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      The Cathartic Value of Dame Edna’s Extravaganzas of Ego

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      Audiences were eager to humbly suffer the stinging quips tossed out by the towering figure that was Barry Humphries’s creation.Listen to This ArticleShe was, lest we forget, the original Real Housewife. Or Surreal Housewife, if you prefer. Possessed of few obvious talents and a bottomless sense of entitlement, this expensively upholstered figure was the archetype for the ordinary middle-class matron who blossomed into improbable, overwhelming, gasp-inducing fame.Her name was Edna Everage (just one vowel away from “average”), and her advent in the mid-20th century anticipated a brash new age of undeserved celebrity. “Oh, my prophetic soul,” she might have said, contemplating the constellation of self-anointed stars who occupy our attention these days. The line comes from “Hamlet.” But Edna was the kind of gal who could convince you that she had coined it all by herself.Dame Edna, as she became known from the early 1970s, was the inspired alter-ego of the sui generis performer Barry Humphries, who died on Saturday in Sydney, Australia. Humphries was 89. Dame Edna, of course, is immortal.To become Edna, Humphries would put on a mauve wig, an increasingly rococo pair of eyeglasses and a glittering gown that screeched conspicuous consumption. Yet it would be a mistake to describe Dame Edna primarily as a drag act.This unfiltered, towering figure — who looked down on the world, in all senses, from a six-foot-plus linebacker’s frame atop stiletto heels — wasn’t a comment on gender. No, Dame Edna was all about blinkered, arrogant class and especially a breed of self-crowned royalty that had become our default deities in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.That would be those who were defined by being famous, whether or not for any discernible reason beyond their willingness to become so. The genius of Humphries’s conceit was to translate the small-minded, unyielding smugness of the middle-class Australian suburbs in which he grew up into the even more invincible complacency of outrageous, drop-dead stardom.As for the rest of us — and that meant, in addition to us peons, her fellow celebrity chums, including the pope and Queen Elizabeth II — we existed to serve as her mirrors, reflecting her own fabulousness.During my tenure as a Times theater critic, there were few events I anticipated more avidly than Dame Edna’s extravaganzas of ego, where I would join the throngs of those she called “possums” and “paupers” to worship at her boat-size feet. Like so many of the greatest comics, she surgically tapped into the ruling obsession of her time.What Lenny Bruce was to the sexual hangups of the late ’50s and early ’60s and what Richard Pryor was to the racial anxieties of the ’70s and ’80s, Dame Edna was to the age of Olympian narcissism. As she said, graciously tossing her signature gladioli into the audience as she was magically lifted into the air at the end of a 1999 performance: “I have to rise above you. It’s the secret of my survival.”Dame Edna in her 2010 show “All About Me” at what is now the Stephen Sondheim Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMy years of reviewing Edna were years when the most commercially successful shows on Broadway were often those that featured faces found on the covers of People, Vanity Fair and supermarket tabloids. Audiences clamored to see Nicole Kidman in “The Blue Room” or Julia Roberts in “Three Days of Rain” not so much to watch a play as to participate in a sacred pilgrimage to the shrines of NICOLE and JULIA.Attending a Dame Edna show thus had its own special cathartic value, rooted in the openly sadomasochistic exchange of energy between her and her audience. She took it for granted that we were there because she was of an unapproachably higher order than we were, a holy order. In a riff that led to a reference to Jesus, she backtracked to say of course she wouldn’t compare herself to him, before pausing to add, “Although there are spooky similarities.”Naturally we humbly suffered the stinging quips she tossed in our direction, collectively and individually. (Pity — and envy — the chosen few she selected for audience participation.) Never mind that when she sang and danced, she sounded like a bullfrog on steroids and moved like a drunken stevedore.She was protected by her impregnable certainty that whatever she did was utterly beyond reproach. Reviewing her 2004 Broadway show “Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance!,” I wrote, “Dame Edna, you see, knows better than anyone that fame means never having to say you’re sorry.”That attitude is less likely to fly in 2023, when being famous seems to mean you’re apologizing all the time. And in writings and interviews in their later years, both Edna and Humphries stumbled with comments that drew outcries from members of the Latino and trans communities and others.So allow me to return to an earlier moment in this century, when Edna was at the peak of her invulnerability, and I received a letter after raving about one of her shows. “I have to say,” the note read, “I almost deserved it.” It was signed Barry Humphries. Had the signature been Edna Everage there would have been no “almost” about it.Audio produced by More

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      ‘New York, New York’ Review: The Big Apple, Without Bite

