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      Review: A Solo ‘Great Expectations’ That Calls for Endurance

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      The British comedian Eddie Izzard plays every part in this relatively straightforward adaptation of Charles Dickens’s classic story.Eddie Izzard is furrowing her brow in mock confusion, eyes darting this way and that. Pip, the narrator of “Great Expectations,” whom Izzard plays along with every character in this solo spin on the classic, is at a loss for words, and Izzard is committed to the bit.It’s a rare moment, of course, as Izzard, the British comedian and actor, has to get through the whole of Charles Dickens’s densely plotted novel in two hours (with a 15-minute intermission). But these fleeting glimpses of her sly, sideways persona, honed on stand-up stages beginning in the late 1980s, are the highlights of this otherwise straightforward, relatively dry retelling, which was adapted by her brother, Mark Izzard, and opened at the Greenwich House Theater on Thursday.Impassive matter-of-factness and clipped, first-person narration are hallmarks of Izzard’s comedy style, usually applied to keenly observed, and often frankly personal, anecdotes in specials like “Wunderbar,” from this year, and “Dress to Kill,” recorded in 1998. But taking the stage alone to dramatize a decades-spanning coming-of-age tale is a steep hill to climb. (Izzard, who last year completed 32 marathons in 31 days, has a thing for feats of endurance.) In that respect, Izzard’s accomplishment here is impressive, if not without hints at the strain of the effort.Serialized in 1860, “Great Expectations” is packed with incidents involving the orphaned Pip and a cast of richly drawn characters: the stern sister who raised him and her kindly husband; a convict turned mysterious benefactor; a lawyer who delivers the windfall; a devoted tutor; peers; rivals; and, perhaps most memorably, the cold object of his affection, Estella, and the eccentric widow, Miss Havisham, who reared her as an emotional hostage.As Pip, Izzard maintains a measured and mildly animated tone, as if reading to an especially excitable child at bedtime. In a cinched black waistcoat, white ruffled blouse and bold red lipstick (the costume stylists are Tom Piper and Libby Da Costa), Izzard assumes Dickens’s wide array of characters with only subtle modulations of voice and gesture — a hand raised with fingers splayed as Miss Havisham, a slight gaze down the nose for Estella.Instead, the work of distinguishing between speakers falls to the step and half turn she performs, between nearly every line of dialogue, to face the opposing direction, the shuffle of lace-up high-heel boots across the floor like a kind of human metronome. The technique, which Izzard notes in the program is borrowed from Richard Pryor’s stand-up, substitutes physical business where deeper development of individual characters, and the tensions between them and Pip, would be more engaging.Any such interior or relational work is daunting to fathom, though, given the twists and turns in Dickens’s sprawling narrative. Unlike “A Christmas Carol,” a neatly structured, novella-length morality tale frequently adapted for the stage, including in a solo version currently on Broadway starring Jefferson Mays, “Great Expectations” is an unwieldy interpersonal epic. Mark Izzard’s adaptation, which is faithful to Dickens’s prose while slashing it down to the barest threads, moves with such expediency that it can be tough to follow, even with whole characters and subplots excised.Nor does Izzard’s performance, unlike Mays’s in “A Christmas Carol,” aim to make the story’s telling especially theatrical. By the time she reaches the second act’s dizzying tumble of action-packed resolutions, the viewing experience is less about being entertained than rooting for Izzard to cross the finish line with her assurance and charisma intact.The production, directed by Selina Cadell, is simple almost to a fault, with velvet red drapes framing the stage (Piper also designed the set) and lighting, by Tyler Elich, that does the most imaginative work of any element to bring the story into the room. Music compositions by Eliza Thompson, the occasional trill of woodwinds between chapters, has the old-fashioned feel of a radio story hour, but sound design, which might have generated dimension and atmosphere throughout, is curiously absent.Pip reflects, in his youth, on contending with “feelings of restless aspiration.” An artist as prolific and ambitious as Izzard (not to mention an athlete as extreme) can undoubtedly relate. It’s when that eager flash in Izzard’s eyes cuts through the flurry of words that “Great Expectations” lives up to its own.Great ExpectationsThrough Feb. 11 at Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan; eddieizzardgreatexpectations.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      With ‘Company,’ Antonio Banderas Brings Sondheim to Spain

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      Many Broadway blockbusters make their way to Madrid, but Banderas wants to push the envelope with serious, complex musicals that are little-known in Spain.On a recent Friday night, a fashionable Madrid audience leaped to its feet at the end of a performance of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company.” The crowd cheered the 40 onstage actors and musicians, but the most enthusiastic ovations were reserved for Antonio Banderas, the production’s director and star. For the past nearly three hours, the Spanish actor had crooned, belted and twirled his way through the first Spanish-language production of the groundbreaking 1970 musical.Banderas’s “Company” started life a little more than a year ago in Málaga, the actor’s hometown in southern Spain, where he founded a musical theater company, Teatro del Soho, in 2019. After a stop in Barcelona earlier this year, the production is ending its run in Madrid, where it is playing through Feb. 14, 2023, at the Teatro Albéniz.“I actually am an actor because of musical theater and musical movies,” Banderas, 62, said in an interview the next day. As an adolescent in 1970s Málaga, he explained, he grew up with the great musicals of the era, including “Hair,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Godspell.”That early love was the inspiration behind Teatro del Soho, a nonprofit that Banderas compared to the Public Theater in New York, which aims to bring musicals other than blockbuster Broadway fare to Spanish theatergoers. (The company’s most recent production is Stephen Schwartz’s “Godspell.”)Over the past two decades, Madrid has emerged as the musical theater capital of the Spanish world. Among the 14 shows running there are “Tina,” “Mamma Mia!,” “We Will Rock You” and “The Lion King” (“El Rey León”). Now Banderas is trying to push the envelope with serious, complex works that are little-known here — and “Company” has been on Banderas’s mind for a long time.In 2003, Banderas was starring in the musical “Nine” on Broadway, playing Guido, a filmmaker having a creative crisis. Banderas recalled Sondheim visiting his dressing room during the run, and drawing similarities between Guido and Bobby, the protagonist of “Company.” He also told Banderas that there was more to that show that met the eye: “I love to create plays with enigmas,” the actor recalled Sondheim saying.After the meeting, Banderas said he immersed himself in Sondheim’s catalog. “Company” in particular became something of an obsession.Banderas received the composer’s blessing to change the age of the musical’s main character, Bobby, from 35 to 50.Javier NavalWhen “Company” premiered in 1970, it looked like nothing else on Broadway: Formally daring, and laced with irony, it is often described as a “concept musical” and has little plot to speak of. Instead, Sondheim and George Furth, who wrote the book, serve up a series of loosely connected scenes about a commitment-phobic bachelor and his friends.Banderas’s main change to the book is an age switch for Bobby — the role he plays — from 35 to 50. The composer-lyricist signed off on that before his death in 2021 at age 91, Banderas said.Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91.Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows.Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview.His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers.‘West Side Story’: Does the musical, which features some of the artist’s best-known lyrics, deserve a new hearing?‘Company’: The revival of his 1970 musical features a gender swap.Everything in his production followed from having an older Bobby, Banderas said. The show’s vignettes are like hallucinatory episodes, as Bobby sifts through memories and dreams of his youth; regrets take on a haunting dimension because of “the proximity of death,” Banderas added.“It was always very shocking to me how much everything was thoroughly focused on Bobby,” Banderas said. “Bobby is a charismatic character, but he’s also an egotistical coward.”In Banderas’s staging, Bobby sometimes sits center stage as the large cast rotates around him. Behind them, the New York City skyline looms majestically. “I created a glittering universe and he’s in the center, as the sun,” Banderas said.Banderas has cast most of the show’s other parts with local performers. “Twenty years ago, you couldn’t find this amount of actors and actresses in Spain,” for musical theater, he said. He also insisted on using the show’s original orchestration. “I have 26 musicians here, which is not profitable,” he said, but added, “I love that sound.” (For comparison, the 2021 Broadway revival of “Company” used a 14-person band.)To create a convincing Spanish-language version, Banderas turned to Roser Batalla and Ignacio García May, a duo who had previously worked together on “A Chorus Line.”“Every Sondheim is a challenge,” said Batalla, a translator and actress from Barcelona who was in a Catalan-language production of “Company” there 25 years ago. The lyrics and music are so closely bound in the show and, indeed, in all of Sondheim’s work, she added.Banderas and the actress Marta Ribera lead the cast.Javier Naval“You have to maintain not only the rhymes and syllables and the cadence of the music, but also give the information at the right point,” said Batalla, who has translated other Sondheim shows into Spanish and Catalan.She recalled meeting Sondheim in Barcelona, in 1995, at a performance of “Sweeney Todd,” which she had translated into Catalan. “He said, ‘As long as all the ideas get to the audience, I’m OK with it.’ He never asked us for the back-translation of any of the shows,” she said.“Company” holds some thorny problems for translators. Batalla pointed to “Getting Married Today,” a punishing, rapid-fire song for a hyperventilating bride — and a high point in most performances — as a particular challenge. “It’s very quick and it needs to be understood,” she said. Spanish had relatively few monosyllabic words to recreate the song’s patter, she added, but the language’s flexible syntax helped offset the difficulty.She left some culturally and geographically specific references to 1970s New York in place, Batalla said: Since American culture is so dominant, those still resonate with Spanish audiences. “We’ve been seeing movies by Woody Allen all our life long,” she said.May, a noted Spanish playwright, said the main challenge in translating the dialogue was finding a “high-class Spanish” that matched the snappy, urbane tone of the book. He weighed “every word, every verb, every nuance, so it could be as close to the English as possible,” he said.Critics here have largely been convinced: The daily newspaper El País hailed the production as “one of the best musicals ever seen in Spain.” For Banderas, the reception is a validation of his passion and commitment.“When we put together Teatro del Soho, it was to do the musicals that actually don’t get to Spain,” he said. In addition to his work there, Banderas recently teamed up with Andrew Lloyd Webber to create Amigos Para Siempre, a joint venture to license, produce and develop theatrical work for the world’s Spanish-speaking markets.Banderas called it an opportunity to “create a platform of Broadway in Spanish to the world.” “But it’s going to take time,” he added.CompanyThrough Feb. 14, 2023, at he Teatro Albéniz, in Madrid; companyelmusical.es. More

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      The Best (and Worst) Theater in Europe in 2022

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      The Times’s three European theater critics pick their favorite productions of the year — plus a turkey apiece for the festive season.Matt WolfFour favorites from The Times’s London theater criticFrom left, Samira Wiley, Ronke Adekoluejo, Sule Rimi and Giles Terera in “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at the National Theater.Marc Brenner“Blues for an Alabama Sky”National Theater, LondonWhen the American writer Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play crossed the Atlantic this fall, it was the high point of a variable year for the National Theater, England’s flagship playhouse. Set in adjacent apartments in 1930s Harlem, the play takes an unsparing look at a cross section of Prohibition-era Americans yearning for release from the racism and homophobia that mar their daily lives. An expert Anglo-American cast was led by Giles Terera (“Hamilton”) and the Juilliard-trained TV actress Samira Wiley as roommates who talk of packing up and moving to Paris; at the helm was Lynette Linton, making a terrific National Theater debut with a production that embraced freewheeling comedy as well as deep sorrow.Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein’s reimagining of “Oklahoma!” at the Young Vic.Marc Brenner“Oklahoma!”Young Vic Theater, LondonIt was an indifferent year for musicals in London, until the arrival from New York of a much-lauded revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 “Oklahoma!” The dilemma of the farm girl Laurey Williams (a dazzling Anoushka Lucas), forced to choose between the affections of two men, possessed an unusual urgency. And the directors Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein found a primal darkness in the material that made a buoyant-seeming American classic look very bleak. In February, the production is set to transfer to the West End for a limited run.From left, Emilia Clarke, Indira Varma, Daniel Monks and Tom Rhys Harries in Anya Reiss’s interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” directed by Jamie Lloyd at the Harold Pinter Theater.Marc Brenner“The Seagull”Harold Pinter Theater, LondonThe director Jamie Lloyd revived Chekhov’s 1896 play in a stripped-back, modern-dress production, with the cast seated on plastic chairs against a nondescript chipboard set. The absence of props and period detail helped focus attention on the anguish at the heart of this celebrated work. You felt, more acutely than ever, the thwarted passions that drive a play about artistic ambition and misplaced love. Indira Varma was in peak form as the charismatically self-regarding actress, Arkadina, and she was superbly matched by the Australian actor Daniel Monks as her suicidal son, Konstantin. The “Game of Thrones” alumna Emilia Clarke made a memorable West End debut as the