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      ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ Dominates Olivier Award Nominations

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      Studio Ghibli’s fantastical movie was an unexpected choice for a stage adaptation. Now, it is up for 9 awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.A stage adaptation of “My Neighbour Totoro,” an animated Japanese children’s movie filled with fantastical creatures, emerged on Tuesday as the front-runner for this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The show, which ran at the Barbican Theater in London and included numerous giant puppets, secured nine nominations for the awards — more than any other play. Those included nods for best comedy, best director for Phelim McDermott and best actress for Mei Mac as a girl who discovers a magical world near her home.The play’s high number of nominations was perhaps unsurprising given that “My Neighbour Totoro” received rave reviews when it opened last year.Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said the play’s puppets were “the most endearing sight on the London stage” at the time. Sarah Hemming in The Financial Times said the Royal Shakespeare Company production was “a tender, remarkably beautiful family show that extols kindness.”Although “My Neighbour” secured the most nominations, it did not get a nod for best new play. Instead, four more grown-up dramas will compete for that title. Those include “Prima Facie” at the Harold Pinter Theater, a Broadway-bound one-woman show about sexual assault that stars Jodie Comer; “Patriots” at the Almeida Theater, a retelling of President Vladimir V. Putin’s rise in Russia; and Aaron Sorkin’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” adaptation at the Gielgud Theater.Those shows will compete with “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy,” a play at the Royal Court in London about six young Black men who meet for group therapy.Jodie Comer’s performance in “Prima Facie” struck a chord with West End audiences and she was also nominated for best actress. She is up for that title against Mei Mac of “My Neighbour Totoro,” as well as Patsy Ferran for “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Almeida Theater, Janet McTeer for “Phaedra” at the National Theater, and Nicola Walker for “The Corn Is Green,” also at the National.Before Tuesday’s announcement, many British theater critics had expected Emma Corrin to receive a nomination for “Orlando,” a play based on Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid novel, at the Garrick Theater.That would have likely caused a media stir as Corrin, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, has over the past year repeatedly urged award show organizers to make their acting categories gender neutral. Last year, Corrin told the BBC that it was “difficult for me” to be nonbinary and nominated in female acting categories.Emma De Souza, a spokeswoman for the Society of London Theater, the award’s organizers, said that Corrin was considered in the best actress category, but did not make the cut. “It was an incredibly competitive year,” De Souza added.The best actor award is set to be equally hard fought. Among the nominees are the rising Irish star Paul Mescal for “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Rafe Spall for “To Kill a Mockingbird” and David Tennant for “Good.” They will compete against Tom Hollander for his role as an oligarch in “Patriots” and Giles Terera, who starred in “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at the National Theater.In the musical categories, the nominations are led by “Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” also at the National. The show, about the residents of a housing complex in the northern English city of Sheffield, secured eight nominations, including best new musical. It will compete for that title with the “The Band’s Visit” at the Donmar Warehouse and “Sylvia” — a hip-hop musical based on the life of the suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst — at the Old Vic.Those three titles will face stiff competition from “Tammy Faye,” a high-profile production at the Almeida Theater that told the story of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker using new music by Elton John.The winners of this year’s Olivier Awards will be announced on April 2 in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. More

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      Review: ‘Letters From Max’ Is a Sacrament of Grief, and a Comedy

