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      ‘Dick Rivington & the Cat’ Review: A Civic-Minded Holiday Treat

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      This wacky family show respects the codes of the British holiday tradition known as panto, which means playfully not holding anything back.New York City has a rat problem, but this holiday season one neighborhood is dealing with the menace: There is a new fearless cat on the Lower East Side, and he can take down an awful lot of vermin. He can also crack wise, twerk and land somersaults, because we are in the wacky land of pantomime, not the 6 o’clock news.The highly interactive, highly silly British holiday tradition known as panto has not made many inroads in the United States, but “Dick Rivington & the Cat” proves it can be done, respecting the genre’s codes while putting a local spin on them.The show borrows the structure of the panto classic “Dick Whittington and His Cat” and relocates it to the neighborhood surrounding Abrons Arts Center, where it is playing. Luckily the area has long been a haven for the downtrodden, so it welcomes the poor orphan Dick Rivington (Annette Berning) and his companion, Tommy the Cat (Tyler West), who have been wandering around looking for a place to call home. They introduce themselves to a rewrite of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” led by Tommy answering Robert Plant’s opening wail with “Meeeeeeeaoooow” — per panto formula, “Dick Rivington” features plenty of pop, rock and rap classic with new lyrics.Dick and Tommy make new pals — including Sarah the Cook (Michael Lynch), her son, Mitch (Matthew Roper), and the fetching Liliana (Jenni Gil) — and help them battle the rodent hordes (played by an ensemble of kids in furry outfits). The critters are led by King Rat (Bradford Scobie), who wants to extend his dominion from Chompkins Square Park “all the way from Corlears Hook to the very end of civilization, 14th Street!” (Is pizza involved, too? Do you need to ask?) Naturally, mayhem ensues, further boosted by the audience, which has been instructed to boo and hiss every time King Rat turns up. (New Yorkers, even children, need very little encouragement to loudly express their displeasure.)Bradford Scobie, center, as King Rat, with Muffy Styler, left, and Jonathan Rodriguez, right.Andrew T Foster for ONEOFUS/Abrons Arts CenterThe writer Mat Fraser and the director Julie Atlas Muz’s Panto Project had presented a very good “Jack and the Beanstalk” in 2017, but this second production, which had a curtailed run last year, is superior in every way. David Quinn created brilliantly inventive costumes on what must have been a tight budget (the cook’s outfit includes doughnuts and eggs over easy) and Steven Hammel’s sets make great use of Abrons’s relatively spacious stage.Most important, the action unfolds at a zippy pace and the jokes come nonstop. Parents will get a kick out of the double entendres involving Dick’s name (also a panto tradition) as well as the lighthearted allusions to the area’s gentrification — King Rat makes Dick and Tommy sleep with a potion so powerful that “a cookie in Essex Market could sell for less than 10 bucks and they wouldn’t wake up.”But what really elevates “Dick Rivington” is the acting, with a cast that perfectly understands that panto is no time for subtlety and “what’s my motivation?” interiority. West and Scobie, in particular, give some of the most exhilarating comic performances I have seen all year. West is tireless as Tommy — watch him chase a plastic bag — and manages to always be in the moment, reacting to whatever everybody around him is doing without coming across as obnoxious.As for Scobie, his King Rat is a ramshackle mixture of Alice Cooper and Adam Ant, prancing around with flamboyant assurance and unabashed glee at being a villain. (His big song is “The Phantom of the Opera,” of course.) He gets terrific support from Jonathan Rodriguez and Muffy Styler as the henchrats Scratchit and Ratchet. Too much of a good thing? Happily, this show does not believe in holding back.Dick Rivington & the CatThrough Dec. 18 at Abrons Arts Center, Manhattan; abronsartscenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Your Own Personal Exegesis’ Review: Blessed Be the Young and Lustful