hopeful young Nina.Lennie James, left, and Paapa Essiedu in Caryl Churchill’s “A Number,” directed by Lyndsey Turner at the Old Vic.Manuel Harlan“A Number”Old Vic Theater, LondonCaryl Churchill’s 2002 play has been revived many times, but rarely with the scorching intensity that the director Lyndsey Turner and the designer Es Devlin brought to bear at the Old Vic in January. Nominally about genetic cloning, Churchill’s hourlong drama moves beyond scientific inquiry to address more human issues, like sibling hatred and the slippery nature of happiness. In the superlative cast, Paapa Essiedu excelled playing three cloned sons who confront a toxic parental inheritance, as did Lennie James as a father who wants to make a fresh start.And the turkey …From left, David Harbour, Bill Pullman and Akiya Henry in Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel at the Ambassadors Theater.Marc Brenner“Mad House”Ambassadors Theater, LondonDysfunctional family dramas are a staple of American drama. But they rarely come drearier and more overwritten than Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” which had its world premiere in the West End this summer. Rebeck, a New York theater regular, gave the play’s choice role to a fellow American, David Harbour; he played one of three children gathered at the home of a cantankerous father (Bill Pullman) roaring his way to the grave like a dime-store King Lear. The writing felt borrowed and inauthentic, and the director Moritz von Stuelpnagel couldn’t lift an evening rife with tired confessions (“none of us had a childhood”) and clichéd plot devices (the belated emergence of an all-important letter). More than once, I groaned.Laura CappelleFour favorites from The Times’s Paris theater criticRomeu Costa, left, and Rui M. Silva in “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord.Filipe Ferreira“Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists”Bouffes du Nord, ParisTiago Rodrigues, the incoming director of the Avignon Festival, was on a roll in 2022. He brought several revelatory productions to Paris this fall, none more so than “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” at the Bouffes du Nord. The unlikely subject of the play, which Rodrigues also wrote, is a fictional Portuguese family that hunts down and kills fascists, following a tradition passed down through generations. Is that an honorable contribution to society, as most of the family members believe, or is doing harm always unacceptable, even when fascists threaten democracy? Rodrigues and his cast walk a fine line to avoid caricature, yet the conversations that result onstage — starting with the youngest daughter, who experiences doubts about her right to kill — are consistently thoughtful and engage the audience critically, without feeling forced.The cast in “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival “One Song”Avignon FestivalSome of the best shows to debut in France in the past year brought unclassifiable feats of virtuosity onstage, like “One Song,” which played at the Avignon Festival. Created by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop, it was another idiosyncratic entry in the “History/ies of Theater” series that the Belgian playhouse NTGent has developed in collaboration with the festival. In “One Song,” a group of musicians/competitors perform a single song on a loop while doing an extreme workout. (A violinist plays while doing squats and leg lifts on a high beam.) Throughout, as the performers thoroughly exhaust themselves, a male cheerleader and a group of fans take turns encouraging and booing them, while a referee mumbles incomprehensibly in the background. The instant standing ovation in Avignon wasn’t merely a way to reward the performers for their efforts: “One Song” lingered in the mind as a wild, exhilarating study in absurdity.Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan in “Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Caberet.”Gestuelle“Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Cabaret”Paris l’Été FestivalAnother oddball success, “Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Cabaret” won a number of awards in France this year, and they were thoroughly deserved. The show’s two actors and directors, Olivier Martin-Salvan and Pierre Guillois, tell their story almost entirely through dozens of cardboard objects. Words written on the signs and boxes, of various shapes and forms, explain what each represents — including a “fjord” and a “fly swatter” — and with the help of assistants, Guillois, a lithe, clownlike figure, in boxer shorts throughout, manipulates them at lightning speed. In the tale he spins, Martin-Salvan’s character goes on an adventure around Europe to reconnect with a siren, all the while mumbling in a mix of gibberish and English. How does this all add up, you ask? The duo’s fantasy world coheres thanks to extraordinary stagecraft in this “cardboard cabaret,” and the result is serious theater magic.Juliette Speck as Caster Semenya, the South African runner and Olympic gold medalist, in “Free Will,” directed by Julie Bertin at the Théâtre Dunois. Simon Gosselin“Free Will”Théâtre Dunois, ParisTheaters that cater to young people often fly under the critical radar. With Léa Girardet and Julie Bertin’s “Free Will,” however, the Théâtre Dunois in Paris landed a hit for all ages. This new play explored the life of the South African runner Caster Semenya, an Olympic gold medalist caught in a long-running fight with her sport’s governing body — and repeatedly banned from competition — because of elevated testosterone levels. Girardet and Bertin, two gifted young writers and directors, depict the frequently inhuman treatment of Semenya (the excellent Juliette Speck) with instructive clarity, weaving together verbatim excerpts from court proceedings and witty spoofs of femininity standards that even top athletes are forced to abide by.And the turkey …From left, Julien Frison, Denis Podalydès and Christophe Montenez at the Comédie-Française in “Tartuffe,” directed by Ivo van Hove.Jan Versweyveld“Tartuffe”Comédie-Française, ParisThis “Tartuffe” was supposed to launch France’s yearlong celebration of Molière’s quadricentennial in style. Staged by Ivo van Hove for the Comédie-Française, a descendant of Molière’s own theater ensemble, it offered an intriguing experiment: a reconstruction of the play’s 1664 original version, censored by the French religious establishment and subsequently lost. Yet van Hove undermined it with a stultifying black-and-white production that had less to do with Molière than with his own directorial tics. The suited cast was left to wrestle with bewildering character arcs: When Tartuffe, who fakes piety to secure a position within a bourgeois family’s home, attempts to seduce the wife, Elmire, van Hove manufactured a love story between the two — leaving Marina Hands, as Elmire, to take Tartuffe’s abuse with puppy-eyed adoration. Thankfully, stronger Molière productions followed at the Comédie-Française later in the year.A.J. GoldmannFour favorites from The Times’s Berlin theater criticA scene in Claudia Bauer’s “humanistää!,” an exploration of texts by the experimental Austrian writer Ernst Jandl.Nikolaus Ostermann/Volkstheater “humanistää!”Volkstheater, ViennaThe director Claudia Bauer’s “humanistää!,” which premiered at the Volkstheater in Vienna in January and traveled to Berlin for Theatertreffen, the prestigious German theater festival, in May, is rightly one of the most acclaimed German-language productions of the year. This theatrical homage to the Viennese experimental poet and writer Ernst Jandl (1925-2000) is a musically supercharged and visually