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      The Signature Theater production is based on correspondence between the playwright Sarah Ruhl and a student of hers, who died of cancer at 25.The poet Max Ritvo, who was 25 when he died of cancer in 2016, knew exactly the impression he did not want to make if he and the playwright Sarah Ruhl ever cobbled together a book of their correspondence. He recoiled at the possibility that it would come across like “a Lifetime movie story of poor cancer boy and his wise, brilliant, loving mentor ministering to his heart and mind through every mortal peril and petty crisis.”Not to worry. “Letters From Max: A Book of Friendship,” published in 2018, is never for an instant maudlin. And “Letters From Max, a Ritual,” Ruhl’s warm and literary new play adapted from the book, is in no way a pity narrative. It’s a theatrical act of remembrance and a sacrament of grief, but it’s also a comedy. Because in their emails and texts, in their voice mail messages and face-to-face conversations, the character Sarah and the character Max make each other laugh.Jessica Hecht, a Ruhl veteran from “Stage Kiss” nearly a decade ago, here nimbly becomes the playwright — wonderfully comical, and as gentle as the soft, soft blue of the blazer she wears. This Sarah has a confiding rapport with the audience and an expansive sense of playwriting potential.Teaching an undergraduate course at Yale, she decides to admit 20-year-old Max, even though he has never written a play — “because,” she says, “funny poets are my favorite kind of human being.” When Max’s banished childhood cancer recurs, Sarah treats both him and his work with compassion, and a friendship begins to put down roots.In Kate Whoriskey’s witty, sensitive production for Signature Theater, the role of Max is shared by two actors, alternating performances. Ben Edelman, so excellent opposite Hecht in Joshua Harmon’s “Admissions,” is the more raucous Max, with a bigger personality that gets bigger laughs. Whatever is behind that facade, though, remains hidden from us. Zane Pais’s loose-limbed Max is the one who brings the tenderness, which cracks the play open emotionally and also, somehow, poetically. Skinny and floppy-haired, with a restless intensity and a searching intelligence, he is at once irrepressible and unavoidably vulnerable.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.This slender play has some of the spareness of poetry, which Sarah and Max periodically speak aloud. If, at a scant two hours including intermission, the production seems sometimes to be moving too fast, it also has interludes when it slows down — as in an exquisite scene between Max and a winged character who is both an angel and a tattoo artist, and is played by Edelman or Pais, whichever of them isn’t embodying Max at that performance.In that third role, Edelman (on piano) and Pais (on guitar) each also play underscoring music that they wrote with the sound designer, Sinan Refik Zafar. The last music the audience hears, though, was composed by Ritvo. The effect of it all, in tandem with the other design elements, is a sense of ethereality. (The set is by Marsha Ginsberg, costumes by Anita Yavich, lighting by Amith Chandrashaker and projection and video by S Katy Tucker.)Ruhl’s plays are sometimes mistranslated from page to stage — rendered less poetic than they are, and more earthbound. Like Les Waters with “Eurydice,” Whoriskey is the rare director who grasps the ineffable in Ruhl, and knows how to make sense of it in three dimensions. For all its talk of this world and corporeality, “Letters From Max” exists on a slightly other plane.Ruhl and Ritvo’s conversation was as much about the life of the mind, and the work of an artist, as it was about the life of the body and the existence of the soul. Ruhl has fashioned from it the kind of play that makes you want to dig in afterward: into the letters between them, into her plays, into his poems. Since the closure of Signature’s thoughtfully curated lobby bookstore — a casualty of the coronavirus pandemic — no production there has made me miss it as powerfully as this one.In my mind I can see the bookshop display that might have been: the volume of their correspondence; Ruhl’s many published plays, particularly “The Oldest Boy,” which affected Ritvo powerfully, and her epistolary plays “Eurydice” and “Dear Elizabeth”; his poetry collections “Four Reincarnations” and “The Final Voicemails” (which you can buy at Signature, along with their book of letters, but only at some performances); and “Words in Air,” the letters between the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell that inspired “Dear Elizabeth.”If “Letters From Max” were any other play, I would think dreaming up a fantasy bookstore display — which is essentially a fantasy reading list — was a strange response. But it feels like a natural extension of the conversation pinging back and forth between Sarah and Max. Theirs is so much wider and more voracious a discussion than any stage could hold.So go see the play, and feel their relationship alive and tingling. Then open some of those books. Bliss.Letters From Max, a RitualThrough March 19 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      ‘Fall River Fishing’ Review: So She Dated an Axe Murderer

