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      Alex Newell From ‘Shucked’ Sings Their Favorite Whitney Houston Song

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      After growing up listening to powerhouse voices, the actor brings their own back to Broadway.Amid the sweet, folksy ballads (and many, many corn jokes) of “Shucked,” the new Broadway musical opening April 4, comes a soulful, commanding number performed by Alex Newell that provides the show some unexpected heft — a song full of riffs and modulations and belted notes that seem to reach both ends of the actor’s expansive range.Roles that showcase the breadth and power of Newell’s voice are familiar territory: The actor made their Broadway debut in 2017 as the maternal goddess Asaka in the revival of “Once on This Island” (1990) and may be most recognizable for their time on “Glee,” from 2012 to 2015, as the transgender teenager Unique Adams. But their character in “Shucked” — Lulu, a whiskey entrepreneur — and that song, “Independently Owned,” offer the chance to inhabit something new: “The expectation of plus-size people is that they cannot be sexy; all my life, I’ve heard you’re either fat and jolly or fat and a bitch,” says Newell, 30. “So to have this dimension of this person, to just exude sex, is so much fun for me because it doesn’t happen often — especially on the Broadway stage.”“Shucked” is set in a small farming town with a thriving corn crop — until the stalks start dying, spurring a local woman (Lulu’s cousin and confidante, Maizy, played by Caroline Innerbichler) to leave home in search of a solution. Newell heard about the piece through a friend, who did an early reading before the pandemic. But they didn’t see the script, written by Robert Horn, until the show’s musical director and orchestrator, Jason Howland, texted Newell about the role. They were immediately drawn to the show’s humor — nearly every line is a pun or punchline or both, the laughs offset by a warm score from the country songwriting duo Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark.Newell grew up singing in church in Lynn, Mass., and listening to other big voices, Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Patti LaBelle, Jennifer Holliday among them. They had early aspirations of becoming a gospel artist, but performing in a choir proved challenging — “I mean, I never fit in. I was always loud.” After seeing a local production of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” when they were 11, Newell began thinking about a career in musical theater.When Fox held an open call for “Glee” hopefuls to audition online in 2011, Newell, then a sophomore in high school, submitted a self-taped clip performing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” from “Dreamgirls.” (Starring as Effie, a role in the musical originated by Holliday, has long been a goal.) Newell later started making pop music, including the queer anthems “Kill the Lights” and “All Cried Out,” and in 2020 eventually returned to TV as Mo, a gender-nonconforming D.J. on the musical series “Zoe’s Extraordinary Playlist.” But for now, Newell says, they’re content to stay onstage: “The endorphins that are released after you’ve sung and everyone is standing and screaming and that wall of sound is pushing right back at you: It’s beautiful.”Ahead of opening night, T asked Newell to sing and discuss their favorite song by one of their idols: Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” (1985). More

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      ‘Life of Pi’ Review: A Boy and a Tiger, Burning Brightly

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      Human ingenuity and animal grace course through this rich, inventive play about difficult choices and the stories we tell to make sense of them.The butterflies enter first, quivering gaily atop their sticks. Then a giraffe pokes her head in. A goat gambols. A hyena cackles. One zebra runs on. Then another. An orangutan swings through while her baby reposes on a branch nearby. Above, monkeys and meerkats chitter. In the first act of “Life of Pi,” a menagerie — menacing, delightful — entrenches itself on the stage of Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.With dazzling imagination and sublime control, the show’s cast and crew conjure a delirious, dynamic, highly pettable world. And oh, is it a wonder. Though the play is ostensibly about one boy’s fraught survival after a disaster, that story is somewhat thin. “Life of Pi” instead succeeds as a broader tribute to human ingenuity and animal grace.Directed by Max Webster and adapted by the playwright Lolita Chakrabarti from Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel, “Life of Pi” begins more somberly, in Mexico, in 1978. A grayed-out hospital room houses a sole patient, Pi Patel (Hiran Abeysekera). A Japanese cargo ship en route to Canada has sunk. Among its passengers were Pi and his family, who had set out from Pondicherry, India. And among its freight were the animals Pi’s zookeeper father tended. All aboard have drowned, except Pi, a traumatized 17-year-old who washed up in this fishing village after 227 days lost at sea.Visiting him this morning are Mr. Okamoto (Daisuke Tsuji), a representative from