arresting work from one of Germany’s very best theater directors. Exuberant performances from the Volkstheater’s excellent actors are perfectly calibrated to this gleefully surreal production, in which 10 of Jandl’s key works come to eye-popping life in a Gesamtkunstwerk that combines spoken word, music, dance and pantomime. While delighting in Jandl’s linguistic games, the production, which remains in the Volkstheater’s repertoire, crackles with fresh and euphoric inventiveness. This is the one show I can’t wait to see again.The ensemble in “Oasis de la Impunidad” (“Oasis of Impunity”), directed by Marco Layera, at the Schaubühne’s Festival International for New Drama, or FIND.Gianmarco Bresadola“Oasis de la Impunidad”Schaubühne, BerlinThis show, from the Chilean director Marco Layera and his company, La Re-sentida, is brilliant but harrowing: I don’t ever want to revisit it. A coproduction between Berlin’s Schaubühne, where it premiered in April, and the Münchner Kammerspiele, the rigorously choreographed exploration of state violence is one of those extreme works of art that is all the more disturbing for the delicate artistry of its execution. Darkly comic in some places, poetic or balletic in others, this “investigation into the origins and mechanisms of violence,” to quote the program, feels like being trapped in a carnival of torture and brutality that is profoundly unsettling for the performers and spectators alike.“Crazy for Consolation,” directed by Thorsten Lensing.Armin Smailovic/Salzburg Festival“Verrückt nach Trost”Salzburg FestivalThorsten Lensing’s long-awaited follow-up to his 2018 adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” is possibly even more astonishing. In “Verrückt nach Trost” (“Crazy for Consolation”), which premiered at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria, in August, Lensing and his group of four brilliant actors achieve something close to a theatrical miracle. The lengthy and often surreal play, which revolves around an orphaned brother and sister who go through life craving love and human connection, is one of the most profoundly moving new plays I have seen in a long time. The work’s emotional impact has much to do with the finely chiseled performances of Ursina Lardi, Devid Striesow, André Jung and Sebastian Blomberg, who guide us through a long evening of unpredictable and incandescent episodes, including what is quite possibly the most moving monologue ever written for an octopus.The “Hamilton” cast in Hamburg.Johan Persson“Hamilton”Stage Operettenhaus, HamburgIn October, the German premiere of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning musical, “Hamilton,” landed with volcanic force in Hamburg. The first production of the show in a language other than English, it was a herculean undertaking. The ingenious translation of Miranda’s abundant and inventive lyrics took four years, and the cast hails from 13 countries. Hard to believe, but the original Broadway production, directed by Thomas Kail, is already seven years old; if anything, this one seems galvanized by its new language and cultural context. There has never been a show like this before in Germany. From the dazzling linguistic feats of the translators to the convincing and handsome staging and gripping, Broadway-caliber performances, everything about “Hamilton” in Hamburg feels revolutionary.And the turkey …Christian Weise’s “Queen Lear” at the Maxim Gorki Theater.Ute Langkafel“Queen Lear”Maxim Gorki Theater, BerlinGermans love their Shakespeare, and Berlin has seen many fine stagings of the Bard’s work, both traditional and deconstructed. Christian Weise’s goofy sci-fi production of “Queen Lear” at the Maxim Gorki Theater is possibly the most bewildering Shakespeare reimagining ever conceived. The modern-language adaptation is by Soeren Voima, an authors’ collective, and it recasts Shakespeare’s darkest play as an outer-space soap opera with echoes of “Star Wars” and “Doctor Who.” The chintzy, low-budget aesthetic, the hammy acting and the lightsabers are all good, if mildly tedious, fun for the first hour. But hark! There are two more hours to go! The only thing this intergalactic spacewreck of a production proves is Lear’s maxim that“nothing will come of nothing.” More

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      Eddie Izzard Plays Which Part in ‘Great Expectations’? All of Them.

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      The British comedian and actor is now performing her solo take on Dickens’s coming-of-age drama Off Broadway. It’s “pure storytelling,” she said.On a December evening in a rehearsal studio on the western edge of Manhattan’s garment district, Eddie Izzard was chatting about audience assumptions — that her solo performance of “Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations” would be a comic take on the classic Victorian coming-of-age tale.“There’s about four jokes in it,” she said.Still, even the way Izzard uttered that sentence was funny: dryly dismissive, with the briefest pause as she calculated the paltry figure. Izzard has, after all, made her name in comedy. And however firmly she might draw a line between Eddie Izzard the stand-up and Eddie Izzard the actor — the British Broadway veteran who was a Tony Award nominee in 2003, for “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” — they are of course one and the same, operating in different yet overlapping modes.In “Great Expectations,” now in previews for a Dec. 15 opening at the Greenwich House Theater in Greenwich Village, Izzard pulls moments of levity from the very air. Playing the orphaned Pip, the forsaken Miss Havisham, the alluring Estella, the desperate Magwitch and 15 or so others, she brings her own arch humor to a multiple-character technique that she ascribes not to some drama theorist but to the comedian Richard Pryor, a virtuoso of the crowded solo stage.When, in rehearsal that evening, Izzard worried aloud about her Pip blocking the audience’s view of Miss Havisham — who at that moment in the scene was quite invisible, as was Estella beside her — it was all about leaving room for the spectators’ imaginations to fill in the blanks.Over the phone later, the show’s director, Selina Cadell, laughed warmly as she said: “I think Eddie looks after the invisible characters better than I do.”“Great Expectations” begins on Christmas Eve, and Dickens did love a Christmas story. But its saga stretches over years, and Izzard says the holiday timing of the play’s run in New York — scheduled to continue through Feb. 11 — is accidental.Unlike Jefferson Mays’s solo performance of “A Christmas Carol,” currently on Broadway, Izzard’s “Great Expectations” has almost nothing in the way of scenery, aside from the velvet curtains of its wooden-floored set, and certainly no whiz-bang, high-tech projections.“This is pure storytelling,” Izzard said after rehearsal. “I’ve always said that drama is like a main meal, and comedy is like a dessert. We love desserts. But the main meal has all different tastes, the savory and the sweets and everything.”Izzard in “Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations,” at the Greenwich House Theater in Manhattan through Feb. 11.Carol RoseggAt 60, she is ready to dig in — and to demonstrate what she’s capable of.“Drama is something I’ve always wanted to do from the beginning, and just went a long way round to get to it,” said Izzard, who lately has been preparing a one-woman “Hamlet” with Cadell. In such multicharacter solo shows, Izzard finds her own gender fluidity helpful.