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      Based loosely on the 1977 film, a show about performers making it in the big city comes to St. James Theater with the sharper edges of its source material sanded off.There’s a big new Broadway musical called “New York, New York,” and it’s based on the Martin Scorsese film bearing the same title.Sort of.Both the movie and the show have lead characters named Jimmy Doyle and Francine Evans, both are set immediately following World War II and both prominently feature a certain anthem by John Kander and Fred Ebb. You know, the one whose first five notes, plunked on a piano, are enough to automatically prompt the brain to fill in the rest.And it is that title song alone, rather than the movie, that is the true inspiration for the sprawling, unwieldy, surprisingly dull show that opened on Wednesday night at the St. James Theater.Extrapolating from its lyrics, “New York, New York,” directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, is about the people wearing those “vagabond shoes,” the ones who “want to wake up in the city that doesn’t sleep.” Jimmy (Colton Ryan) and Francine (Anna Uzele) now rub elbows with characters dreamed up by the book writer David Thompson with Sharon Washington. They are musicians and singers, strivers and dreamers. And sadly, none make much of an impression, mired as they are in a syrupy muck of good sentiments and grating civic cheerleading.As the various story lines move toward their inevitable intersection, any sign of wrinkle or kink has been smoothed out. The most prominent victims are the reimagined Jimmy and Francine, who have been flattened into cardboard figures. The film’s Jimmy, portrayed by Robert De Niro, was an obnoxious, abusive, narcissistic jerk of a sax player who fell for Liza Minnelli’s Francine, a passionate singer who worked her way up from canary in big bands to solo star; their volatile relationship would not pass the smell test with 2023 audiences.The new Jimmy is merely a minor irritant who has graduated from good saxophonist to brilliant multi-instrumentalist equally at ease playing jazz with the African American trumpeter Jesse (John Clay III) and Latin grooves with the Cuban percussionist Mateo (Angel Sigala), whose own stories are delineated in broad strokes. That Jimmy ends up as a human bridge between the musical styles of Harlem and Spanish Harlem is quite a feat for a white-bread Irish kid. (A Jewish violinist played by Oliver Prose mostly exists on the sideline.)Meanwhile, Francine comes across as a spunky, empowered free spirit plugged into a 21st-century outlet. A Black woman, she overcomes the treacherous waters of the music scene with relative ease, and setbacks seem to glide off her.Ryan (“Girl From the North Country,” Connor in the film of “Dear Evan Hansen”) and Uzele (“Once on This Island,” Catherine Parr in “Six”) are technically fine, but they don’t fill characters drawn as sketches. They never find the ache that drives both Francine and Jimmy, nor the sexual attraction between them.This creates a central void that further restrains the overly polished book — friction feeds fiction.And if anybody knows that, it’s John Kander. An effective mix of louche syncopation, unabashed romanticism and biting sarcasm long set Kander and Ebb apart on Broadway, from “Cabaret” to “Chicago” to their brilliant earlier collaboration with Stroman, “The Scottsboro Boys.”The score for “New York, New York” juxtaposes new songs Kander wrote with Lin-Manuel Miranda, like the propulsive “Music, Money, Love,” with older ones set to lyrics by Ebb. Of those, the best known (you-know-what and “But the World Goes ’Round”) were pulled from the Scorsese movie, while others were repurposed, such as “A Quiet Thing” from the 1965 show “Flora the Red Menace,” and “Marry Me” from “The Rink” (1984).But no matter when or who they were written with, too many of the songs lack Kander and Ebb’s signature serrated edge. Partly this has to do with Sam Davis’s arrangements and music direction, which have a deficit of oomph, and thus further reinforce the show’s sexlessness — there is no pulse when there is no swing. (Kander and Ebb were capable of that more than most Broadway creators: Just listen to, say, the fantastically driving “Gimme Love” from “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”)Francine, who comes across as an empowered free spirit, seems to overcome the treacherous waters of the music scene and racial animosities of the 1940s with relative ease, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe new show’s rah-rah tone eventually becomes numbing. This is all the more frustrating because ambivalence is baked into the title song, which alludes to the city’s mercurial temperament. “If I can make it there/I’d make it anywhere” — we’re in a tough town — is followed by “It’s up to you/New York, New York,” which deprives the singer of agency. But the show follows the triumphant template set by Frank Sinatra rather than the more ambiguous one imparted by Minnelli. In this rose-colored vision, trials are temporary, everybody gets along, and nobody runs up against New York’s bad side.Stroman has a rare affinity for classic Broadway showmanship, as illustrated by her work on “Crazy for You” and “The Producers,” but she can also veer into radical stylization, as in “The Scottsboro Boys.”Here, the flashes of inspiration are few and far between. A highlight is a tap number staged on high beams, with a couple inscribed with “JK 3181927” and “FE 