stage artists is taking a sparer approach this year — minimal physical production, a focus on works in progress, blink-and-you-miss-them runs. But even as the company looks for a less costly, more sustainable way forward, it has not left glamour behind.At the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance at Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass., the play reading on the main stage this weekend is Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (July 29-30), with Meryl Streep’s daughters, Louisa Jacobson, Mamie Gummer and Grace Gummer, in the title roles, and her son, Henry Wolfe Gummer, as the sisters’ brother. Next weekend, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Michael Chernus and Alison Pill star in a reading of Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman” (Aug. 5-6).The loose and lively WTF Cabaret, on the same intimate stage, is hosted this week by the comedian Lewis Black (July 27-29) and next week by the comedian Jaye McBride (Aug. 3-5). The band is terrific.The festival’s Fridays@3 reading series takes place close by, at the Clark Art Institute, where you might want to leave time to see the exhibition “Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth” or dip your toes in the three-tiered reflecting pool outside. (It’s allowed.) With Diana Oh in the cast, Clarence Coo’s “Chapters of a Floating Life” (July 28) is about two couples from China in postwar New York City. The series finishes with Aurora Real de Asua’s “Wipeout” (Aug. 4), a septuagenarian surfing comedy with Emily Kuroda, Becky Ann Baker and Candy Buckley. (wtfestival.org)Barrington Stage CompanyA revival of Pearl Cleage’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” with Tsilala Brock, left, and Ryan George, is at Barrington Stage Company through Aug. 5.Daniel RaderIn downtown Pittsfield, Mass., this theater has a slate of full productions this summer. A beautifully acted, vibrantly designed revival of Pearl Cleage’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky” is on the Boyd-Quinson Stage (through Aug. 5), followed by a revival of William Finn and James Lapine’s musical “A New Brain” (Aug. 16-Sept. 10). With a cast that includes Adam Chanler-Berat, Andy Grotelueschen and Mary Testa, it’s produced in association with Williamstown Theater Festival.A few blocks away, on the St. Germain Stage at the Sydelle and Lee Blatt Performing Arts Center, Julianne Boyd directs Brian Friel’s classic “Faith Healer” (Aug. 1-27), a drama told in monologues. Downstairs, Mr. Finn’s Cabaret presents a lineup of Broadway veterans: Lillias White (Aug. 13-14), currently playing Hermes in “Hadestown”; Hugh Panaro (Aug. 21), a former Phantom in “The Phantom of the Opera”; the composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown (Aug. 31-Sept. 1), whose musical “Parade” just won the Tony Award for best revival; and Alan H. Green (Sept. 2-3), a company favorite. (barringtonstageco.org)Berkshire Theater GroupChristine Lahti in Berkshire Theater Group’s production of the actress’s autobiographical solo show “The Smile of Her.”Emma K. Rothenberg-WareThis is the final weekend to catch Christine Lahti in “The Smile of Her” (through July 29), an autobiographical solo show about her suburban family in the patriarchal 1950s, at the Unicorn Theater in Stockbridge, Mass. Next up, also at the Unicorn, is the world premiere of the musical “On Cedar Street” (Aug. 12-Sept. 2), about two widowed small-town neighbors who start sleeping side by side to alleviate their loneliness. Adapted from Kent Haruf’s final novel, “Our Souls at Night,” it has a book by Emily Mann, music by Lucy Simon and Carmel Dean and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead. (berkshiretheatregroup.org)Shakespeare & CompanyBrian D. Coats and Ella Joyce in a production of August Wilson’s “Fences,” through Aug. 27, at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass.Eran ZelixonNot a lot of Shakespeare is among the theater happening this summer in green and gorgeous Lenox, Mass., but “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Aug. 1-Sept. 10) is coming right up in an open-air production, with the excellent Jacob Ming-Trent as Bottom. Ken Ludwig’s two-hander “Dear Jack, Dear Louise” (through July 30) is wrapping up its run in another of the company’s outdoor spaces.Indoors are August Wilson’s “Fences” (through Aug. 27), William Gibson’s “Golda’s Balcony” (Aug. 5-20) and Donald Margulies’s “Lunar Eclipse” (Sept. 15-Oct. 22), making its world premiere with Karen Allen and Reed Birney at the tail end of summer. Also inside: a staged reading of “Hamlet” (Sept. 1-3), with Finn Wittrock in the title role and Christopher Lloyd, who played the mad monarch in Shakespeare & Company’s “King Lear” two summers ago, as Polonius. (shakespeare.org) More

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      Book Review: ‘Tom Lake,’ by Ann Patchett