“I love the fact that I’m playing male characters and female characters in this,” she said. “And I hope that Dickens might think it was OK.”Izzard is fond of noting that the novelist, in his lifetime, used to travel to New York to give public readings. This “Great Expectations” began with readings, too, as Izzard did what she calls work-in-progress performances, initially in 2019 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The streamlined adaptation is by her older brother, Mark Izzard, though when Eddie suggested the project to him, she meant for them to work on the script together.“I went back and read the book and got started,” Mark said by phone, all practicality, “and found out later that Eddie was too busy to do anything. So I just pushed on.”Back in the rehearsal room, Eddie pulled out her phone and scrolled, seeking a photo from the summer of 2020: a time-capsule image of an early pandemic performance. It shows her in a red dress, doing “Great Expectations” for a socially distanced audience on a wind-whipped rooftop in the south of England, using a hand-held microphone.“I said, ‘This is exactly how Dickens planned it,’” she deadpanned.THEATER REHEARSAL ROOMS are workaday spaces, and people tend to dress accordingly. Almost no one looks glamorous, let alone devastatingly so. But that evening in early December, Izzard did, in a tailored black jacket over onyx tights, with a splash of color in the few fluttery inches of floral-print skirt — a very British touch — peeking out beneath the jacket hem. On her feet were a stunning pair of tall, lace-up, high-heeled black boots: a part of her costume that she wanted to get used to wearing.“If you are trans, it’s probably better to be fairly well put together,” she said, and sighed at the difference between taking meticulous care with her appearance and throwing on any old thing, as she said a person can do “if you look devastatingly feminine. Female. I mean, Marilyn Monroe wore a potato sack at one point in a photo shoot.”Let the record show, though, that Izzard was not just fairly well, but magnificently, tastefully put together. If you’ve seen the 2009 documentary “Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story,” which includes a short section ridiculing her historical lack of fashion sense when it came to standard-issue guy clothes, you will recognize this as a sartorial leap forward.About her pronouns, when I asked, she said: “Prefer she/her, don’t mind he/him, so no one can get it wrong.”It was such a breezy, practiced statement that I thought she was done until she added: “And I didn’t change them. The world changed them.”What’s this?“I was on a program. They said, ‘Do you want she/her or he/him?’ I went, ‘Ahh, oh, she.’ I’d been thinking of changing them. And then the program went out, and the whole world changed them. Two days.” She made a sound effect like a series of detonations.“All news outlets, particularly in America and Britain, where I’m known probably the strongest” — another sound effect, this one a whoosh — “and Australia and Canada and New Zealand, where I’m also known” — a sound effect like a rapid whir — “‘She/her now.’ And I went, ‘Oh, OK.’”It wasn’t that she merely went along with it, but she was surprised at the sweeping abruptness with which her pronouns were adopted.“I thought it was a great honor,” she said. “I’ve been promoted — promoted to she. That’s how it was. But I didn’t actively have a campaign about it. It just happened. You know, I came out 37 years ago. Some people grumble. I say, well, how much notice do you need? Thirty-eight years? Thirty-nine years?”Izzard’s audiobook of “Great Expectations” was released in 2018, and she always thought there would be a companion stage version.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesComing out is an inherently political act, and Izzard is a political creature. In American terms, she described herself as a Democrat, but at home she is a longtime member of the Labour Party and this fall had hoped to become its candidate for an open seat in Parliament. That bid failed this month, though not before drawing what The Guardian newspaper called “a barrage of abuse,” with both Conservative and Labour politicians publicly making transphobic remarks.But Izzard said that increased mainstream awareness of transgender people and transgender issues has made life easier since she came out in 1985, when she described herself as transvestite — language that, she noted, has since evolved.“We were considered non-people, or toxic people,” she said. “And I realized that my job is to try and knit being trans into society. We had a hard time just trying to exist.”She went on: “A lot of people have been wonderfully accepting, and young people are very open and great. Some people are still transphobic, but” — she took a deep breath, then finished the sentence more quietly — “I just ignore them.”CADELL FIRST met Izzard about two decades ago, when the agent Nicki van Gelder asked Cadell, who is also an actor, to coach Izzard for a film role.Izzard loves acting for the big screen — loves that movies can capture forever what she called “that lightning in a bottle” that is a beautiful performance, loves having played Edward VII to Judi Dench’s Queen Victoria in “Victoria & Abdul,” loves having been in both “Ocean’s Twelve” and “Ocean’s Thirteen,” even in small roles.But when I asked Cadell what makes Izzard tick as an actor, she mentioned the live-performance dynamic between Izzard and a crowd.“I think she is someone who loves that present moment with an audience. It electrifies her imagination,” Cadell said. “Laughter is very important to Eddie. I also think that Eddie is driven to try everything she feels is, in some way, challenging. But I think she keenly understands the relationship of a performer with an audience, which I adore.”Izzard was only 6 when her mother died in 1968. After that, her widowed father sent her and her brother to boarding school. In “Believe,” the documentary, there is a sweet moment when a former headmaster recalls a teddy bear show that young Eddie put on at the foot of her bed, using a bathrobe as the stage curtain.A couple of years later, when the school did a production of “Oliver!,” the “Oliver Twist” musical that Izzard remembers as her first Dickens, she begged to be cast but was assigned to play the clarinet in the orchestra. (Recalling this, she burst into snatches of songs she’d yearned to sing: “Oliver! Oliver!” and “Got to pick a pocket or two, boys, you’ve got to pick a pocket or two.”)The same thing happened with “The Pirates of Penzance,” for which she would have been happy to play either a pirate or a girl. She was 17 when she got her first dramatic role — as Ernst Ludwig, the Nazi, in “Cabaret” — and dyed her hair jet black to play it.So acting, in her growing-up years, was mostly just dreamed of, and a passion for Dickens didn’t take root in a child who was dyslexic and not a big reader, but also enthralled with astronauts and all things 20th-century American.“Great Expectations” came into Izzard’s life when she asked her agents to find someone to hire her to make an audiobook of a Dickens novel — because she had noticed that audiobooks were taking off, she wanted to read a great work of literature, and she and Dickens share a birthday, 150 years apart.Izzard’s audiobook of “Great Expectations,” which is more than 20 hours long, was released in 2018. In Izzard’s mind, there was always going to be a stage version as a companion piece — though she had envisioned the audiobook as the primary element. She says it didn’t occur to her initially that once she got the live performance down, it could remain permanently in her repertoire. Its running time, rather more accessible than the book’s: about two hours, intermission included.LISTEN CLOSELY to people’s memories, and sometimes you hear their ambitions underneath. Here is Izzard remembering the night she lost the Tony to Brian Dennehy, and found herself in the company of some other acting nominees.“I was standing next to Stanley Tucci and Philip Seymour Hoffman,” she said. “I thought, I’m in this group? This is the group that didn’t get the Tony?” She whispered the next bit, savoringly: “This is a good group to be in.”Nearly 20 years later, she knows that some people continue to write her off as solely a comedian, not also an actor. She knows that acting gets a different kind of respect than comedy.“I think my dramatic work now has got really to an interesting place, a place where I don’t quite know where it’s going to go,” Izzard said.She intends to “keep pushing” with it as she finds out.For now, that means donning those glorious boots downtown at Greenwich House, channeling Pip and company. Digging into the main meal that is her acting, she’ll be sharing it only with the audience. More