481928” — Kander and Ebb’s birth dates, and two of the Easter eggs lurking in Beowulf Boritt’s vibrant set, dominated by towering fire escapes. The magical moment known as Manhattanhenge is evoked with a terrific assist from the lighting designer Ken Billington. And there is, as always, the visceral thrill of watching a big band rise up to the stage, when Jimmy’s combo kicks off the title song at the end.It is not much to remember from a show that clocks in at nearly three hours and had such formidable potential. “You can be anyone here,” Jesse says at one point, “do anything here.”If only “New York, New York” had interpreted that line not as a reassurance, but as a challenge to dare.New York, New YorkAt the St. James Theater, Manhattan; newyorknewyorkbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Summer, 1976’ Review: The Path to Freedom Starts With a Friendship

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      Two mothers make a life-altering connection during a play date in this production for the Manhattan Theater Club.Holly and Gretchen. Those are the little girls’ names, so dissimilar in the way they hit the ear: one soft, warm and breathy; the other sharp-edged and cramped. Just like their mothers.The children are 5, maybe 6, when they first play together and hit it off, instant pals suddenly eager to see each other every day. In “Summer, 1976” — David Auburn’s bittersweet, comic memory play — that means their mothers, diametric opposites, will be hanging out a lot, too.This is a fortunate thing for us, the audience. Because in Daniel Sullivan’s sun-dappled Broadway production for Manhattan Theater Club, Laura Linney plays the austere, censorious Diana to Jessica Hecht’s vastly chiller Alice — or, as Diana describes this fresh acquaintance, a “sleepy-eyed little hippie with her shorts and her coconut oil.”“I sort of immediately hated her,” Alice tells us in narrator mode, which she and Diana slip in and out of as they recall the time when they were new to each other.But when Alice reaches into her macramé purse and retrieves a joint (“I only took it out because it was the only way I could imagine getting through the next 10 minutes,” she says), Diana tokes prodigiously to prove she’s not a square. On John Lee Beatty’s lyrically midcentury modern set, summer-lit by Japhy Weideman at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, the two women get the munchies and have a feast. Nearly by chance, a life-changing friendship takes root.They are a gorgeous duo, these friends: bickering lifelines for each other, vulnerable and too proud. In one narrated stretch, with Hana S. Kim’s projection design aiding our imaginations, Diana and Alice embark on a cross-country road trip, terminating in San Francisco — which seems ideal, not least because it brings to mind Linney’s ’70s heroine Mary Ann Singleton in the mini-series “Tales of the City.”Auburn, a 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for “Proof,” another richly female-centered drama directed by Sullivan in its premiere, isn’t breaking any ground with theatrical form here. And the white, college-educated, Midwestern young women at the center of this play are a very particular slice of the culture. Stretching from 1976 to 2003, this is a story of profound connection and awakening disquiet, which Sullivan directs with his customary unostentatious lucidity.If “Summer, 1976” feels too comfortable to be fashionable, it’s sharply observant, too, and subtly, insistently feminist — more than the wisp of a two-hander that it might first appear to be. Auburn, who at 53 was about Holly and Gretchen’s age during the Bicentennial, has once again sown a script with riches for actors. Linney and Hecht mine them for all they’re worth.A frustrated artist who teaches at Ohio State University, Diana is a single mother — the kind with family money as a cushion and a rule against Gretchen watching any TV shows that aren’t on PBS. An inveterate snob who judges the worth of her fellow humans by their design choices and the books they read, Diana is harder to like than Alice is — though in Linney’s hands, no less funny or affecting. The second line out of her mouth gets a laugh with its withering disdain for Alice’s daughter.“I didn’t like her child, actually,” Diana says.Diana’s off-puttingness is partially strategic; it keeps her safe from the harm that other people might cause by getting close. But her brittle-perfectionist facade conceals a deep well of insecurity and loneliness, and a reserve of compassion that’s more capacious than we’d guess.Alice, in her flowing peasant dress (costumes are by Linda Cho), is the kind of fluttery, gentle-voiced woman who is routinely underestimated. She’s smarter and more resilient than she lets on, though, and, like Hecht’s terrific performance, admirably sly. A stay-at-home mother with almost zero interest in cooking, cleaning or decorating, Alice is married to Doug, an economist who’s up for tenure at the university and spends the summer buried frantically in his papers. Invested in believing that she’s happy, and that her marriage is, too, Alice looks after Holly, sunbathes in the yard of their modest house and indulges in best-selling paperbacks.One of those novels, Robin Cook’s “Coma,” not published until 1977, is a slight, seemingly calculated cheat on Auburn’s part in a show that’s otherwise meticulous about period accuracy. (See, for glorious example, Diana’s impeccably turquoise-shadowed eyelids — as well as her hair, styled