the Japanese Ministry of Transport, and Lulu Chen (Kirstin Louie), from the Canadian Embassy. These guests have been charged with learning what happened to Pi. For their benefit, he spins a fantastic tale — incredible in every sense — about sharing a lifeboat with animals, initially several then finally just one, Richard Parker, an enormous, sinuous, very hungry Bengal tiger.Between Richard Parker and Pi, adamant carnivore and lifelong vegetarian, there is a desperate struggle for dominance. Richard Parker needs to eat. Pi would prefer not to be eaten. But these two passengers eventually achieve a détente, even a kind of friendship, a hallucinatory acknowledgment of what is human within the animal and animal within the human. It is the example of Richard Parker — and his companionship, however imagined — that allows Pi to survive.“You’re the only reason I’m alive,” a despairing Pi says to his friend, midjourney. “It’s just you and me.”But “Life of Pi” is a much larger affair than this small-man-big-cat duo. The cast runs to 24 actors, many of them also puppeteers, with a small fleet of crew members to make the whole show seaworthy. (The play originated in Sheffield, England, before moving to the West End and then to the American Repertory Theater in Boston, so yes, it floats.) Martel’s novel — absorbing, florid — is a work of magical realism. Webster, the director, makes sure to deliver the magic and the realism both.The menagerie of puppet animals, designed by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, prowl and canter and leap with astonishing character and style, our critic writes.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesNodding to techniques pioneered by Robert Lepage and Improbable Theater, Webster encourages a beautiful synchrony of lighting (Tim Lutkin), video (Andrzej Goulding), sound (Carolyn Downing) and set (Tim Hatley, who also designed the costumes). Aided by the other production elements, the mise-en-scène constantly moves and shifts. The room becomes the boat. The boat recedes into the room. Sometimes both room and boat are there at once and a person might have to clap her hands across her mouth to stop herself from oohing, especially when the schools of fish surface or the stars begin to flicker. We are in the realm of fantasy here, of symbolism, but squint just a little and waves appear. Even from the mezzanine, I could feel — almost — a salt spray.And the puppetry! Between Milky White of “Into the Woods” and the dinosaur and mammoth of “The Skin of Our Teeth,” New York has not been starved of extraordinary stick and cloth creations. But the animals here, designed by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, with movement direction by Caldwell, prowl and canter and leap with astonishing character and style. And Richard Parker, animated by three puppeteers at any given time, is the show’s striped jewel. Chuffing, growling and panting as he stalks the boat’s perimeter, he is at once beguiling, gentlemanly and quite dangerous. Abeysekera — a petite hurricane of an actor with reeling limbs and a clarion voice — is excellent in an exhausting role.But Richard Parker (very briefly voiced by Brian Thomas Abraham) makes the more indelible impression. When he finally slunk onto dry land, I worried for him as I did not worry for Pi. He seemed so thin.The cast runs to 24 actors, many of them also puppeteers.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesToward the start of his tale, Pi promises his listeners that his story will make them believe in God. But while Martel’s novel has a deep and sometimes tendentious concern with religion and philosophy, Chakrabarti’s adaptation engages with these questions only glancingly.At its most abstract, this a play about how we come to terms with our own choices, even with our own survival, and the stories we might tell to make those choices and that survival make sense. Trauma requires language, Pi insists. If you don’t find words to compass it, he says, “it becomes a wordless darkness, and you will never defeat it.” Yet language tends to recede whenever the animals are onstage. Want wonder? Want divinity? Look to the tiger burning bright. And then look to the human hands that tend the flame.Eventually Pi offers an alternative version of what happened on that lifeboat, which Webster also stages. Stripped of animals, allegory and visual pleasure, this account is more plausible, though much darker. “Which is the better story?” Pi asks.Depends what he means by “better.” But of course it’s the one with the animals. Because faced with such horror, or even with the ordinary hardships of daily life, anyone would prefer the fantasy, especially when it is rendered with such richness and invention. (A different show might have questioned the morality of extracting such pleasure, such delight, from a tale of privation. Not this one.) Significantly, neither story redeems what Pi has suffered. But only one has a tiger in it.That roaring that you will hear at the show’s end? It’s the sound of a standing ovation.Life of PiAt the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, Manhattan; lifeofpibway.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      In This ‘Peter Pan,’ Something Always Goes Awry. That’s the Plan.