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      Review: In ‘Ye Bear & Ye Cubb,’ Colonial America Takes the Stage

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      A play first performed in a tavern in 1665 survives with its title, and the court case it precipitated, intact — but nothing else.The first scripted performance in colonial America took place in a Virginia tavern on Aug. 27, 1665. Not a line of it remains, not a character name, not a whisper of plot. Even its genre — comedy, satire, arboreal drama? — is lost to time. But its title, “Ye Bare and Ye Cubb,” has survived. So has the court case it precipitated. Because as long as there has been theater in America, there has been someone around to hate on it. The actors were promptly arrested, and what we know about the play we know from court records.These dregs of history are the fermenting agent for “Ye Bear & Ye Cubb” at 59E59 Theaters. Those responsible for the original were charged with public wickedness. The devisers of this new version, which includes a cream pie and several fart jokes, don’t really know how to behave, either. Created by No. 11 Productions and directed by Ryan Emmons, “Ye Bear” is a fantasia on colonial themes — messy, overstated, indifferently competent. It is also tenacious and generous, with a sweet-tempered approach to its audience interactions.After an unnecessary dream sequence (so much in the script, credited to six company members, is unnecessary), the action begins in Fowkes’ Tavern. William Darby (Steven Conroy, who also plays a version of himself) has written a play, and he recruits two friends, Cornelius Watkinson (Anthony Michael Martinez) and Philip Howard (Erin Lamar), and an unknown person in a bear costume (or possibly an actual bear, it’s unclear) to perform it there. After the players are arrested, they are asked to perform it again, in full costume, before the court.So far, this matches the historical record. But while the court reports are silent on the contents of the play, No. 11 voices an imagined version, with lines like: “The goose is loose/by the beard of Zeus/the fawn is gone/are we amidst a con?” (The play’s name references Ben Jonson’s masques, a dubious inspiration.) These sequences are, at best, embarrassing, as is the alliteration-heavy courtroom drama that ensues. Clearly, this verbiage is bad on purpose — which doesn’t make it any easier to endure. Every character stops the show for a monologue. Few of them should. If the script reveals a decent knowledge of theater history, it never offers immersion in what life might have been like in early America, what excitement these players might have felt or the risks they took — knowingly or otherwise — in giving this performance.The script’s insufficiencies are softened by the company’s attitude — warm and inclusive — toward the audience. From the first, the spectators are invited in (considering the cramped layout of the upstairs theater, there are few alternatives) and encouraged to buy drinks at the onstage bar. Later, they are recruited as seamstresses, as witnesses, as a bailiff and a miscreant. Theater, the play suggests, is a communal effort. No. 11 puts that into action, with free beers for the spectators charged with sewing a doublet.We know so little about theater in America’s first century. The earliest report of professional actors here is of a troupe that had been kicked out of England for violating a licensing act in the 1750s, nearly 150 years after the first colonists settled. If theater happened previously — and it did, in some form, in schools and churches and the occasional tavern or purpose-built playhouse — it meant that small groups of people, all of whom had other jobs and priorities, met in small rooms and made something together.This is what “Ye Bear & Ye Cubb” seeks, in its shambling way, to honor. “Let’s raise a glass,” Conroy, as himself, says late in the play, “to the artists and the work that we don’t know and the names that never got written down.” Would those 17th-century artists enjoy what No. 11 has wrought? That, too, is unknown. But let’s hope they wouldn’t sue.Ye Bear & Ye CubbThrough Dec. 23 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. More

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      ‘There’s No Way to Do a Good Job if You’re Judging the Character’

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      The actor K. Todd Freeman has worked with Steppenwolf Theater since 1993. His roles, however challenging, usually don’t exact a personal toll. Bruce Norris’s incendiary “Downstate,” which debuted at that Chicago theater in 2018, is different.“After three or four months of doing the play,” Freeman said, “it’s like, OK, I need to stop.”Like many of Norris’s works (including “Clybourne Park”), “Downstate,” a drama about a group home for men who have committed sexual offenses against children, is in part a provocation, a goad to presumed moral certainties. It focuses on four men: Dee (Freeman), who had sexual contact with a 14-year-old boy; Felix (Eddie Torres), who molested his daughter; Fred (Francis Guinan), a former piano teacher who abused two of his students; and Gio (Glenn Davis), who committed statutory rape.So inflammatory are its themes that Steppenwolf, having received threats, had to hire additional security for the show’s run. And the production, now at the Off Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan after a subsequent run at London’s National Theater, continues to attract controversy, such that anyone who describes it positively risks being seen as endorsing its subject matter.From left: Guinan, Eddie Torres (partially obscured), Davis, Susanna Guzman and Freeman in the play, which is at Playwrights Horizons through Dec. 22.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAfter the Washington Post critic Peter Marks posted a link on Twitter to his favorable review, conservatives, including Senator Ted Cruz, attacked him. They claimed that the play and by extension the review were sympathetic to pedophiles.On a recent weekday, at a restaurant near the theater, three of the actors — the Steppenwolf regulars Freeman and Guinan, and Davis, one of the company’s artistic directors — discussed what it takes to imagine men who have done the unimaginable and how much of their own sympathy they can extend. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Did you do much research into men who have offended against children?FREEMAN There was a literary department at Steppenwolf that provided a great research packet. They gave the laws, what jail time we all would have had, what sort of rehab we would have had, how we got from the crime to this house. And there were documentaries that were made available to us. It was never overwhelming to me.