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      Julia May Jonas’s play-as-church service for LCT3 is imaginative, but falters as it nears the finish line.Heathens! Faithful! Come join a house of worship. Or, in the case of Julia May Jonas’s new play “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” the Claire Tow Theater will do just fine.Upon entering the theater, audience members are greeted with a selection of joyous carols and handed a program and church bulletin. A lectern stands at center stage, and a stiff-looking pew sits off to the side. But there aren’t any solemn sermons or routine parables in this play-as-church service by Jonas, who’s also the author of the fiery debut novel “Vladimir.” An imaginative though lopsided LCT3 production, which opened Monday, the show finds many instances of humor and insight in a story about a small-town youth group in 1996 New Jersey.Rev. Kat (Hannah Cabell) is this parish’s requisite fun, progressive pastor: She’s blunt and well-educated, and runs the youth group, whose members include a high school senior named Chris (Cole Doman) with an alcoholic father. He’s bright and, between his teenage dialect of sputters, mumbles and interjections, has downright poetic moments of wisdom.That’s what sparks a connection between him and Kat, who enthusiastically serves as both a theology teacher and his emotional sounding board. He’s not the only one struggling: Addie (Mia Pak), who likes Chris, has an eating disorder. As does Beatrice (Annie Fang), a new member of the group who often retreats to the background. And Brian (Savidu Geevaratne), whose parents are deacons, has been practically raised in the church but is overshadowed by the more popular Chris.The cast has excellent chemistry. And as directed by Annie Tippe, they capture the familiar posturing and insecurity of adolescence, the awkward exchanges and playfulness. This all plays out in short scenes at the church, which, courtesy of Brett J. Banakis’s set design, elicits the feel of a local church that doubles as a community center (retractable walls, portable stage).Though the use of the bulletin and structure of the play, meant to recall a church service, even with call-and-response, is more appealing in concept than in execution. The youth group’s big events mark the passage of time: a charity dance-a-thon, a liturgical play and a cross-carrying ceremony. Each interaction conveys the characters’ guilty rush of desire — whether for sex, food, connection or attention — or a type of abstinence, with Chris and Kat’s mutual attraction at the center.Doman, foreground left, and Cabell acting out a scene of Mary Magdalene washing Jesus’ feet. In the background are, from left: Annie Fang, Savidu Geevaratne and Mia Pak.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJonas’s “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” like Bess Wohl’s recent play “Camp Siegfried,” juxtaposes faith and sex as sibling hungers and balms. In “Camp Siegfried,” about two teens who fall in love at a Nazi youth camp in Long Island, that faith is in the cancerous myth of Aryan superiority. “Personal Exegesis,” however, embarks on a more philosophical examination of the topic, as when the skeptical Beatrice questions her peers about their beliefs. If Jesus is the place where divinity and humanity overlap, what’s in the spaces in between, Beatrice asks Addie?And yet, a fundamental “why” is left unanswered: Why are we seeing this? The script offers part of the answer: It’s a memory play. Whose memory? Beatrice’s, though it’s unclear if she’s the architect of what we’re seeing and why she’s brought us here.There are some signs that we may not be in an objective present: Rev. Kat introducing herself as a “youth minister at Redacted Church in Redacted, New Jersey,” and dreamlike sequences in which the characters act out tableaus of Renaissance artworks like the Pietà, or sing a song about lusting for “puffy nipples.” Some scenes and story lines are more blatantly allegorical than others, and initially it’s hard to tell whether these whimsical movements are from a single character’s perspective or just a characteristic of the work.Even when she seems like another background character, Annie Fang’s Beatrice is incisive, a little offbeat, always trying to play it cool — the kind of relatable teen heroine who seems adopted from a ’90s film.The whole ensemble is stellar: Doman’s Chris reads as a typical teenage boy but with such softness and grace that he’s elevated to a kind of messiah himself, a charismatic prophet who speaks the word and forgives sins. Cabell walks a fine line with Kat, whose authority figure is a welcome change from the go-to archetype of the predatory male pastor. As Kat she oscillates among the roles of devout mentor, shrewd academic and petty woman with a crush. Pak’s delicate performance as Addie is at turns adorable (“I had a rock in my shoe so I could feel Jesus’s pain,” she earnestly says of her participation in the Cross Carry) and wrenching, as when she tells the story of Jesus fasting in the desert, emphasizing his pious starvation. But ultimately Addie, who undergoes a fantastical transformation, is part of a story that feels like its own self-contained allegory that’s an awkward fit with the rest. Geevaratne’s wrings out the comedy from Brian’s tireless — and sometimes cringeworthy — efforts to be liked, but his character is noticeably less developed, written to serve just a limited function in the plot.The lighting design, by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, gives intimate scenes a seductive candlelight feel and makes a bright overhead spotlight shine down like the eye of God. And Wendy Yang’s costume design, from baggy cargo pants with a chained wallet to a patchwork skirt and Doc Maartens, is an instant rewind to the time when millennials reigned.Jonas’s script begins with a definition of “exegesis”: “The critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of Scripture.” Her play succeeds at using biblical stories and religious traditions to illuminate its characters’ internal thoughts and feelings, but in blurring the line between a translation of dogma and a concrete truth, it leaves us to wonder: the Gospel according to — whom?Your Own Personal ExegesisThrough Dec. 31 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?’ Review: Wickedly Talented