by Annemarie Bradley, and Alice’s, styled by Jasmine Burnside.)A medical thriller, “Coma” is also about a woman who enters an overwhelmingly male professional world and faces sexist pushback. Not that the play gets into this; it’s just a signal that’s there for picking up.But both Alice and Diana, who meet through a campus child care co-op designed by Doug as an economic model, have seen their creative and career ambitions derailed. They belong to a generation of women who came of age in time for the sexual revolution and took advantage of that freedom pre-Roe v. Wade. Still, there remained the practical matter of how pregnancy could permanently rearrange their lives, and the entrenched expectation that a married woman puts her husband’s career first.Diana got pregnant in art school during a fling with a glassblower; Alice dropped out of graduate school to marry Doug, then had Holly. Columbus — a staid heartland city named for that avatar of heedless white male adventuring — was never the aim for either of them.“Great things were promised me, Alice,” Diana says. “I promised them to myself.”In that red, white and blue summer, they question what’s gone wrong with their American dreams. And they start, with poignant imperfection, to put things right.Summer, 1976Through June 10 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘The Shark Is Broken,’ a ‘Jaws’ Comedy, Plans Broadway Run

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      The play stars Ian Shaw, whose father, Robert Shaw, played a shark hunter in the movie.“The Shark Is Broken,” a comedy about the making of “Jaws” that stars the son of one of the film’s main actors, will open on Broadway this summer.The play is the brainchild of Ian Shaw, whose father, Robert Shaw, played Quint, the psychotic shark hunter, in the film. Its film set was plagued by problems, some exacerbated by Robert Shaw’s drinking, and the play depicts the fraught relationship between him and his co-stars, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider.In the play, set in 1974, the three men are trapped together on a boat, managing bad weather, (fake) shark troubles and alcohol.The play began its life at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019, opened in London’s West End in 2021 after a pandemic-related delay, and had a production in Toronto last fall. The Broadway run is to begin previews on July 25 and to open on Aug. 10 at the Golden Theater.The play received a number of strong reviews in London, including from The Evening Standard, which said Ian Shaw “gives what is undoubtedly one of the best theatrical performances of the year.” (The Guardian was more restrained, saying that “too much of the humor hinges on 21st-century hindsight” but also praising Ian Shaw’s “loving and eerily evocative portrayal of his own father.”)Ian Shaw wrote the play with Joseph Nixon; the production is being directed by Guy Masterson and produced by Sonia Friedman and Scott Landis.The play joins what is shaping up to be an unusually busy summer on Broadway. There is already horror (“Grey House”) and farce (“The Cottage”) represented, along with three big musicals (“Once Upon a One More Time,” “Here Lies Love,” “Back to the Future”) and a solo comedy (Alex Edelman’s “Just for Us”). More

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      Megan Terry, Feminist Playwright and Rock Musical Innovator, Dies at 90

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      She wrote 70 plays, won an Obie Award and wrote and directed “Viet Rock,” a musical that predated “Hair” and is considered the first U.S. stage work to address the Vietnam War.Megan Terry, an Obie Award winner, a founding member of the Open Theater group and a prolific feminist playwright who wrote and directed a rock musical on the New York stage that predated “Hair,” died on April 12 at a hospital in Omaha. She was 90.Elizabeth Primamore, a writer who is working on a book about Ms. Terry and four other women writers, confirmed the death on Monday.Ms. Terry’s “Viet Rock: A Folk War Movie” opened at the Martinique Theater, an Off Broadway house, on Nov. 10, 1966, during the Vietnam War, after earlier performances at the Yale Repertory Company and La MaMa E.T.C., in the East Village.The rock numbers’ lyrics were poignant and pointed: “The wars have melted into one/A war was on when I was born.” One song advised against optimism: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket/Baskets wear out and men die young/ Better to marry trees or elephants/Men die young.”The dialogue played with politics and popular culture. “Let’s all go gay with L.B.J.,” one character said, a twist on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign slogan “All the way with L.B.J.” Others declared: “I lost my way with L.B.J.,” “March to doomsday with L.B.J.” and “I lost my green beret on the Road to Mandalay.”“Viet Rock” was believed to be the first American stage work to address the Vietnam War.