“I don’t believe in the term ‘monsters’ for human beings. I don’t like the otherness of that,” Freeman said.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesWas there anything you learned that surprised you or made you question how the country prosecutes and treats sex offenders?DAVIS I talked to Bruce about why he wrote the play. He said, “We live in a country in which you can murder someone, go to prison, come out, and have some approximation of a decent life afterward. But if you’re marked with this scarlet letter, this follows you forever.” He said, “I want to explore how we feel about that as a culture.”GUINAN I was rather shocked by the fact that all you have to do is go online and they’ll tell you exactly where all of these people live. Primarily, it ends up being in really poor neighborhoods. I was just shocked at how many convicted child molesters there are within walking distance of my house in Illinois.FREEMAN I was like, why isn’t there a registry for murderers? I would like to know when there’s a convicted murderer moving into my neighborhood. That’s a pretty horrible thing, killing people. Why aren’t we up in arms about that as well?Have these characters fully reckoned with their actions?GUINAN Fred, while he acknowledges what a terrible thing it was, then says, “I don’t know why the Lord would make me this way.” So I don’t think so. I don’t think he has.FREEMAN There are people who like to define their lives by their past and their scars. Do they need to? And is it bad if they don’t? It’s easy to judge these people. I don’t believe in the term “monsters” for human beings. I don’t like the otherness of that. It helps us think that we’re better or different — that we could never do that. We all could.Guinan said that the role has “opened the question of ‘what about the unforgivable in your own life?’ That’s a question I really have not answered for myself.”Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesCould we? I can’t imagine a circumstance in which I would abuse a child.FREEMAN I can’t either. But most child abusers have been abused. Maybe if you had that past? We just don’t know.Did you ever find yourself judging the characters or feeling repulsion for the characters?FREEMAN That’s just not what you do as a performer. There’s no way to do a good job if you’re judging the character.DAVIS There’s a part of you that understands, psychologically, that what this character has done is wrong, egregious. And then in honoring the story, honoring the character, you divorce yourself of that judgment. If I’m playing a character and I’m not going as far as I can because of my own judgment, I should probably let someone else have it.If you were withholding judgment, why then did the play begin to weigh on you?DAVIS It’s not an easy world to live in every day. You have to prepare yourself for what you’re about to hear and do.FREEMAN These four walls are basically the characters’ entire world. Trying to believe in the reality of that, just believing in the given circumstances, it’s a weight.Is it important to you that the audience empathize with these characters?DAVIS I don’t think we as artists can predetermine the response from the audience. What I owe to the audience is a realistic portrayal of the given circumstance and to let them decide for themselves if they want to feel compassion.FREEMAN To me, this is not a play about pedophiles. To me, pedophilia is a metaphor for the limits of our compassion, our mercy, our grace.“Whether I extend a little bit of grace or a lot of grace or no grace at all, my job is simply to portray what this character was thinking, what they were after, why they do what they do,” Davis said.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesWhat do you make of the criticism that this play is sympathetic to pedophilia?FREEMAN I don’t think there’s a single line in there that suggests that. But it’s seeing them as human.DAVIS It’s a play that forces you to look at these people outside of the worst thing they’ve ever done. For some people, that’s too much.What has been the experience of having to extend your own humanity to the most reviled?DAVIS It’s not any different, in terms of any other character that I might play who does nefarious things. These characters have done particularly egregious acts. But whether I extend a little bit of grace or a lot of grace or no grace at all, my job is simply to portray what this character was thinking, what they were after, why they do what they do. So I don’t know if I would necessarily put it in those terms, that I’m extending my humanity, because it can sound like I’m forgiving them on some level. As an actor, I simply need to get inside of them.GUINAN For myself, it’s opened the question of “what about the unforgivable in your own life?” That’s a question I really have not answered for myself. Do you let yourself off the hook? And how do you do that?FREEMAN This is one of the best roles I’ve ever done. Because it is dangerous. And because it is scary. And incendiary. Who wants to do something that’s forgettable and nice? More

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      Tony Awards to Be Staged in Manhattan’s Washington Heights

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      The annual ceremony honoring Broadway’s top productions and performers is moving to the New York neighborhood where the musical “In the Heights” was set.After 75 years of ceremonies in and around New York’s theater district, the Tony Awards next year will move uptown, holding the annual best-of-Broadway awards ceremony in Washington Heights.Tony Awards administrators made the surprise announcement Tuesday morning, saying that the next ceremony would take place on June 11 at the United Palace, an ornate theater in northern Manhattan that was constructed as a movie theater and is now used for religious and cultural activities.The administrators did not immediately offer a rationale for the move, but it brings the ceremony to a neighborhood with a large Hispanic population, and to a theater that has been championed by one of Broadway’s best-known stars, Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Miranda’s first Broadway musical, “In the Heights,” is named for, and takes place in, the neighborhood.)The ceremony, which will honor plays and musicals that opened on Broadway between April 29, 2022 and April 27, 2023, will be broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+. The nominations will be announced on May 2.The United Palace is a landmark building that opened in 1930 as a Loew’s “Wonder Theater,” which were large and luxurious movie palaces. The building has 3,400 seats, which makes it the fourth largest theater in Manhattan — it is significantly smaller than Radio City Music Hall, where the Tony Awards have often taken place, but larger than the Beacon Theater, where the awards have sometimes been staged in recent years.The Tony Awards have, since 1947, changed locations multiple times. They were initially held in hotel ballrooms, then Broadway theaters before switching to larger venues in the 1990s.The Tony Awards, formally known as the Antoinette Perry Awards, were founded by the American Theater Wing and are now presented by the Broadway League and the Wing. Next year’s ceremony will be directed by Glenn Weiss, who has frequently played that role; Weiss and his longtime collaborator, Ricky Kirshner, will produce the broadcast with the League and the Wing. More

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      Review: ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ Returns, the Way It Never Was