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      On a recent afternoon, the actor Greg Tannahill sat perched atop a London rooftop, one leg extended, one arm outthrust. A pair of carpenters would then whisk Tannahill from his rooftop and into a nursery. And then out of it. And then back in again. A window frame would come free. Tannahill, now jerked upside down, would mewl and scream and clamber down a wall. Once he finally righted himself, the flight harness would wrench him upside-down again.This breathless, silly sequence lasted less than a minute and ended when Tannahill, playing an actor cast as Peter Pan in an ill-starred kiddie production, finally stands up straight and delivers the line: “Thank heavens I didn’t wake the children.”The routine requires split-second precision and the seamless cooperation of actors, flight operators and stage managers. To make it work and to make it safe (there is an open flame on set!), the creators and crew members of “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” the spry, slapstick comedy that is scheduled to open at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theater on April 19, have spent dozens of hours (maybe hundreds of hours, counts differ) honing this one bit.“Peter Pan Goes Wrong” is the second Broadway production, following the Agatha Christie- adjacent “The Play That Goes Wrong,” in 2017, from the theater company Mischief. Founded by three former drama school roommates — Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields — Mischief specializes in farcical deconstructions of established genres. Each new play is putatively the work of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, a troupe of overambitious amateur thespians. Whenever the Cornley players take the stage, something inevitably goes awry. A lot of somethings. Mischief’s fascination is with the things (and people) that go bump in the night. People like Tannahill.Backstage at the Ethel Barrymore Theater: Richard Force, a carpenter, helping Tannahill into his harness.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“I’ve gained a bruise or two in rehearsal,” said Tannahill, once he had retired to his dressing room. “But you’ve got to break a few eggs to make a lovely omelet.” He then clarified that he hadn’t actually broken anything.‘Acclimate to the terror’I visited the Barrymore a week before the show’s first preview performance because I wanted to see the work that went into putting even one gag together. “Hours go into generating just 10 seconds,” Sayer told me.It was late afternoon, just before the dinner break, and the auditorium was littered with binders, monitors and makeshift desks. The atmosphere was one of controlled chaos, but no one seemed especially tense. (Many of the company’s members studied together at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.) Not even Tannahill, though he did ask, good-naturedly, for a moment to catch his breath before the carpenters swung him in again.“Just so I can acclimate to the terror that is that moment,” he said.That moment has been in the works for about 10 years, ever since “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” first opened at the Pleasance, a small theater in North London. Mischief had chosen a children’s show as the follow-up to “The Play That Goes Wrong” for two reasons. First, these shows have so many rules and conventions ripe for rupture. “You can’t really get more serious than a show that is intended for children,” said Henry Shields, as he and his collaborators speed-ate a dinner of pasta and salad. “The moral standard of these shows, it is extremely high.”The second reason was the flying rig. With characters suspended high above the stage floor, what could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot.When the show debuted, at the Pleasance, the company couldn’t afford luxury gear. The rented rig had no counterweight, so when they wanted to lift Tannahill, who originated the role of the actor playing Peter Pan, a crew member had to jump off a stepladder. To have Tannahill enter at the appropriate speed, a couple of actors would hold his feet, pull him back and let him go.Honing a sequence: Jonathan Sayer, one of the founders of the Mischief theater company, compared their process to stop-motion animation, because a new movement or gesture has to happen nearly every second.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“The low-tech version of the show was much more dangerous,” Shields said. “I mean, it was safe, we took care, but there were more bruises.”In this low-tech version, things actually did go wrong, unscripted things. At one point, a screw fell out and a door broke away, jamming the revolving stage just minutes before curtain. At another performance, a dummy version of Peter Pan fell to the floor prematurely. (“Don’t worry,” Tannahill ad-libbed. “That’s just the other dead Pan.”) One night, Sayer, playing one of the children, forgot to loosen a button on his costume. When his own rig jerked up, it choked him.“I remember being very out of breath and quite shaken and looking up expecting to see you all looking very concerned,” Sayer recalled. “Everyone had tears rolling down their faces with laughter.”The company now takes rehearsals and personal safety just a bit more seriously. “With age and experience comes much more care,” Sayer said. “When you’re 21, you say, ‘Let’s just go for it!’ Now, there’s a lot of poring through everything at an extreme level of detail to get it right and to make sure that we’re safe and well and happy.” (He and his collaborators are now seasoned men of 34.)Mischief managedFor a “Goes Wrong” play to work, the production has to chart an exact course between mayhem and control. Too much polish and it isn’t funny. “Especially on a big Broadway show, people are so hard-wired to be like, ‘Well, this is how it’s done. This is how we’ll make it clean, neat, tidy.’ You’re quite often trying to unpick those things. Like, ‘No, no, let that moment be messy. Let the shirttails hang out,’” Lewis said.But too little refinement and the jokes don’t fly. If the doors slam — and slam and slam — but the story isn’t told, the audience won’t laugh. With each new production, the director, Adam Meggido, includes at least one rehearsal in which everything goes right. “You need to be able to do the thing and to have total control over it before you can start to undercut it,” Sayer said. “You’ve got to make sure the story of ‘Peter Pan’ is being told before you start to rip it up a little bit.”Matthew Cavendish, who plays Max, in bunk beds that collapse, naturally.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesAnd then, second by second, joke by joke, the ripping begins, in a process that Sayer compared to stop-motion animation, because a new movement or gesture has to happen nearly every second. “Comedy is hard,” Shields said. “Jokes are hard. You have to be very precise.”Still, that precision has to allow for differences in the layout of each new theater and for the addition and subtraction of actors and understudies, who have to be afforded the space to play the roles in their own ways, even while hitting every line and mark. Besides, Lewis, Sayer and Shields have never met a joke that they didn’t believe they could eventually improve. Ten years on, they’re still tweaking, refining and adding new bits. “You’re never finished writing comedy,” Shields said, sounding slightly exhausted. (At one point he had described Mischief’s style as “a bottomless pit of comedy.”)The fine-tuning ends only during the technical rehearsals, when any further changes would give the designers, board operators and stage managers conniption fits. I found them a few days before that, during what Lewis described as “that fun, exhilarating part of the process where we’re trying to get those last few changes through.”Where the magic happensAn assistant stage manager led me across a confetti covered set to a narrow backstage area that magically held a half-dozen people. The carpenters stood behind a bank of monitors. One grasped the ropes that controlled Tannahill’s horizontal travel; the other his vertical axis. “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” has upgraded since its Pleasance days. The rig now came courtesy of Flying by Foy, the industry leader. (In a neat bit of symmetry, Peter Foy, of Flying by Foy, designed the rig for Mary Martin’s celebrated “Peter Pan.”) It would take both of them, three stage managers and an offsite flying manager to guarantee Tannahill a smooth journey. Which is to say, one in which every bump and inversion is intentional.Tannahill says he enjoys all the pranks, even being turned upside-down. “It’s quite therapeutic,” he said.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesTannahill claimed to enjoy all of it, even the moments in which he was turned upside-down. “It’s actually quite nice,” he said. “Gets the blood circulation going in a different direction. It’s quite therapeutic.”At rehearsal, he oriented himself precisely on a roof. At a cue from Tannahill, a raised hand, the operators swung him through the window. This was the carpenters’ 20th time with the sequence, maybe the 30th, and it ran without a hitch, though without the necessary force.“Can you slap him into the wall?” Sayers said to the carpenters. “He used to really thwack into the wall.” The sequence had to look out of control while the actual control remained perfect. If Tannahill seemed to be in real danger, the audience would feel too anxious to chuckle. But if he came in too slow, they wouldn’t laugh either.They tried it again. This time Tannahill did smack into the wall. The wrong wall. The sequence reset. “Because that happened in rehearsal, it was very controlled,” Tannahill later reassured me. “It didn’t give me a bruise straightaway.”The third time, the sequence, in fairy-tale fashion, went just right. When Tannahill flipped upside-down for the second time, the cast and crew cackled. How did it feel to have finally nailed the timing and the trajectory, to have his colleagues laugh at his discomfort?“It feels great,” Tannahill said. “It makes all the bruises worth it.” More

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      Review: ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’ in London

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      The British experimental theater company Complicité turns the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s novel “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” into a thought-provoking, entertaining spectacle.Some books lend themselves to stage adaptation more than others, and the experimental theater company Complicité has a strong track record of turning awkward novels into plays. The British troupe, led by the director Simon McBurney, has already created acclaimed productions from Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” and Max Porter’s “Grief Is the Thing With Feathers.”Complicité’s latest show is a suitably idiosyncratic treatment of “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” the surreal eco-thriller by the Polish author and Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. It runs at the Barbican Theater in London through April 1, then tours Britain before playing at some major European venues and festivals, including the Ruhrtriennale in Germany, and the Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris.Tokarczuk’s novel revolves around a series of grisly murders in a remote village in southern Poland. The narrator-protagonist, Janina, a semiretired teacher and passionate animal lover in her 60s, takes a keen interest in the case, pestering the local police force with her unsolicited insights and pushing a bizarre theory that, since all the victims were avid hunters or poachers, the murders must have been carried out by animals as an act of revenge. Along the way she holds forth on animal cruelty, astrology and her love of the English poet William