“The piece ended with an image of rebirth,” the critic Dan Sullivan wrote in The Los Angeles Times, “but the image that stayed with the viewer was a mound of dead soldiers, male and female, muttering ‘Who needs this?’”The New York Times panned the production. Walter Kerr, the newspaper’s chief theater critic, dismissed it as “essentially thoughtless, from-the-gut-only noise.” The Village Voice called it extraordinary.A year later, one of its cast members, Gerome Ragni, and two partners presented their musical “Hair” at the Public Theater, which moved to Broadway in 1968 and found overwhelming international success.A 1966 poster for the Open Theater production of “Viet Rock” at La MaMa E.T.C. in the East Village. The musical received mixed reviews.LaMama ArchivesMs. Terry, in her mid-30s, went on to write “Approaching Simone” (1970), about Simone Weil, the French activist philosopher. It won the Obie Award for best Off Broadway play.Jack Kroll wrote in Newsweek magazine that “Simone” was “a rare theatrical event” filled with “the light, shadow and weight of human life and the exultant agonies of the ceaseless attempt to create one’s humanity.” Clive Barnes of The Times called it “a superb theatrical coup.”Marguerite Duffy was born on July 22, 1932, in Seattle, the daughter of Harold and Marguerite (Henry) Duffy. Her father was a businessman. Marguerite became fascinated with theater after seeing a play at age 7 — a passion that, by her account, her disapproving father ridiculed, giving her nicknames like Tallulah Blackhead and Sarah Heartburn, as opposed to Bankhead and Bernhardt.In high school, she worked with the Seattle Repertory Playhouse, learning early that politics and theater could be powerful but prickly bedfellows. The playhouse closed in 1951 under pressure from the House Un-American Activities Committee.Marguerite won a scholarship to the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada, where she earned a certificate in acting, directing and design. Returning to her home state, she completed her bachelor’s degree in education at the University of Washington.She then took a teaching job at the Cornish School of Allied Arts, today Cornish College of the Arts, in Seattle. Her first plays, including “Beach Grass” and “Go Out and Move the Car,” were criticized for their frankness, which led her to take two drastic steps.She began doing her theater work under a pseudonym. Megan was the Celtic root of her first name, and Terry was a tribute to the 19th-century British actress Ellen Terry. And she moved to New York City.Her plays in New York included “The Magic Realist” (1960), “Ex-Miss Copper Queen on a Set of Pills” (1963), “When My Girlhood Was Still All Flowers” (1963), “Eat at Joe’s” (1964) and “Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool, Dry Place” (1967).“Plays by Megan Terry” is an anthology of three of her works, “Approaching Simone,” “Babes in the Bighouse,” and “Viet Rock.”Broadway Play PubOne of Ms. Terry’s most talked-about techniques with the Open Theater, an experimental New York company founded in 1963 by Joseph Chaikin, was known simply as transformation. An actor might begin speaking in one language and suddenly switch to another, having taken on a new character’s identity.In a scene in “Viet Rock,” one actor mimes being hit by gunfire and the others catch him. “Then, abruptly, the sounds change, the body is held high, and the group, rotating weirdly, has become a helicopter, transporting the wounded to Saigon,” the critic Michael Feingold wrote in The Times in 1966. Seconds later, he wrote, the actors became the hospital, and “shortly afterward turn it, without a qualm, into a Buddhist funeral.”The Open Theater’s last production was “Nightwalk” (1973), written by Ms. Terry, Sam Shepard and Jean-Claude van Itallie and performed in repertory with two other works. Mel Gussow of The Times called it “enormously enjoyable,” with a “strong and disquieting impact.”Ms. Terry also worked with the Firehouse Theater in Minneapolis. In her 40s, she moved to Nebraska to become the playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theater in Omaha and continued to produce experimental work.At the end of her career, she had written 70 plays. They include “Babes in the Bighouse: A Documentary Fantasy Musical About Life in Prison” (1974), “Sleazing Toward Athens” (1977), “15 Million 15-Year-Olds” (1983), “Dinner’s in the Blender” (1987) and “Breakfast Serial” (1991).Much of her work was intended, at least partly, for young audiences. “The Snow Queen” (1991) was a playful adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. “Headlights” (1990) was an examination of illiteracy.Ms. Terry was a founder, with five others, of the short-lived but influential Women’s Theater Council in 1972. She received the Dramatists Guild Award in 1983. Along with her wife, Jo Ann Schmidman, and Sara Kimberlain, she was an editor of “Right Brain Vacation Photos” (1992), an illustrated book of two decades of Magic Theater productions.Ms. Terry is survived by Ms. Schmidman.Saying goodbye was one of Ms. Terry’s least favorite activities. When she was getting her degree in education, she remembered the pain of losing the third-grade class she had student-taught all year. In her career, she found a way to avoid that kind of enforced separation.“I’ve always loved being in a theater company and being with people year after year,” she said in a 1992 interview at Wichita State University. “It satisfies my emotional needs and my intellectual needs. I come from a huge family, and theater gives you the chance to recreate the family in your own image.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Breathless’ Review: Shopping Soothes an Anxious Mind