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      This Disney+ documentary uses a concert set list as a springboard to chronicle Idina Menzel’s musical achievements.Our expanding catalog of glossy celebrity bio-documentaries gains a new entry in “Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?,” which trails its subject on a national tour in 2018. The concerts saw Menzel performing musical highlights from throughout her career, including a medley of show-tunes, original pop numbers and singalongs.The director, Anne McCabe, uses these songs as springboards into Menzel’s past, and in between lengthy performance sequences — renditions of “Take Me or Leave Me” from “Rent,” “Defying Gravity” from “Wicked” and “Let It Go” from “Frozen” go on and on — the film races through an overview of career achievements. We are frequently reminded that Menzel’s tour ends at Madison Square Garden; in an effort to graft an arc onto this timeline, the documentary insists that playing the arena is Menzel’s lifelong dream.There is little dramatic tension or psychological depth to this cinematic biography, and even in sentimental moments, McCabe fails to elicit an emotional response from her subject or the audience. When, for example, the film touches on the sudden death of the “Rent” creator Jonathan Larson, McCabe includes an impersonal remark from Menzel, cuts to an archival clip of a different cast member and then moves on.Bursts of authenticity occur in scenes concerning Menzel’s preteen son, particularly when Menzel explores how shifting from mom time to work time can bring about both guilt and a measure of relief. We already know that Menzel can belt to the back row; a richer profile would have coaxed out a more intimate voice.Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      Drama, in German, in the Shadow of ‘Leopoldtstadt’