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      Maria Friedman’s rethinking of the much-loved, much-monkeyed-with 1981 Sondheim-Furth flop gets very close to coherence, and all the way to enjoyable.Many people love something about “Merrily We Roll Along” but few people love everything.It has that brilliant Stephen Sondheim score! It has that meshuga George Furth book! It’s a comedy of misbehavior, a tragedy of cynicism, a big Broadway musical, a tiny domestic drama, a timeline in search of a story that’s never found and, anyway, doesn’t make sense. Even if it did, no one is old enough/young enough to convincingly perform roles that age in reverse from 40 to 20. And if they do, they can’t sing.What no one wants is to leave the 1981 flop alone. Though too often lifeless in its many incarnations, it is also somehow deathless, rising repeatedly from the glossy grave of its beloved original cast album — remembered more fondly than the messy if emotional original production — in hopes of a transfiguration that finally makes it work.The revival that opened on Monday at New York Theater Workshop, after earlier iterations at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London and the Huntington Theater Company in Boston, comes closer to meeting that goal than any of the many I’ve seen before. Maria Friedman’s staging brings the intelligence of the songs fully alive and justifies the baroque construction. Her framing snaps the picture almost fully into focus. And with Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez as the show’s central trio of backward-tumbling friends, it is perhaps for the first time perfectly cast.Is that enough to make it great, the way it never was?The question resonates with the material — which, being about show business, is always involved in a meta-conversation with itself. Groff plays Franklin Shepard, a hacky movie producer in 1976, trailing two wives with a third on the way, who gradually evolves (backward) into a promising theater composer in 1957. Radcliffe plays his word man, Charley Kringas, who, in a nationally televised meltdown in 1973, spectacularly splits from the oldest of his old friends. Mendez plays the third wheel, Mary Flynn, an embittered (what else?) theater critic and washed-up novelist whose fog of alcohol slowly burns away to reveal, by the final curtain, a hopeful innocent in love forever with the unavailable Frank.Groff as Franklin Shepard, who’s a hacky movie producer when the musical opens in 1976.Sara KrulwichFriedman clarifies this rangy structure from the first image, which replaces the ensemble scenes of previous productions with Frank standing completely alone in the ruins of his life. As disembodied voices sing the opening phrases of the upbeat title song we quickly understand that we will be focusing not on the triangle so much as its apex. No one else in the story, not even his besties and exes, is quite real to Frank anyway; they are props in his monodrama, and often mangled. This is going to be the story of a brilliant young man who, failing to grow up, inevitably punches down.Happily, Groff has the glamour and fury to shoulder that interpretation. No Frank I’ve seen has been so unapologetic in his solipsism, so sure he deserves a get-out-of-jail-free card to life’s every complication. And when someone crosses him, as Charley does singing “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” on that TV show, Frank is so livid, staring straight ahead as if his friend no longer exists, that you wait in terror for what will happen next. What you get, even worse, is what happens before.The laminated ironies of Furth’s timeline, lifted from a 1934 Kaufman and Hart play with the same title and a similar arc, have always seemed better integrated into Sondheim’s ingenious score than into the plot itself. The songs are structured like a musical in reverse, with reprises preceding instead of following fuller versions, and bits of accompaniment later revealing themselves as new melodies. By the time you hear “Our Time,” the exquisite hymn of hopefulness that ends the show, you will recognize that it has already been cannibalized for parts; a few of its bleached bones show up as early as the second number, “That Frank,” with much more cynical lyrics.Friedman’s staging for the first time raises the story to nearly the same level of expressiveness. The dialogue, which in most productions sounds like movie lines instead of actual speech, has been put through some sort of sanding machine that removes its polish and restores real texture. Even in the songs, phrases that can seem too perfectly crafted are now engorged with specifics that inform the actors’ delivery and thus our understanding. For “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” Radcliffe seems to have written a Bible of back story, giving wild spins to every line that help send the song into orbit.Visually too, Friedman simplifies, reinforces and focuses what we see. Soutra Gilmour’s costumes, though changing with the years, are similar enough to immediately specify everyone in the cast. (Frank is usually in a black suit, Charley in eye-jarring argyle, Mary in busy print shmattes.) And since all the action takes place within the cold unit set representing Frank’s midcentury Bel Air house (also by Gilmour) we never wonder why we’re watching a scene, even if it nominally takes place somewhere else. We’re watching it because it’s his brain.From left: Reg Rogers and Krystal Joy Brown, with Groff, Mendez and Radcliffe.Sara KrulwichBut those fixes, however successful, are also compromises. The Bel Air house, fairly hideous and mostly blank to allow for its transformations, necessitates a lot of choral furniture-handling that works against the sleekness of the material. Though the cast, especially Mendez, is vocally splendid, the original Jonathan Tunick orchestrations, vastly reduced to nine players from 19, have undergone a radical deglamorization, making it a smart if sad choice to drop most of the brilliant overture. And if dancing doesn’t really fit Friedman’s more interior approach (the limited choreography is by Tim Jackson) the general lack of Broadway pizazz leaves the show feeling deprived of half its inheritance.With the Off Broadway run (through Jan. 22) all but sold out, and commercial producers teed up for a transfer, we may yet find out what “Merrily” can be at its best. For now, it’s just at its best so far. That means some scenes work as they never have; the Act II opener, “It’s a Hit,” which often lays an egg, is for the first time hilarious, thanks in large part to Reg Rogers as Frank and Charlie’s producer. The unlikely progress through the story of Gussie Carnegie — the producer’s secretary, then wife, then star, then ex, but in reverse — suddenly seems clear and, in Krystal Joy Brown’s fetching performance, charming if not credible.Yet at the same time, some things that used to work no longer do. The supporting characters, heavily doubled, are mostly a blur. The song “Old Friends,” which at its root is about the fatal compromises that keep people together, has a case of fake giddiness. And “Bobby and Jackie and Jack,” a comedy number about the Kennedy family that the three friends perform in a downtown club in 1960, lays the egg that “It’s a Hit” no longer does.Musicals are mysterious. Even the best are games of Whac-a-Mole: Fix one problem and another pops up. It’s therefore no small thing to say that in her effort to drag a half-living thing like “Merrily” to full life, Friedman is more than halfway there. Maybe, finally, it’s a hit.Merrily We Roll AlongThrough Jan. 22 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More