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      Laura Horton’s poignant comic monologue at 59E59 Theaters, part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, delivers a sympathetic portrayal of a sample-sale hoarder.Clothes can send Sophie into a rhapsody like nothing else does. Ever since she was a child, trawling thrift shops for secondhand style, her purchases have felt like victories.In those early years, some of the thrill came from finding name brands that would help her fit in better with the kids at school. But she has always had an eye for fashion, no matter how impractical.By the time she is a young adult, an aspiring writer living in London and stalking sample sales, the dresses and sweaters and shoes that she lugs home to her room in bulging bags have little to do with wearability. Does she need five ball gowns? Nope. But shopping is how Sophie soothes her increasingly anxious mind.Laura Horton’s poignant comic monologue “Breathless,” part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, finds Sophie at a breaking point. Played by Madeleine MacMahon, who gives her a nervous likability, Sophie would seem to have arrived at a joyous time in life. In her late 30s, she has a thoughtful, interesting new girlfriend, Jo, whom Sophie can envision as a long-term partner. Yet at the end of every date, she fabricates reasons Jo can’t come into her apartment.“There’s all the time in the world to see my place,” Sophie says, except there isn’t, because Jo is weary of being kept at a distance. Too mortified to confess that her apartment is stuffed with clothes — a dangerous, suffocating, hoarder quantity of clothes — Sophie gets dumped. She has, essentially, chosen Vivienne Westwood (Ah, that checkered dress!) and Stella McCartney (Oh, those silk-screened pants!) over a woman who’s into her.Stephanie Kempson’s production for Theater Royal Plymouth smartly lets us imagine Sophie’s labyrinth of apparel, her towers of shoes. The set and props are minimal: a couple of clothing racks hung with empty garment bags; a single shopping bag from Alexander McQueen. Throughout, Sophie wears the same casual outfit: loose overalls with sneakers. (Set and costumes are by Kempson, Horton and MacMahon.)The play takes vivid hold through MacMahon’s performance, which includes a small gallery of supporting characters. Among them are Sophie’s sweet, gruff father and her unflappably loving mother, whose warmth is as enveloping as a hug.There is also a journalist friend who (spoiler) promises Sophie anonymity in a story about hoarding, then splashes her name and photo all over a national newspaper. The betrayal hits so hard in performance that I wanted to implore the fictional Sophie not to believe her friend, as she does, that it’s all his editors’ fault.A program note says that the play is based on Horton’s “own experiences of hoarding disorder,” and quotes her as saying that she was “heavily influenced by ‘Sex and the City’ growing up.” It seems only right, then, that “Breathless” is onstage in a part of Manhattan — about midway between a Dior boutique and Bloomingdale’s — where luxury beckons, and the price is steep.BreathlessThrough May 7 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Review: Byronic Heroism in ‘Sardanapal’ at the Berlin Volksbühne

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      The director and star of the Volksbühne’s new show, based on a play by Lord Byron, picked up another role when one of the lead actors was missing in action.Before the curtain rose at the Berlin Volksbühne for Friday’s premiere of “Sardanapal,” inspired by Lord Bryon’s 1821 play “Sardanapalus,” the audience learned that one of the show’s lead actors, Benny Claessens, was “not doing well.” In heroic, Byronic fashion, the show’s director and lead Fabian Hinrichs rescued the evening by jumping into the fray and assuming his absent co-star’s role, along with his own.And so the show — a labor of love that verges on folly — went on. Hinrichs’s ambition, it seems, is to revive the English Romantic poet’s verse drama about Sardanapalus, an Assyrian king who lived in the 7th century B.C. and whose credo, in Byron’s memorable formulation, was “eat, drink, and love; the rest’s not worth a fillip.” Instead of pursuing violent conquest and martial glory, the powerful monarch of the title revels in the good life and inspires his subjects to do likewise.In a 2019 article about the play by Hinrichs that was republished on the production’s website, he writes that Byron’s forgotten drama “deserves a splendid rebirth.” A splendid rebirth is decidedly not what the Berlin audience got on Friday night.Hinrichs, a wry and charismatic performer who is also credited with the production’s music and the sets (along with Ann-Christine Müller), is a cult figure at the Volksbühne, known for his collaborations with René Pollesch, the German writer-director who is the theater’s artistic director. One of their productions together was a splashy extravaganza at Berlin’s biggest revue theater, in 2020.But this is Hinrichs’s first time directing a show at the Volksbühne; over the course of its intermission-less two hours, the production feels dramaturgically rudderless.Far from a faithful staging of Byron’s five-act tragedy, Hinrichs’s staging is essentially a revue. It recalls several of the Volksbühne’s other recent outings, including Florentina Holzinger’s “Ophelia’s Got Talent” and Constanza Macras’s “Drama,” which also combine dialogue, music and dance in messy, hard-to-classify evenings. The most sustained engagement we get with Byron’s work and themes is a corny YouTube tribute video of inspirational quotes that is projected onstage during the show.The production features dancers, an acrobat and a local youth orchestra, but it also spends some time in a Munich