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      New stagings in Germany and Austria, including Tom Stoppard’s latest play, explore the themes of social integration and tolerance that animated the “Jewish question.”MUNICH — “My grandfather wore a caftan, my father went to the opera in a top hat, and I have the singers to dinner,” boasts a character in Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” summing up the rapid trajectory from piety to cultural assimilation that was common among Vienna’s Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Stoppard’s play, which is running through March at the Longacre Theater in New York, is one of the season’s most discussed productions. In it, the veteran dramatist, veering into explicitly Jewish territory for the first time in his long and decorated career, explores the themes of social integration and the limits of tolerance that made the “Jewish question” one of the flash points of modernity.Seventy years before Stoppard’s fictional Merz family graced the stage, Gabriele Tergit published “The Effingers,” a 900-page novel that traces the fortunes of a Jewish family in Germany over four generations, from 1878 to 1948. Tergit, a German Jewish writer and journalist whose long life spanned much of the 20th century (she died in 1982, in London, at age 88), has undergone a reappraisal recently. When “The Effingers” was reissued in 2019, it became a literary event in Germany; the book was compared to Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” and even won praise from the country’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. (An English translation, by Sophie Duvernoy, is coming from New York Review Books.)The Münchner Kammerspiele, whose recent programming has highlighted works by unsung female artists, has lost no time in bringing “The Effingers” to the stage. Jan Bosse’s nearly four-hour production is dramatically fluid and visually striking. Aside from the historically accurate costumes, whose changing styles help us keep track of the passage of time, Bosse and his stage designer, Stéphane Laimé, serve us a sleek and spare production that incorporates written and projected dates, historical photographs, family trees and, in one particularly amusing sequence, a car ride in a model manufactured by the Effinger family (brought to life with a green screen).The dozen actors who play the family members, and their friends and enemies, are largely plucked from the Kammerspiele’s permanent ensemble. Among the best are Katharina Bach as the beautiful, artistically talented and doomed Sofie Oppner: Bach invests the character with a blend of charisma, flamboyance and mental instability. Zeynep Bozbay is warm and convincing as Marianne Effinger, who rejects her arriviste family’s lavish lifestyle by devoting herself to charity. She waits in vain for a marriage proposal from one of her brother’s friends; when they meet again, decades later, he has become a convinced antisemite.Yet despite the fine acting and the bold staging, “The Effingers” rarely ignites onstage. Unlike the book, the performing version by Bosse and dramaturge Viola Hasselberg ends before World War II, perhaps to avoid suggesting a sense of tragic inevitability for a family of affluent Berliners who just happen to be Jewish. Though the production teems with life, it also lacks focus and narrative direction. Keeping up with the large, at times chaotic, Effinger clan over a half-century is not consistently rewarding. Perhaps a more judicious selection of scenes would have yielded a more dramatically and emotionally satisfying play. Or maybe a slimmed-down cast (such as in the three-actor tour de force that is “The Lehman Trilogy,” another Jewish family saga) would have resulted in a less cluttered and more absorbing production.From left, Johannes Nussbaum, Lisa Stiegler, Valentino Dalle Mura and Thiemo Strutzenberger in “The Tower,” directed by Nora Schlocker at the Residenztheater in Munich.Birgit Hupfeld“The Effingers,” an epic literary adaptation, is unusual repertoire for the Kammerspiele, where more experimental, chamber-like productions dominate these days. Large casts and extra-long running times, by contrast, are common features down the block at the Residenztheater, which boasts the largest acting ensemble in Germany. This season, dramatic epics like “Angels in America” and “The Inheritance” share the program with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “The Tower.” The Austrian Jewish Hofmannsthal, a leading literary figure in fin-de-siècle Vienna, is also one of Stoppard’s touchstones for recreating that period in “Leopoldstadt,” and comes in for high praise in a monologue extolling how Viennese Jews worship culture. “A new writer, if he’s a great poet like Hofmannsthal, walks among us like a demigod,” Stoppard has a character say.Nora Schlocker’s grim, aesthetically distinctive but dramatically stilted production of “The Tower” illustrates some of the difficulties of bringing Hofmannsthal’s work to the stage nowadays. An allegory about political power and the fall of empires, “The Tower” was written in the aftermath of World War I, although Hofmannsthal continued to work on it for nearly a decade. It’s a long play, modeled on an earlier work by the Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón, about a king who keeps the son who has been prophesied to overthrow him locked up in a tower.Schlocker has radically shortened the play, and the actors (joined onstage by three musicians) play multiple roles, except for Lisa Stiegler, who gives a bloodcurdling, affecting and acrobatic performance as the imprisoned prince, Sigismund. Sumptuous as the play’s language is, it’s a difficult work to make tick dramatically. Schlocker’s deep cuts speed things up (the show clocks in at a mere 100 minutes), though it feels disjointed at times. But the grotesque, ghoulish aesthetic she devises, while effective in places, can seem just baffling and quirky in others.Claus Peymann’s production of Thomas Bernhard’s “The German Lunch Table” at the Josefstadt Theater in Vienna. Philine HofmannFor a shocking and refreshing dose of eccentricity, turn to Claus Peymann’s delirious production of Thomas Bernhard’s equally insane play, “The German Lunch Table,” at the Josefstadt Theater in Vienna. Bernhard, who died in 1989, was the bad boy of postwar Austrian literature, and he loved to thumb his nose at his compatriots for maintaining that they were Hitler’s first victims. For this production of Bernhard’s 1988 play, a vaudeville-like series of seven sketches, Peymann has teamed up with Achim Freyer, who designed the colorful, eye-popping sets and projections.The Josefstadt Theater is known for conventional (and conservative) dramatic fare, but this bonkers staging of a play that seems hellbent on offending its audience is anything but. Bernhard’s sketches all deal with Nazism surfacing in quotidian interactions and with society’s failure to work through the past. In one, politicians who are contestants on a TV quiz show brag about being “National Socialists at heart.” In another, elderly couples gather to celebrate the acquittal of a friend who was on trial for crimes against humanity committed at a Nazi concentration camp.As luck would have it, “The German Lunch Table” is in repertoire at the theater along with the first German-language production of “Leopoldstadt.” That Stoppard’s haunting ode to the vanished Viennese Jewish world should play alongside Bernhard’s incendiary indictment of postwar Austrian repression and hypocrisy feels appropriate, in a sly and mischievous way.Effingers. Directed by Jan Bosse. Through Feb. 3 at the Münchner Kammerspiele.Der Turm. Directed by Nora Schlocker. Through Jan. 18 at the Residenztheater Munich.Der deutsche Mittagstisch. Directed by Claus Peymann. Through March 27 at the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna. More