Blake.Complicité’s decision to foreground these freewheeling digressions is to be commended: This is not a conventional whodunit but, rather, a kind of fable. The production’s blend of philosophical purpose and irreverent humor rings true to the book’s spirit, and makes for an entertaining and thought-provoking spectacle.The spine of the play is a spotlit monologue by Janina, who dips in and out of the action as it unfolds around her. Amanda Hadingue — standing in for Kathryn Hunter, who has been unwell — brings a disarmingly self-effacing grace to the lead role, ensuring Janina retains the audience’s sympathy, even as she rails abrasively against the industrial slaughter of animals, the hypocrisy of organized religion and the unquestioning passivity of her fellow townspeople.Indeed, the entire production is delivered with a playful esprit that borders on the pantomimic: Self-important cops are played for laughs, as is the supercilious local priest; there are charming cameos from animals played by humans — a dog here, a fox there; and César Sarachu almost steals the show in a wonderfully droll performance as Janina’s endearingly hapless neighbor, Oddball.Interiority is the perennial challenge when adapting literary novels for stage or screen. A slick 2017 movie adaptation of “Drive Your Plow” called “Spoor,” by the Polish director Agnieszka Holland, rendered it as a straight-up nor thriller. It was well wrought but inevitably one-dimensional: Janina’s distinctive narrative voice, which treads a fine line between eccentric and downright cranky, is integral to the novel’s charm; the story feels flat without it. Complicité’s adaptation neatly sidesteps this problem by juxtaposing the inner and outer worlds in a way that feels lively and dynamic.From left: Maria, Uzoka, Sophie Steer, Kathryn Hunter, Amanda Hadingue and Tim McMullan. The company’s director is known for his exuberant use of audiovisual effects.Marc BrennerMcBurney, the director, is known for his exuberant use of audiovisual effects, and his team have conjured an impressive sensory texture here. A big screen at the rear of the stage displays eye-catching images that complement the action. Some are scene-setting, such as snowy landscapes evoking the bitterly cold Polish winter; others, such as a series of detailed drawings of horoscope charts, are thematic.Richard Skelton’s atmospheric score alternates between brooding suspense and doleful solemnity, though the sound designer Christopher Shutt is maybe a little too trigger-happy with the sudden loud noises: I feared for some of the older theatregoers, but it certainly kept the audience alert.Rae Smith’s costume design is understatedly on point: Janina pads around in a jarringly mismatched sports-casual ensemble that is precisely the kind of thing an unabashed eccentric might wear, and the local huntsmen look appropriately forbidding in their uniformly dark puffer jackets.Clocking in at 2 hours and 45 minutes, “Drive Your Plow” is a bit too long. A subplot about Janina’s unspecified chronic illness (“my ailments”) could perhaps have been significantly abridged, or even cut, to give the play a zippier feel. But its shortcomings are essentially those of the novel: its single-track didacticism; its neat pitting of romantic idealists against macho, insentient normies; and the fact that a decisive plot twist can be spotted a mile off.Complicité is no stranger to politics: “The Encounter,” adapted in 2016 from a novel by the Romanian-American author Petru Popescu, addressed environmental destruction in the Amazon; the company’s 2015 children’s play “Lionboy” touched on the ethically dubious machinations of Big Pharma. Crucially, the company’s dissident ethos extends to form as well as subject matter. “Drive Your Plow’s” parable of hubris offers considerable food for thought as we continue to hurtle toward climate disaster: Janina is a Cassandra figure for the 21st century, a voice of reason doomed to be met with indifference, condescension or ridicule. The political message is deadly earnest. Thankfully, Complicité serves it up with a dose of fun.Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the DeadThrough April 1 at the Barbican Theater in London, then touring in Europe through June 17; complicite.org. More

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      ‘According to the Chorus’ Review: Backstage Truths

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      In Arlene Hutton’s play at 59E59 Theaters, the members of a Broadway cast reveal their hopes and fears tucked away in a quick-change room.Even longtime theatergoers could learn a few fun tidbits from the new play “According to the Chorus.” That, for example, when members of a Broadway ensemble are in costume, they are not supposed to eat, smoke or hold a dog. Or that they often drive the dressers who help them in and out of said costumes bonkers — and vice versa.Spry and zippy — to a fault, as it skims rather than digs — Arlene Hutton’s backstage story, presented by New Light Theater Project (“I Wanna F*ck Like Romeo and Juliet,” “Imagining Madoff”), has found an appropriate home in the smallest venue at 59E59 Theaters. The show takes place in a Broadway quick-change room, a hive of activity in cramped quarters, and the audience is sitting inches away, adding to the sense of immersion in a tight-knit community.A former dresser herself, Hutton (“Last Train to Nibroc”) zeros in on the worker bees who keep shows going. And the unnamed musical in the play has been going for years when we catch up with it, in 1984. Based on the stage outfits we see, it looks like an old-fashioned tuner, à la “42nd Street” or “Dames at Sea.” It also sounds like quite a workout, which partly explains why during breaks the chorus tends to avoid climbing the several flights of stairs to the dressing rooms and instead head to the basement to hang out with the dressers.The latter are led by the crusty veterans Audrey (Karen Ziemba) and Brenda (Judith Hiller). They