supermarket.Apollonia T. BitzanThe evening gets off to a slow start, with a series of disconnected musical numbers, both live (a gusto-filled saxophone solo) and canned (Barry White’s “Let the Music Play”). Hinrichs dances ecstatically to the disco classic before singing a song by Schubert.Before we get to ancient Mesopotamia, however, we find ourselves in a Munich supermarket at 5 a.m., listening to Hinrichs making small talk with the cashier (and holding up the checkout line). What does she think about while scanning items for eight hours a day, he wants to know. The actress Lilith Stangenberg launches into a lusty monologue about her love for the sea and sand. Stangenberg, an striking and eccentric comédienne, returns later in the evening as Myrrha, an enslaved Greek woman who is Sardanapalus’s lover.After waiting on the supermarket checkout line for an hour, we finally get to Assyria and to Byron’s drama. On opening night, Hinrichs, filling in for his absent star, clutched the script in his hand as he declaimed the epicurean monarch’s lofty verse. (Claessens’ name has been taken off the “Sardanapal” program for subsequent performances, and local news media have speculated about a rift between the actor and director; a Volksbühne spokeswoman said Claessens is unwell.)Under these trying circumstances, Hinrichs’s delivery was both muscular and somehow deflated. His signature laconic tone was unmistakable: wide-eyed yet world-weary, and shot through with grace and absurd humor. Yet in the context of a disjointed and meandering production, even Hinrichs’s performance grew exasperating.Still, there were some moments of reprieve. It was wonderful to find the Volksbühne’s longtime music director Sir Henry back on the main stage and at his piano. He accompanies Hinrichs as the actor warbles his way through the Schubert, performs as the soloist in the first movement of a Chopin piano concerto and even operates a floor polisher onstage in the supermarket scene. A late-evening fairy ballet for dancers in billowy white costumes was a high point, as was the lovely, all-too-brief scene in which the acrobat Christine Wunderlich recited a monologue during an aerobic silk performance. And a youth orchestra from a local high school accompanied Sir Henry in the Chopin: it returned later in the evening to perform some Philip Glass, and the evening wrapped up with (why not?) Abba’s “Dancing Queen.”In more ways than one, “Sardanapal” felt like a missed opportunity for the Volksbühne, which is slowly regaining its footing after a few extremely rocky years. February’s premiere of “Die Monosau” was an invigorating jolt of theatrical madness that felt like a vindication of the theater’s new model of collective leadership. I hope that “Sardanapal” isn’t too much of a setback for an institution that finally seemed to be on its way to recovery.SardanapalThrough May 30 at the Volksbühne theater, in Berlin; www.volksbuehne.berlin. More

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      Todd Haimes, 66, Who Rebuilt the Roundabout Theater Company, Dies

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      After rescuing the company from bankruptcy, he turned it into a major player on Broadway and one of the largest nonprofit theater companies in the country.Todd Haimes, who rescued New York’s Roundabout Theater Company from bankruptcy and built it into one of the largest nonprofit theaters in America, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 66.A spokesman, Matt Polk, said his death, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was caused by complications of osteosarcoma. Mr. Haimes had lived with the cancer since 2002, when he was diagnosed with sarcoma of the jaw.As the artistic director and chief executive at Roundabout, Mr. Haimes had an extraordinarily long and effective tenure. He led the nonprofit company for four decades, turning it into a major player on Broadway, where it now runs three of the 41 theaters.Roundabout has focused on classics and revivals but has also been a supporter of new work. Under Mr. Haimes’s leadership, it excelled on both fronts, winning 11 Tony Awards for plays and musicals it produced and nurturing the careers of contemporary American writers, including Stephen Karam, Joshua Harmon and Selina Fillinger.Among Roundabout’s biggest successes during his tenure was a 1998 revival of “Cabaret,” originally starring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson, that survived a bumpy start (a construction accident interrupted performances for four weeks) and then ran for nearly six years. It returned a decade later for a one-year reprise.There were many other triumphs, including a 2020 revival of “A Soldier’s Play” that is now touring the country. Both productions won Tony Awards.Catalyzed by America’s social unrest over racial inequality in 2020, Mr. Haimes led Roundabout in an effort to unearth lost gems written by artists of color. One result was an acclaimed Broadway production of the Black playwright Alice Childress’s 1955 backstage drama, “Trouble in Mind.” It had never made it to Broadway because Ms. Childress had refused to soften the show’s ending to make it less challenging for white theatergoers.Mr. Haimes joined Roundabout in 1983 as managing director. He was just 26, and the company, founded in 1965 and saddled with debt, was operating in rented space in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. At one particularly desperate point he used his own credit card to keep the company