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      ‘Events’ Review: There’s Kool-Aid in the Water Cooler

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      Bailey Williams’s comedy is a sharp-toothed, sometimes bewildering satire of all-consuming workplace culture.“No one is being murdered before the gala.”It’s the kind of directive that wouldn’t be necessary at most companies — even, perhaps, most high-strung, high-design event-planning firms, even at the height of gala season. But nerves have been extra frayed lately at Todd David Design. People’s imaginations might be running away with them.Or maybe, when Todd — the company’s pseudo-visionary leader — was patched in on speakerphone from a beach in Miami, his team back in New York really did hear him start to get murdered. Hard to say. In any case, his second in command, the imperious Christine, is not having it. So: “No one is being murdered before the gala,” she tells them all. They have a deadline to meet. Back to the task, everyone.All-consuming workplace culture is the satirical target of “Events,” Bailey Williams’s sharp-fanged new comedy at the Brick in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Directed by Sarah Blush, this co-production with the Hearth is off the rails — and that’s both a compliment and a critique.The show is as vibrantly nuts as Todd’s own pretentious ridiculousness (“I am thinking already of florals,” he says airily, musing on the gala) but also tangled, occasionally bewildering and larded with too much corporate-speak. A little of that goes a long way; even when it’s being skewered, simply hearing it can have a deadening effect.On a set by the design collective dots that includes an absurd foam-encased chair with a tiny tag on one leg, ordering people not to sit in it because it is art, “Events” takes place in two divergent realities. There is the brightly lit, well populated world of the office, and then there is the skulking realm of a woman called Itchy, dimly lit with just a single hanging lamp. (Lighting design is by Masha Tsimring.)Itchy is part of Todd David Design, too, or at least she used to be. Played with soft, confiding intensity by Zuzanna Szadkowski, she speaks her series of monologues directly to the audience, and is a riveting storyteller. Itchy, we learn, has not been doing so well at the company. She is convinced that someone there has been poisoning her, which is what’s causing her terrible itch. And that’s why she’s gone to the empty office on a Friday night, dressed in a dollar-store version of hazmat gear — plastic rain poncho, goggles, multiple shower caps — to decontaminate the place.Itchy is disaffected and quite possibly delusional. She may also be dangerous. But in her raw and wounded certainty, she is human and entirely fascinating.The others — Todd (Brian Bock), Christine (Claire Siebers) and their beleaguered team (Dee Beasnael, Julia Greer, Derek Smith and Haley Wong) — have signed on to the office’s culture of surface-shininess, reflexive obeisance and total commitment, even when their guru-boss is objectively detached from reason. But what if, in their devotion to creating events for their clients, they’re missing the main event — their own finite lives? And what if they’re losing themselves in the process?“Girl,” one colleague says to another, cutting through the nonsense at last. “You shouldn’t have brought your soul here. That’s your well-being. That’s your meaning-making.”EventsThrough Dec. 18 at the Brick, Brooklyn; bricktheater.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Interview: Turning Those Dreams Into Reality

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      Make It Beautiful Theatre Company on their improv show, The Dream Machine

      Lovely to meet you, why don’t you introduce yourselves and tell us a little about Make It Beautiful Theatre Company.

      Hey there. We are Make It Beautiful Theatre Company. We’re a London-based theatre collective, made up predominantly of Drama Centre graduates. We have a passion for dark comedy and improvisation. Our 5 star show The CO-OP recently performed at the Park Theatre, as well as our new show Sniff performing at Theatre503. We have also performed at the Norwich Theatre and the Black Box Studio in Slovenia. But the play we are bringing you this Chtistmas is The Dream Machine. 

      That show, The Dream Machine, will be at Golden Goose in December. We assume this isn’t a stage adaptation of the 1991 film of the same name? What is it all about instead?

      Unfortunately this is not a stage adaptation of the 1991 film – not that we even know what that is. Instead, it’s the Dream Machine. This is a long-form improvised show, based entirely from audience suggestions. Each show we ask an audience member to recount a weird dream they had and, from that, we create an entirely improvised full-length performance. We build a world full of crazy, funny characters and heartwarming stories based entirely from a stranger’s dream. We have performed the show for around two years – staging it at the White Bear Theatre, Space Theatre, Trestle Arts Base, the Cockpit and the OSO Arts Centre. Its next venture is the Golden Goose Theatre. 