often treat the cast members with gruff impatience, and you get the feeling the pair have heard and seen it all. Audrey has been at her gig so long, she knows the answer to every backstage variation on the light bulb joke.One fast-paced scene after another reveals confidences and arguments, hopes and fears, and of course the eternal quandaries: How much should you tip your dresser? Is it a good idea to go on tour if you’re in a Broadway show? What’s best, zippers or Velcro?We watch this busy little microcosm through the eyes of newcomer KJ (Dana Brooke), who used to be a dresser at the more leisurely City Opera and leads a parallel life as an aspiring playwright. Good-natured and eager to please, KJ used to be in a relationship with a featured dancer, Peter (Brandon Jones), who eventually came out as gay.This gives KJ a personal connection to the AIDS epidemic as it ravages the ranks of the company and the staff. “I’ve been through six dance partners since we opened,” the saucy Linda (Joy Donze) says. “No, seven.”And of course, there are the usual theater worries: rumors that the show could close, the ever-present threat of an injury that can endanger a performer’s livelihood.The show, efficiently directed by Chris Goutman, tracks the women — the men are peripheral here — over the course of several months. Or at least it attempts to, because “According to the Chorus” ends up stretching itself too thin. With a cast of 12, Hutton does not have the time to flesh out her many characters, leaving us with tantalizing glimpses of lives half-told, personalities half-sketched. These women are finally spending some time in the spotlight, and it’s still not enough.According to the ChorusThrough April 15 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      An ‘Obsession’ With Philip Glass Inspires a Director’s Memory Play

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      In “Tao of Glass,” Phelim McDermott, who has directed three Glass operas, turns to his personal history with the composer’s work.The first piece of theater that Phelim McDermott made after college, decades ago, used music by Philip Glass. And directing productions of three of Glass’s operas has brought McDermott — and Improbable, the theater company he helped found in 1996 — glowing reviews and sold-out houses.So it’s not surprising that McDermott’s “Tao of Glass,” which arrives at the NYU Skirball on Thursday, is a loving tribute to his long relationship — what, in an interview, he called “my obsession” — with Glass’s seemingly repetitive yet constantly transforming music.“Philip’s music has been like this river that’s gone through my creative life,” McDermott said on a video call from London, where he was completing rehearsals for a revival of his juggling-heavy production of Glass’s “Akhnaten” at English National Opera. “It connects me to a part of myself that sometimes I neglect and have forgotten about. It’s like an invitation to return to myself.”Improbable’s productions tend to be built from everyday stuff, but “Tao of Glass” is even more modest than most. It is essentially a one-man show for McDermott. (Glass doesn’t perform live in the piece, but is present in ghostly form through a sophisticated player piano that plays back precisely what he put down on it, including every detail of touch and phrasing.)Onstage, McDermott is surrounded by shadow play, sticky tape and creatures formed from tissue paper as he tells stories about his life; his history with Glass, both the work and the man; his experiences in meditation-encouraging flotation tanks; and his encounters with the writings of Lao Tzu, the open-minded principle of “deep democracy” espoused by the author and therapist Arnold Mindell, and a shattered coffee table made of, yes, glass.In the interview, McDermott talked more about his relationship with Glass and how the show came together. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.The composer Philip Glass in 1980.Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesTalk about the roots of your relationship with Glass’s work.I was at college in London, what was then Middlesex Polytechnic, and I became very obsessed with his music. This was in 1982 or ’83, and I would take out VHS tapes of him playing with the Glass Ensemble, and footage of the operas and so on. And then, in the last six weeks of my degree course, I made an adaptation of an Ian McEwan short story, “Conversation With a Cupboard Man.”It was a monologue about a guy who lives in what, in the U.K., we call a wardrobe — quite a dark, sort of strange piece about this guy who’s a misfit. And Philip’s music from “Glassworks” was so appropriate to that piece. It became the music we used in the show.And when did you take on one of the operas?I was approached by John Berry at English National Opera. It was 2005, and I was performing a show called “Spirit” at New York Theater Workshop, literally around the corner from where Philip lives, and he met me at Atlas Cafe. I’d been asked to do “Einstein on the Beach,” and I thought it was a stupid idea. Philip asked me, “Why do you want to do ‘Einstein’?” And I said, “I don’t.” So we talked a bit, and he said, “Your genuine reluctance to do this piece makes me think you should do it.”But then he mentioned “Satyagraha.” And I went away and listened to it, and it’s not a bio-opera about Gandhi; it’s about a concept. I got excited by this idea of collective social activism, of big groups of people and how they can exchange ideas. And it resonated with Arnold Mindell’s “worldwork”: If you want to do social activism and change, you have to work on yourself. If there’s an outer conflict, you also have to work on that conflict within yourself. That idea of “deep democracy” is in “Tao of Glass.”Your stagings of “Satyagraha,” “Akhnaten” and “The Perfect American” have different unifying concepts.With “Satyagraha,” which we first did in 2007, it was big-scale spectacle, but using humble materials: sticky tape, newspaper — building those into large-scale puppetry. That became a model or metaphor for how, collectively, you can create something powerful even with humble materials. For “The Perfect American” (2013), which is about Walt Disney, it was about animation, and about all the work that goes into it between every frame. And for “Akhnaten” (2016), about the Egyptian pharaoh, it was juggling — and it turned out the very first image of juggling is in an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic.The countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, center, as the title character in McDermott’s staging of Glass’s “Akhnaten.