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      A casually absurd play about the infamous Lizzie Borden, presented by Bedlam, cleverly undercuts the central dramatic event.There will be blood. And meat sauce. And dancing corpses. And Sharon Tate. Clarity? Not so much.Though, to be fair, if you aren’t ready for madness, perhaps a play about Lizzie Borden, presented by a theater company named Bedlam, isn’t your best bet.“Fall River Fishing,” written by Zuzanna Szadkowski and Deborah Knox, who also star, is a Rube Goldberg machine of a play: an entertaining spectacle of seemingly disparate parts that are actually interconnected. Yet this ornate display winds up feeling like a lot of show for an unimpressive payoff.But let’s begin with Lizzie Borden (Szadkowski), the woman from the gruesome children’s rhyme, who in 1892 took an ax and served 40 whacks in a double parricide that claimed the lives of her father and stepmother. Well, not an ax exactly, but a hatchet, as Bridget (Knox), the Borden family’s maid — and Lizzie’s kind-of lover — describes it. The weapon doesn’t actually appear until late in the first act, which comprises a series of domestic scenes in the Borden home, including interactions between Lizzie, Bridget, Lizzie’s father (Tony Torn), her young stepmother (Susannah Millonzi) and Uncle Nathan (Jamie Smithson), on the day of the murders.From left, Susannah Millonzi as Lizzie’s young stepmother, Jamie Smithson as Uncle Nathan and Tony Torn as the Borden patriarch in “Fall River Fishing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesInstead of opting for an “American Psycho”-style gorefest, “Fall River Fishing,” directed by Eric Tucker, cleverly undercuts the central dramatic event, making the infamous real-life murders the anticlimax and continuing on from there. So from the start, we see onstage the bloodstained couch, the puddle of blood on the floor and red stains on the bed, though the characters sit and walk around the space as though everything is perfectly normal. Perhaps there is a touch of Bret Easton Ellis in this casually absurd play, which is packed from beginning to end with dark ironies. The most obvious being that the Bordens, despite wearing 19th-century fashion and sitting on 19th-century furniture, don’t just speak in contemporary English, but also make rather contemporary cultural references: to Cabbage Patch Kids, to the appeal of Greek yogurt, to the O.J. Simpson verdict.The dialogue is a constant stream of random quips, anachronisms, expletives, awkward gaffes and surprising non sequiturs. All of which is very funny — if that kind of quirkiness and drollery is your cup of tea. If not, you’ll struggle with the play’s humor, which may wear thin even for those enjoying it. After all, the play prioritizes its high-concept, heightened comedy over character building, plot or any of the usual forces behind a work’s momentum — so its engine runs out of steam almost immediately.It’s because of the no-holds-barred work of the cast and the director, however, that “Fall River” manages to stretch its charms for as long as it does (a nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time could have been cut by a full 60 to 90 minutes). Szadkowski proves to be an expert of deadpan humor from the first (unprintable) word she utters as Lizzie, who is both an insecure outcast and a selfish flirt with an endless need for attention. And, to make things worse, Lizzie is an aspiring actress who declares her performance as Nora in “A Doll’s House” — watch out, Jessica Chastain — her greatest feat.Knox’s Bridget makes a perfect pair with Szadkowski’s Lizzie, who strings the earnest maid along; Bridget follows Lizzie’s whims and bizarre scene studies, donning a wig and a pregnancy belly to play Sharon Tate (who makes an additional appearance). The Borden patriarch played by Torn is an unbearable misogynist, who wistfully recalls his first polyamorous marriage and the appeal of “foreign genitals, novel genitals,” courtesy of Tinder, with entertaining crudeness. Millonzi, as Lizzie’s alternately meek and vicious stepmother, performs her role with such otherworldly abandon that the character seems to have stepped out of her own universe, even within this already curious realm of weirdos and fools. Her physical performance is most impressive: She’s constantly draping herself over furniture, folding over suddenly and slouching around like a wet noodle. And Smithson is an utter delight as Uncle Nathan, a living, breathing cringe in the form of an adult man.After all of the jokes and the bloodshed and a brief waltz between the deceased, the play turns into a less interesting thought experiment in its second act, with Szadkowski and Smithson now playing a modern-day Nora and Torvald as they entertain some very bizarre guests. Soon everyone is digging into a bowl of spaghetti, hands-first, and rubbing it over their faces. By then “Fall River” has not only lost its steam, but also its appeal, and its last bit of sense.“This is nonsense!” Torvald/Nathan declares near the end of the production. True, but a little nonsense offers laughs and flights of imagination. Too much, and you leave the theater feeling mad.Fall River FishingThrough March 9 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Elyria’ Review: The Past Catches Up to Them, Outside Cleveland