      You say the show is made using improv and Russian-theatre techniques; we know about improv, but what’s the Russian-theatre technique then? What is the Russian connection within the company then?

      Whilst at Drama Centre we were lucky enough to travel and study at the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute in Moscow – this was where we got a lot of our Russian theatre inspiration from. This can come in the form of magical realism; something natural suddenly becoming something much more magical in a matter of moments. This is the Dream Machine in a nutshell. In 2019, we were invited for a residency at the Southern France Au Brana Theatre, with the aim of making a new show. Instead, we ended up delving into long-form improvised magical realism for 2 weeks. It was a hypnotic experience. Nevertheless, we ended that residency without a play. What we did have, however, was a new devising technique: the Dream Machine. This soon became our new improv show. 

      Isn’t improv just an excuse not to prepare an actual show, you know, roll up on the night and just make it up on the spot?

      Haha I think we wish this was the case. Oh the beauty of having lines to fall back on, pre-hearsed fight scenes and songs to bust out. Instead, we all have to trust in each other that we – as a group and without any conferring – are going to somehow make a sensical piece of theatre out of the ridiculous dream we have just heard. That is, I suppose, where the comedy comes from. We didn’t consider ourselves real improvisers for a very long time, but over the last few years we have a new found respect for them. 

      You’ve put this show on before, how weird are the suggestions thrown at you, any you care or dare to share? Do you ever get any suggestions you just have to pass over as too ridiculous?

      There’s never been a situation where we have had to deny someone’s dream. We can’t really imagine this ever happening. But there have been many gloriously odd ones. We have taken cats to space, birthed chickens, gone into the depths of the Earth to meet with a worm council – you name it, we’ve probably done it. In every dream there is a story, even if it seems impossible to find at first. We know that, eventually, if we continue to go down the path of ridiculousness, we will land on it. 

      And if you had to share your own dreams for the show, what oddities would that throw up?

      Honestly, our dreams always end up being far less weird than the audience’s. We will use our own for inspiration during rehearsals but they never have the same randomness or surprise as they do when we’re doing a real show. The bigger the group of people, the more odd dreams to choose from. 

      The show’s on just before Christmas, does that mean you will be throwing in a little seasonal theme here and there?

      Oh yes of course! The christmas spirit will be sure to have a firm place in the show. There will be Christmas bells and chocolates, all with powers to change the course of the show. Mark our words, you will feel the snow practically falling upon your head. The Dream Machine will be christmassy! No doubt about it. 

      What’s harder for you, putting on the improv of Dream Machine or staging a scripted production?

      If you’re talking about before the show, then the Dream Machine is definitely harder. The nerves you feel before a performance is unlike anything scripted. We literally have no idea what’s going to happen. But once it’s started and we’re moving slowly down the path of ridiculousness, then it’s usually freer and funner than a scripted production. 

      We’ve been full of praise for your previous works (Co-op and Sniff), are we going to see a new scripted production from you next year? What else have you got planned for 2023 so far then?

      Both Sniff and the CO-OP are our babies and we had a great time performing and making those. 2023 brings more excitement. We will be performing Sniff at the Jack Studio in early February – a dark comedy about drugs and addiction, set in a pub toilet. What’s not to like? And we will also be working on our new production. This play will be about a haunted pub. We developed it at the Norwich Theatre earlier this year and now plan to finish and perform it in 2023. Keep your eyes peeled for that! 

      And as it’s a Christmas show, if anyone is thinking of bringing along a gift for you, what would you all like?

      Just a pint. Please, for the love of god, if you feel like getting any of us anything, make it a pint at the end of the show. We’d love that. 

      Thanks to the team at Make It Beautiful Theatre for taking time out of rehearsals to chat to us. You can catch The Dream Machine at the Golden Goose Theatre between 19 – 21 December. Further information and bookings here. More

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      ‘The Brightest Thing in the World’ Review: Falling in Love, While Loving Heroin