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow did “Tao of Glass” come about?It’s a show that happened when another one didn’t, which I talk about in “Tao of Glass.” Philip and I were supposed to adapt Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen.” I’d come out to New York; I’d done a storyboard and what musical bits might happen; but Maurice’s sad death, in 2012, meant that project veered into not happening.John McGrath at the Manchester International Festival said even if that project’s not happening, if I was to dream what I might make with Philip, what might that be? And I got a vision, floating in the flotation tank, of me and Philip onstage together. I went to Philip and said, “I have a vision: I’m doing the puppetry, and you’re at the piano.” And he never said no.Part of the story is my dream of getting him back into a rehearsal room the way I imagine he did when he was just starting out, just a downtown rehearsal space and some musicians. And it happened: There was this week where Philip did come into the rehearsal room, and I told stories — about him, about Taoism, about Arnie Mindell — and he would riff, and then he went away and arranged those bits of music he’d played. And, in a way, the show made itself. In the breaks, he would take us to a Tibetan curry house where they all knew him. It was Philip having a good time, really.They say don’t meet your heroes, but I did, and I ended up making a crazy show with him that’s one of the things I’m proudest of. When you’re making a show like this, you have to trust something, and what you end up trusting is just doing the next step and the next step and the next step. And that’s what Philip’s music does. People say it’s repetitive, but it’s not really repetitive. It’s cyclical and it changes, and you get to a place where you don’t know how you got there, a deeper place.What comes next for you and him?The last time I saw Philip — we always have a little conversation about what happens next, and he said, “When we work together, it seems to go quite well.” And at the moment we’re talking again about “Einstein,” to complete the trilogy with “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten.”There’s probably vocabularies from those other productions that will go into our version of “Einstein” — probably a new vocabulary, too, but also elements of those other productions. When we met, he talked about various things, but the thing he’s most excited about is the trilogy: that we’ve got to do our Improbable version of “Einstein,” so that we can do all three operas across a city at the same time.He’s a bit slow now, but he said, “You’ve got me all fired up.” So I know that that’s what Philip wants to happen — and I’m saying that publicly so that it does. That’s how you make things happen. More

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      Review: In ‘Día y Noche,’ Opposites Intertwine

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      David Anzuelo’s generous, unwieldy play about an oil-and-water friendship between two high school boys opens at 59E59 Theaters.Let’s get this out of the way: The highlight of David Anzuelo’s new play, “Día y Noche,” is a wild, riotously funny sex scene that brings Act 1 to, well, a climax. It involves a trio of teenagers, Martin, Danny and Edna, enacting an unconventional scenario punctuated by Edna yelling encouragements in a fake French accent as she writhes in ecstasy, looking feral and her eyes bulging.Any show would have a hard time living up to this memorable sight, and unfortunately so does the LAByrinth Theater Company production “Día y Noche,” which is currently at 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. The play is ambitious and generous but also unwieldy — the overlong sum of individual moments that often feel rushed.The show focuses on Danny (Freddy Acevedo) and Martin (Neil Tyrone Pritchard), who meet in their high school practice room in El Paso, Tex. — the first plays the guitar, the second the oboe. They form a bond that, despite Martin’s initial wishes, is not romantic but just as complex: an enduring friendship between oil-and-water boys.We are in 1984, and Danny, who is from a lower-middle-class Chicano family, is cooler than cool — he likes Patti Smith and David Lynch, girls and theater. Martin, one of the few Black students at their school, is a shy, bumbling nerd who is more well-off. He is just coming out as gay and wants to major in computer science in college.They should not get along, but they do.Anzuelo, who grew up in El Paso in the 1980s and also has a long career as an actor, is best at mapping out the way kids outside the mainstream found and supported each other in the pre-internet days — he is attuned to what can bind people over differences of class, ethnicity and temperament.It takes a little while for both the play and Carlos Armesto’s production to settle into a groove. The show is divided in “tracks” of various length, with projected titles, as if we were listening to an album, though this format also gives a choppy feel to the proceedings. Punk and proto-punk numbers punctuate key moments (the mood music in that teenage ménage: the Stooges’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog”), but Anzuelo forgot that brevity was one of the genre’s signatures: The Ramones’ debut album lasted just 29 minutes; “Día y Noche” goes on for close