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      A microcosmic tale of the Indian diaspora, Deepa Purohit’s new play centers on the tangled history of two women and the man in between them.Watching an actor steal a show is one of the absolute thrills of live performance — but the purest method of that thievery has nothing to do with scenery-chewing, grand solo moments or sparkly razzmatazz. It’s nimble and cat-burglar quiet, not demanding attention, not meaning to upstage.As a doctor named Charu in Deepa Purohit’s new play “Elyria,” set in 1982 Ohio, Bhavesh Patel has the element of surprise very much in his favor. Charu is a mild, conformist, ordinary man — and in his muted earth tones, outfitted for obscurity. In his first scene, he arrives home from the hospital, pours himself a bowl of cornflakes, takes the last of the milk, has an unremarkable conversation with his homemaker wife. He’s a remote presence, lost in his own thoughts. Yet every beat and pulse of him has, for the audience, a subdued magnetism.It’s a genuinely exciting performance, layered and full, flecked with the driest comedy. The only trouble with such standout excellence is that it shifts the axis of the play, so that it seems as if Charu is at its center. “Elyria” in fact revolves around two women and their tangled history with each other, though they both also have a history with him: Dhatta (Gulshan Mia), who married Charu two decades ago, back in Tanzania, as their families had arranged; and Vasanta (Nilanjana Bose), who fell in love with him when they were young and had his baby, though he never knew.The sprawling “Elyria” is a microcosmic tale of the Indian diaspora, crisscrossing continents from Africa to Europe and North America. Directed by Awoye Timpo for Atlantic Theater Company, the play finds Dhatta and Vasanta in Elyria, Ohio, not far from Cleveland.Dhatta and Charu have lived there since 1969, parents to a college-age son, Rohan (Mohit Gautam), who is all-American in his preppy rugby shirts. Vasanta, who works in a hair salon at J.C. Penney, and her husband, Shiv (Sanjit De Silva), a would-be entrepreneur, are newly arrived after 20 years in Nairobi.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.“Not many of us East Africans here in these parts, no?” Shiv says when the two couples run into each other at the movies.Shiv, though, is the only one of them who has no idea that this is a fraught reunion, let alone that Vasanta’s presence in town feels to Dhatta like a betrayal and a threat, even a trauma.For almost all of Act I, the audience is left in the dark, too, about what is going on between the women, which makes the first half of the play feel in retrospect like prolonged throat-clearing.The story of “Elyria” revolves around two women, played by Mia, left, and Nilanjana Bose, whose pasts follow them from Tanzania to Ohio.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA spoiler, then, because there’s no discussing “Elyria” without it: Rohan, Dhatta and Charu’s son, is Vasanta and Charu’s biological child. Both women have always known it. Once the audience does, too, the many threads of the play begin to form a more taut, less enigmatic tapestry.But there are so many threads, and Purohit, attentive to her characters, wants to follow them all: the two marriages, the parent-child relationships, and Rohan’s charming, might-it-be-romance friendship with Hassanali (Omar Shafiuzzaman), a British exchange student. Memory sequences are also woven through, involving Vasanta and Dhatta’s younger selves, and there’s some lovely Indian dance. (Choreography is by Parijat Desai.)The muchness dilutes rather than intensifies. There isn’t time to give the history between the women the weight and tension that it needs if the audience is to invest in it.Jason Ardizzone-West’s geometric set, though, is a thing of spare beauty, the square stage (not raised, as it usually is, in the Linda Gross Theater) surrounded by the audience on all sides and elegantly lit by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew. The costumes, by Sarita Fellows, have some fun with 1980s fashion, despite a few misses, like Rohan’s jeans, which aren’t Levi’s but should be, and the way women wore leggings then versus now.But Patel’s Charu is perfect — even his too-long sideburns, a relic of the ’70s: as if the nation had slipped from the Me Decade into the Reagan era while he was distracted at work. Charu is comic and reckless, selfish and decent, myopic and real. It’s an exhilarating performance, a work of actorly alchemy.ElyriaThrough March 19 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      Rattlestick Theater Names Will Davis as Its Next Artistic Director