afloat. But a few weeks after he arrived, the board of directors voted to shut it down.A board member subsequently donated enough money to buy the company some time, and Mr. Haimes engineered a turnabout — cutting the staff, reducing expenses, improving marketing and, over time, expanding the audience with measures such as early weekday curtain times to attract an after-work crowd, special events for singles and gay theatergoers, and discounts for children. In 2016, he became the first presenter to allow the livestreaming of a performance of a Broadway show, a much-praised revival of “She Loves Me.”Mr. Haimes, right, with Gene Feist, Roundabout’s artistic director, in the theater in 1986. “I have no desire to be on stage, but I get a tingle just being around one,” he said.Jack Manning/The New York TimesBernard Todd Haimes was born on May 7, 1956, in Manhattan to Herman and Helaine Haimes. His father was a lawyer, his mother a homemaker.His onstage life was exceedingly brief: In elementary school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he wore a dress to play the title role in a production of “Mary Poppins.” He later claimed that he had landed the part because he was the only child who could pronounce “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. at Yale. Before arriving at Roundabout, he was general manager of the Hartman Theater Company in Stamford and managing director of the Westport Country Playhouse, both in Connecticut.“I had no desire to trade stocks and bonds, and making Nivea cream wouldn’t turn me on,” he told The New York Times in 1986. “I’ve loved the theater all my life. I have no desire to be onstage, but I get a tingle just being around one, ever since I worked on the stage crew for ‘How to Succeed in Business’ on Broadway when I was in 10th grade.”He became producing director of Roundabout in 1989 and added the title of chief executive in 2015.“The advantage of my background is that all of my artistic decisions are being informed by management concerns,” Mr. Haimes said in 2004. “No one’s ever going to accuse me of being a crazy artist. The disadvantage is the same: that perhaps there are brilliant things other people could accomplish that I just can’t.”He is survived by his wife, Jeanne-Marie (Christman) Haimes; two children, Dr. Hilary Haimes and Andrew Haimes; two stepdaughters, Julia and Kiki Baron; and four grandchildren. His first two marriages, to Dr. Alison Haimes and Tamar Climan, ended in divorce.Mr. Haimes led Roundabout’s move to Broadway in 1991, when he began presenting work in the Criterion Center, which no longer exists. The move was a turning point for the company. “Because of the Tony Award eligibility,” he said, “we will have a tremendous advantage when it comes to obtaining the rights to plays, securing directors and attracting distinguished actors.”In 2000, he moved the company into the renamed American Airlines Theater, which is now Roundabout’s flagship house. It has since also acquired the theater at Studio 54 and assumed operations of the theater now known as the Stephen Sondheim.Among the Tony-winning shows produced by Roundabout during Mr. Haimes’s tenure were revivals of the plays “Anna Christie” and “A View From the Bridge” and of the musicals “Nine,” “Assassins,” “The Pajama Game” and “Anything Goes.” Roundabout was also among the producers of Tony-winning productions of two new plays, “Side Man” and “The Humans.”The company now runs five theaters, all in Midtown Manhattan, including the three Broadway houses, an Off Broadway theater and an Off Off Broadway black-box space that it developed to give a platform to emerging playwrights.Over the years there have also been flops and budget deficits, and some critics have suggested that Roundabout was overextended. Its enormous real estate footprint became a financial challenge that the company addressed partly by renting out some of its Broadway venues to commercial producers. The company made a significant amount of money, for example, by renting out the Sondheim for five years to the producers of “Beautiful,” the Carole King biomusical.Mr. Haimes was one of a handful of leaders of nonprofit theater companies in New York whose decades-long tenures have raised eyebrows among those who want more turnover. He held onto the Roundabout job even when he took another one, as artistic director of the deeply troubled Toronto theater company Livent, in 1998; that company collapsed, and Mr. Haimes stayed at Roundabout.Roundabout’s size — 150 employees and a $50 million annual budget — has given it the ability to support significant endeavors offstage. It operates education and training programs, including school partnerships that serve more than 4,000 students each year and a partnership with the stagehands union to train theater technicians.But like many nonprofits, it has not yet fully rebounded from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Roundabout staged one show on Broadway this season, a revival of “1776.”Mr. Haimes, who was often content to remain in the background, was a well-liked and enthusiastic figure in the industry. He was active in both the Broadway and the Off Broadway communities, serving on numerous committees, and over the years he taught at Yale and Brooklyn College.But he remained a businessman and a booster at heart.“Basically I’m incredibly insecure and don’t take myself seriously as an artist,” he said in a 1998 interview. “But somehow my taste seems to match up with what the public wants.” More