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      This time the celebrated novelist spins the cozy tale of a former actress, her three daughters and their rueful memories. There’s a cherry orchard, too.Are you in possession of a hammock? A creaky old porch swing? A bay window with built-in seating? If not, Ann Patchett’s new novel, “Tom Lake,” will situate you there mentally. I wouldn’t be surprised if it put your fitness tracker on the fritz, even if you amble around listening to Meryl Streep read the audio version.This author is such a decorated and beloved figure in American letters — spinning out novels, memoirs and essays like so many multicolored silks; opening an independent bookstore in Nashville to fight the Amazon anaconda; even helping care for Tom Hanks’s cancer-stricken personal assistant — that I sometimes think of her as Aunt Patchett.Patchett’s actual family of origin was complicated, as she made explicit after the 2016 publication of the semi-autobiographical “Commonwealth.” “The Dutch House” (2019), which had a wicked stepmother, did not stray far from the idea that living with relatives can be messy and hellish.With “Tom Lake,” she treats us — and perhaps herself — to a vision of a family beautifully, bucolically simple: nuclear, in its pre-bomb meaning.Like some guardian angel in the sky, Anton Chekhov hovers over this story, which features three sisters in their 20s and is set on their parents’ cherry orchard(albeit in northern Michigan during the recent pandemic, not the tuberculosis-torn Russian provinces). But Thornton Wilder is driving the tractor.Sequestered not unhappily in lockdown, the sisters’ mother, Lara (she dropped a “u” after reading “Doctor Zhivago”), is telling them, after tiring days in the field, about her long-ago, short-lived career as an actress, whose highlight was starring as Emily Gibbs, the tragic heroine of Wilder’s enduringly popular piece of Americana, “Our Town.”In flashbacks we learn she played Emily in both high school and college in New Hampshire, also home to the play’s fictional Grover’s Corners. Then, after a brief and disorienting detour to Hollywood, she returns to the role in summer stock at a theater company, the titular Tom Lake, that happened to be nearish the orchard.“Even hawking Diet Dr Pepper I was Emily, because she was the only thing I knew how to do,” Lara realized after starting rehearsals to play Mae in Sam Shepard’s rather less innocent “Fool for Love.” “I had the range of a box turtle. I was excellent, as long as no one moved me.” Emily is as important to her as Barbie, apparently, was to so many others: a character so formative, she provides the name for Lara’s firstborn.Lara’s Emily doesn’t aspire to be an actress — that particular affliction has befallen the youngest daughter, Nell, named for Lara’s seamstress grandmother — but she is powerfully fixated on her mother’s former co-star and ex-boyfriend: one Peter Duke, who played Emily Webb’s father at Tom Lake.“Duke,” as everyone calls him, goes on to become a huge celebrity, enchanting the kiddies in a movie musical called “The Popcorn King,” singing and dancing on a floor covered with kernels, then becoming a Serious Actor, winning an Oscar and inevitably descending into addiction. As a teen, Lara’s Emily grows convinced he, not Lara’s hardworking fruit-farmer husband, was her father, and Patchett drops in enough subtle commonalities — their hair, a certain physical rubberiness (“whoever installed her interior compass put the magnet in upside down”) — that the reader is left in genuine suspense about whether it’s true.But the larger theme is that it may not matter: Our children inherit the full range of our experience, as much as genetic traits.“Tom Lake” isn’t a prudish novel — the flashbacks are to the 1980s, when parents hovered a lot less — but it is a resolutely folksy, cozy one, a thing of pies and quilts and nettlesome goats and a middle child named Maisie after the other grandmother. (Lara, in her late 50s up there in rural Michigan, is a demographic anomaly, leaving so many of her old friends in the deep fog of memory without trying to hunt them down on Facebook.) Nell senior had a sewing business and countrified sayings appear here like dropped stitches. You could have knocked me over with a feather!Idle hands? We all know whose workshop they are. You “can’t swing a cat” without hitting a castle, in Scotland.Two performances of Wilder’s Stage Manager are “as different as chalk and cheese.”But Patchett is also, as always, slyly needlepointing her own pillowcase mottos. “There is no explaining this simple truth about life: You will forget much of it.” “Sweet cherries must be picked today and every day until they’re gone.” “Swimming is the reset button.” This last spoken by a lithe and beautiful Black character named Pallace — whose integration into the theatrical utopia seems just a tad too easy.“Tom Lake” is a quiet and reassuring book, not a rabble-rouser. It’s highly conscious of Emily Gibbs’s speech about human failure to appreciate the little things, the Stage Manager’s line about the earth “straining away all the time to make something of itself,” and of the ravages to that earth. Domestic contentment is its North Star, generational continuity its reliable moon. Only a cynic could resist lying down on a nice soft blanket to marvel at Patchett’s twinkling planetarium.TOM LAKE | By Ann Patchett | 320 pp. | HarperCollins | $30 More