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      Davis will be the rare transgender theater artist to lead an Off Broadway nonprofit.Rattlestick Theater, a well-regarded Off Broadway company in the West Village, has decided to name Will Davis, a freelance director and choreographer, as its next artistic director.Davis will succeed Daniella Topol, the artistic director since 2016, who has decided to leave theater administration to pursue a career as a nurse. Davis, 40, is transgender, a distinction that he views as noteworthy.“One of the most important things I can do, as a very intentionally, very visible trans person, is offer a mirror to other emerging artists in all disciplines who may not feel like there is a space for them,” he said. “I’m very excited to be part of the group of people who can push this door open and leave it open.”Davis, who is particularly interested in developing new plays, previously served as artistic director of the American Theater Company in Chicago. He programmed experimental work there and box office revenue declined; his tenure ended with the shuttering of the theater company.Jeff Thamkittikasem, the chairman of the Rattlestick board, said the nonprofit had considered Davis’s experience in Chicago and was confident that the situation in New York was different.In Chicago, Thamkittikasem said, Davis “did what he could and produced great art.” In New York, Thamkittikasem said, “We are in a safer and stronger position that will allow him to flourish.”“Will is just an amazing artist with a beautiful eye, and we’re so excited for that aesthetic to be used for developing the culture of Rattlestick,” Thamkittikasem said.Davis said he was proud of the work he did in Chicago, and looking forward to the opportunity to lead in New York. “Rattlestick has always been a home for experimentation, and that has definitely been a part of what my work has been about,” he said. “There’s every possibility for us to make work that is exciting, that pushes the form, and that also feeds and sustains the theater.”Rattlestick, founded in 1994, is a small company with a penchant for adventurous work by emerging writers. This past week, the Obie Awards said it would honor a show the theater staged in 2021, “Ni Mi Madre,” by giving a prize for performance to the show’s creator and star, Arturo Luís Soria.The company has an annual budget of about $1.5 million, with five full-time and five part-time staffers. The company operates out of a theater, rented from a church, with about 93 seats; a $4 million renovation project is scheduled to begin at the end of this summer, and the company plans to stage its next season at locations around the city.Davis will start working alongside Topol in the coming weeks, and will assume the artistic director position full-time on May 1. More

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      Review: In ‘With No Fanfare,’ Things Fall Apart

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      The play, a hit at the Avignon Festival, explores the twists and turns of a breakup through a whimsical mix of musical numbers and dreamlike vignettes.While romantic drama fuels much of the theatrical repertoire, what happens after a catastrophic breakup isn’t nearly as easy to translate onstage. In “With No Fanfare,” a French musical theater production directed by Samuel Achache, it takes a set that literally falls apart to establish the slow process of picking up the pieces.The metaphor is transparent, but it isn’t overblown. “With No Fanfare” (“Sans Tambour”) centers on a nameless couple, a man and a woman who have already reached their breaking point when the play starts. The man (Lionel Dray) frantically washes the dishes in a small sink; the woman (Sarah Le Picard) accuses him of caring only about clogged drains. As they trade barbs, they punch the kitchen walls, or whack household items at them. One by one, the walls collapse like a house of cards.And that’s just the first 15 minutes. What comes next — mourning and rebuilding — is told through a whimsical mix of musical numbers and dreamlike vignettes. One character lands at an imaginary clinic for broken hearts. Later, the cast re-enacts the medieval story of the star-crossed Tristan and Isolde. The process is unpredictable, tragicomic, slightly messy — and thoroughly touching.“With No Fanfare” first made a splash at the Avignon Festival last summer, and it has now reached the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, where it feels right at home. When the director Peter Brook brought this dilapidated music hall back to life in the 1970s, he didn’t hide the visible wear and tear on the walls. The set, a two-story house designed by Lisa Navarro, has a similarly ramshackle quality, with peeling paint and a hazardous stairwell.Lisa Navarro’s set suggests a ramshackle, two-story house.Christophe Raynaud de LageOver the past decade, Achache has developed a quirky brand of musical theater, often in tandem with a co-director, Jeanne Candel. The company he founded in 2021, La Sourde, employs both musicians and actors, and “With No Fanfare” takes advantage of that as it weaves compositions by cast members and the musical director, Florent Hubert, on top of a series of lieder by Schumann.The soprano Agathe Peyrat sings many of these numbers, and acts almost as a shadow for the actors, expressing their grief-stricken feelings. Along with her, five musicians are onstage nearly throughout, and they also take smaller acting parts.