to three hours.After the intermission, the momentum evaporates into a succession of disjointed scenes filled with enough for two more plays, though the twin narrative helixes are that Martin finds a boyfriend (Peter Collier) and deals with the specter of AIDS, while Danny falls under the spell of a manipulative older theatermaker (Joe Quintero) with a taste for the stage director Peter Brook and drugs.To his credit, Anzuelo also gives us a couple of distinctive female characters, Edna (Emma Ramos) and Jessica (Viviana Valeria), though we learn just enough about them to be left wanting more — especially of Ramos, whose quirky, ferocious performance is downright electrifying. The lesbian Jessica is mostly an accessory to Martin’s gay baby steps, and is rewarded with a brief, wordless scene with a girlfriend, which is worse than no scene at all. Sometimes, more is just less.Dia y NocheThrough April 15 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      ‘James Brown Wore Curlers’ Review: A Superfan Becomes Celine Dion

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      In “James Brown Wore Curlers,” the French playwright tries out a more far-fetched premise than in her previous hits, and produces less satisfying satire.“No realism,” the French playwright Yasmina Reza indicates twice in the opening pages of her new play “James Brown Wore Curlers,” which had its world premiere this past weekend in Munich.It’s a stage direction that the director Philipp Stölzl has taken to heart in his gently surreal production at the Residenztheater. The rotating stage is dominated by a wooden swing, a player piano and, most memorably, a gigantic fish: two halves of a trout, suspended high above the actors. The effect is weird, hilarious and, when fog issues in torrents from the fish’s mouth late in the performance, hallucinogenic.It turns out Reza and her director have a point. The non-naturalism of the staging helps the audience ease into the improbable plot, which tracks a French couple whose son goes from being a Celine Dion superfan to believing that he is the French Canadian pop diva herself. The premise is more outlandish than in Reza’s most celebrated works — the Tony-winning satires “Art” (1994) and “God of Carnage” (2006) — which skewered the rituals, pretensions and prejudices of the upper middle class. Here, the target of her satire is less defined.Instead of a living room or restaurant, Reza ushers us into a psychiatric ward, where, in the opening scene, Pascaline and Lionel Hutner, a middle-aged French couple, have just decided to commit their son Jacob. Recently, Jacob has ceased to merely dress up as his idol and put on concerts for his parents. Now he speaks with a French Canadian accent and insists that his parents — whom he now addresses by their first names — call him Celine.The play is set entirely in the clinic and a neighboring park. Aside from the Hutners, there’s an unconventional and freewheeling psychologist who zips around the stage on a white scooter, and Philippe, a white patient who claims to be Black and who is Jacob’s only friend at the clinic. Identity certainly looms large in the play, but Reza doesn’t engage with the issue in a serious and sustained way beyond hinting that all attempts at constructing an identity may contain an element — or more than an element — of delusion.From left: Juliane Köhler, zur Linden, Michael Goldberg, Lisa Wagner and Nussbaum.Sandra ThenOver a series of hospital visits, Reza keeps the tone breezy. (Though she wrote the play in French, it is performed in Munich in a smooth German translation by Frank Heibert and Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel.) There is background music and song, although none of it by Dion herself. That might be a rights issue, or just an opportunity for Reza to pen her own lyrics, which are set to original music by Ingo Ludwig Frenzel.Stölzl, who also directs film and opera, serves up an elegant and well-paced production, but there’s only so much that his clever staging can do for a play that is as light and insubstantial as a meringue. The only thing that lends the evening depth are the performances.Decked out in a red tracksuit and long, billowing blue scarf, Vincent zur Linden is captivating and flamboyant as Jacob. The young actor, who also has a starring role in Stölzl’s acclaimed recent production of Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance,” gives a performance that is both campy and affecting. The comedy is deepened by the fact that Jacob’s Celine can barely hold a tune.As his parents, Michael Goldberg and Juliane Köhler come off as clueless boomers trying their best to be tolerant and vacillating between self-recrimination and despair. Lionel is the more bitter of the two. Pascaline wants to be accepting, but the ways she encourages Jacob — dancing and singing backup to his awful songs — are cringeworthy. Lisa Wagner is wonderfully batty and occasionally cantankerous as the unorthodox shrink, and there’s more than a hint that she might just be another patient in the clinic.What are we left with, in the end? A plea for tolerance? A utopian ideal where everyone can flourish in whatever skin or identity they choose?It’s hard to know what stance Reza takes on these issues, but they’re not necessarily what’s on our mind when we leave the theater. I was still puzzling over the trout. It was one of the production’s most inspired choices (Stölzl also designed the set), but what on earth did it mean?Reza hasn’t had a new play on Broadway since “God of Carnage” closed in 2010 after more than 400 performances. Clocking in at a brisk 100 minutes, “James Brown Wore Curlers” is less a biting bourgeois farce or comedy of bad manners than Reza’s most celebrated plays: It feels slight and hardly packs a punch. A French production in the not-so-distant future seems inevitable, but don’t hold your breath for a Broadway run.James Brown Wore CurlersThrough May 25 at the Residenztheater, in Munich; residenztheater.de. More