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The back-and-forth between drama and music lends “With No Fanfare” much of its power, because the show’s dreamlike logic can be hard to follow. The part in which characters play Tristan and Isolde doesn’t quite land, for instance: A relationship built on a mythical love potion isn’t an ideal point of comparison for a modern couple.“With No Fanfare” is stronger when Achache and his cast (who all get a writing credit) let their imaginations roam freely. Once the central relationship has crumbled for good, the woman suddenly reappears at a treatment center where doctors offer remedies for heartbreak.There, the woman meets a third character, a writer named Spinel. Played by the actor and singer Léo-Antonin Lutinier, Spinel is a test patient for the clinic’s offbeat, metaphorical procedures. On doctors’ orders, he swims in his own tears. Later, he has surgery to remove the last remaining traces of love from his brain.“With No Fanfare” weaves a series of songs by Schumann into the narrative, as well as additional compositions by cast members.Christophe Raynaud de LageLutinier brings a dryly burlesque quality to the proceedings, and Spinel is in some ways the most affecting character, even though his relationship with the others isn’t fully fleshed out. Many scenes in “With No Fanfare” rely on plain physical comedy, as when Spinel tries to reach a piano that is hovering above the stage. He looks at it, and then brings a ladder that doesn’t reach; when he tries to climb it despite this, the steps give out under him, a Buster Keaton-style digression.Yet even the most absurd scenes have a melancholy quality to them. Achache somehow connects them to the long, frustrating process of rebuilding a life when the world you had imagined with someone collapses. As the nameless central man, Dray — an actor with over-the-top energy — spends much of the show standing precariously on a half-destroyed stool, a hammer in hand.It makes little sense on paper, yet onstage what you see is a man struggling to re-establish a sense of normalcy. Achache doesn’t aim for a tidy narrative. The characters don’t get a happy ending, or any real ending at all, but that lack of resolution rings true.At the end, Dray sits alone on the upper level of the set, dangling his legs over the edge, and surveys the ruins underneath. “And still, I coped with it,” he says, looking bemused. Mourning is a mental journey, and “With No Fanfare” makes a fitting visual and musical response to its twists and turns. More

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      Review: ‘black odyssey’ Sails Through Black Past and Present

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      This wine-dark sea threads through Harlem, and its Ulysses, buffeted by the gods, is a soldier fighting in Afghanistan who makes a fatal mistake.Imagine fitting the various arenas of Black history — protests, from the March on Washington to Black Lives Matter; deaths, from the enslaved lost on the Atlantic crossing to Trayvon Martin; music, from Negro spirituals to Biggie Smalls — into one of the foundational texts of civilization, so old that it predates the written word itself.Things are going to get a bit crowded.But that isn’t to say that what the poet-playwright Marcus Gardley has accomplished in his often stunning but also muddled “black odyssey,” which opened Sunday, is any less impressive for the sizable challenge it presents.Set in modern-day Harlem and beyond, “black odyssey” follows the journey of Ulysses Lincoln (Sean Boyce Johnson), a soldier in Afghanistan who unknowingly shot and killed the son of the sea god Paw Sidin (Jimonn Cole). The god’s vengeful machinations, along with Ulysses’ own guilt, have deterred him from getting back to his wife, Nella P. (D. Woods), and son, Malachai (Marcus Gladney, Jr.). The god-in-chief, Deus (James T. Alfred), and his daughter, Athena, or Aunt Tee (Harriett D. Foy), an ancestor of Ulysses who becomes human to support Nella and Malachai while the hero is away, try to help Ulysses despite Paw Sidin’s obstacles. Ultimately, though, Ulysses discovers that the only way he can absolve himself and return home is by finding his history.Presented by the Classic Stage Company, “black odyssey” opens with a chorus’s invocation: “Let’s begin at the beginning so we may end at the end.” This cheeky, faux-cryptic line introduces Gardley’s work, directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, as not just inspired by the plot and characters of the Odyssey but also by the formal structure of the epic poem, which begins with the same circularity and foreshadowing. The dialogue snaps with playful alliteration, repetition and puns, even rhymes that punch up lines rather than overpower them. (“God knows you could use a hot bath, hot comb, and a hot oil treatment,” Aunt Tee says indelicately to Nella, inviting herself into her home.)And the script demonstrates Gardley’s appreciation for and understanding of Homeric storytelling: As in the Odyssey, where so little of the main action takes place in real time but instead comes to life in hearsay and recollections, so too does “black odyssey” manipulate time and place, memory and fantasy, in the simple act of telling a story. (Gardley’s film adaptation of “The Color Purple” is forthcoming.)More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The cast is a delight, especially when Walker-Webb’s direction allows them to let loose with the comedy. Foy is uproarious as the wise and wisecracking Aunt Tee. Adrienne C. Moore, as the enchantress Circe, provocatively stalks across the stage, sticks out her bottom at Ulysses and stretches out horizontally in front of him, all the while describing a sensual menu of Southern comfort food (“Neck them neck bones … dump my dumplings,” she begs Ulysses in some culinary-themed foreplay). Cole’s Paw Sidin is wily and despicable, though as cool as his long, blue buttoned jacket.The heroes themselves are less interesting, though to be fair their roles give them less room for such play, given that they must carry the show’s drama. But Ulysses jittering around with desire as he’s seduced by Circe, Nella going angry-Black-mother on Malachai, and Malachai giving woke Gen Z-style speeches to his elders are all, in their comedy, more compelling than in their moments of sorrow and joy.From left in background, Tẹmídayọ Amay and Sean Boyce Johnson in boat. In foreground, James T. Alfred has the ship’s wheel chained to him.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn general, when the play leans to parody, offering sirens styled as Dream Girls and the blind prophet Tiresias as a funky, supa-dupa-fly afro-wearing bus driver (Alfred, clowning around wholesomely), it becomes a whole different production — entertaining, though from left field.Because otherwise, the work’s copious name-dropping, and its conflation of characters and events from Black history, transforms it into a game of Black bingo: Check references to the Scottsboro Boys, the Birmingham church bombing, the Middle Passage, Hurricane Katrina and the spirituals (though beautifully performed, particularly by Woods and Gladney) for the winning card.And “black odyssey” has a lot of fun with naming, in the same spirit as its source text (in the Odyssey, Odysseus says he is “Nobody” or “No one”) — but between Malachai Malcolm Little Lincoln and Circe Tubman Sojourner Rosa Ida B. Nzinga, among others, even that touch of humor becomes little more than an overdone declaration of the play’s Blackness.Formal and informal classicists who’ve attended the College of Homer and the University of Bulfinch and Edith Hamilton may also have some follow-up questions about this Harlem odyssey’s modus operandi. For example, the play represents the gods exercising their power in the human world as Deus and Paw Sidin playing a chess game. But the metaphor is overused and raises more questions: Do these gods have laws and limitations to follow? Deus says they’ve been playing since 1619, so does that mean they are to blame for the state of Black Americans? Are they only gods of Black people; are they the same gods from Homer?More generally “black odyssey” sometimes struggles to strike the right balance of working from the original text and departing from it; the tension is most apparent when the play blatantly explains itself, by, for example, naming a character Benevolence Nausicca Calypso Sabine (a transformative Tẹmídayo Amay) to make clear that she’s an amalgamation of several young female characters Odysseus encountered in his travels.David Goldstein’s set beautifully transforms the thrust stage at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater with an elevated platform that appears to ripple and reflect like the actual sea. Two ends of a sailboat, painted with a city skyline and used to represent a home, a rooftop or, of course, a sailing vessel, go a long way, but the production could use a few other pieces or props to make its different settings clear. Adam Honoré’s lighting is appropriately august, when Deus stands with a trail of warm yellow light behind him, opposite the chilly dark blue of Paw Sidin’s lighting, and aquamarine blues and greens reflect off the sea-stage, submerging the whole theater in an oceanic underworld. Similarly on point is Kindall Houston Almond’s costume design, which showcases such a variety of fashions from different periods and aesthetics: bright, flowing robes, a black baseball cap with a Basquiat-style crown, huaraches, a.k.a., the unofficial shoes of every Caribbean man of a certain age.This classic-meets-modern, Greek-meets-Black production traverses a lot of ground in its two-and-a-half-hour running time, making the journey feel tiresome by the end. Still, “black odyssey” offers a set of heroes — and villains — and a grand spectacle of Blackness to make the trip worthwhile.Black OdysseyThrough March 26 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More