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      An addiction and recovery tale wrapped in a romantic comedy, Leah Nanako Winkler’s play insists on acknowledging the messy coexistence of joy and pain.NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Christmas whooshes in from the wings, making a festive sneak attack. One instant, a recovering addict is deep in a soliloquy about the seductions of heroin; the next, she is standing in her doting sister’s living room, surrounded by sparkle and warmth.“The Brightest Thing in the World,” Leah Nanako Winkler’s potent new play at Yale Repertory Theater, is itself a bit of an ambush, though a more gradual one. Beginning as a rom-com with all the trimmings, it intensifies into a pair of love stories — each golden in its way, each fraught with quiet fear. Directed by Margot Bordelon, this is ultimately a brokenhearted tale.But for a nice long while, it luxuriates in the fluttery pleasure of mutual crushes morphing into romance. At Revival, a cozy bakery cafe in Lexington, Ky., the charming Lane (a stellar Katherine Romans) has been subtly wooing Steph (Michele Selene Ang), one of her regular customers, with coffee and pastries on the house. Lane even bakes her the kind of cake that famously figures in the novel Steph totes around.“See my biceps?” Lane says, boasting of all the egg-beating she’s done. “They’re stronger now.”“Whoa,” Steph says, swooning adorably.Winkler knows her rom-com tropes, so Steph is not only a florist but also a journalist, albeit a fairly unobservant one. She has no idea that everyone who works at Revival is in recovery from addiction. By the time Lane becomes aware of Steph’s obliviousness and fills her in, they are already enmeshed; when they finally got together, fireworks boomed in the night sky. (The set is by Cat Raynor, lighting is by Graham Zellers, sound is by Emily Duncan Wilson.)Della (Megan Hill), Lane’s wacky older sister, actively nurtures the couple’s happiness. On the first of a few Christmases with Steph, when Lane worries that “it’s hard to be all in with someone like me,” Della reassures her.“You’re fantastic,” she says. “And a catch.”This is the play’s other love story: the devotion between Lane, who is four years sober, and Della, a one-woman cheerleading squad who holds on tight to the memories of all the beautiful things that her sister has done and been. It’s Della who recalls Lane, radiant in the audience at a concert one night, as “the brightest thing in the world.”Romans and Megan Hill as sisters who are the second of the play’s two love stories.Joan MarcusWinkler’s script is dappled with fancy and poetry, but some dialogue sounds more schematic than dramatic, as when Lane and Steph talk politics. The play also sabotages two scenes by courting laughs in life-or-death moments — first during a pivotal emergency, and later in a traumatic recollection of loss. Humans can be ridiculous even in the most somber circumstances, but the attempts at comedy undermine the emotion.Those are puzzling miscalculations for a work that is otherwise insistent on acknowledging the messy, scary coexistence of joy and pain, strength and fragility, self-preservation and self-destruction — not only in Lane but in Steph and Della, who love her tenaciously, and whom she loves back hard. It’s just that, as Lane tells Steph, she also loves heroin.Which is why a constant worry long ago insinuated itself into Della’s everyday thoughts: “What do I have to do today … is Lane dead. I need gas … is Lane dead. Do I want coffee … is Lane dead.”It is bold to stage “The Brightest Thing in the World” in the season when jolly-holiday pressures can heighten tensions for addicts and those who love them. That timing could easily make it too much for people to watch.But I’ve been dogged for years by the same dread as Della, with a different name attached. And I’ll tell you, there can be real solace in a play that speaks your own fears back to you.The Brightest Thing in the WorldThrough Dec. 17 at the Yale Repertory Theater, New Haven, Conn.; yalerep.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Orlando,’ Emma Corrin Straddles Genders and Centuries

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      In a freewheeling London adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Corrin plays a character whose emotions are as fluid as their identity.LONDON — The play comes perfectly matched with its leading player in “Orlando,” a freewheeling take on Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending novel that opened Monday at the Garrick Theater here.Neil Bartlett’s breezy adaptation of its 1928 source is playful, and ultimately moving, but the director Michael Grandage owes much of the production’s success to its galvanizing star, Emma Corrin, who made an acclaimed West End debut last year in the short-lived “Anna X.” Thankfully, this time, Corrin can be seen onstage for considerably longer; “Orlando” runs through Feb. 25.The fast-rising Corrin, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, has made headlines recently as much for their gender identity as for increasingly prominent screen roles. After winning a Golden Globe for playing Princess Diana in “The Crown,” Corrin starred in two films this season, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and “My Policeman,” which was also directed by Grandage.Yet none of those roles has connected as directly to Corrin’s ongoing self-inquiry as the restless, century-straddling Orlando. “Being nonbinary is an embrace of many different parts of myself, the masculine and the feminine and everything in between,” Corrin said in a recent interview with The New York Times.Corrin has obviously spent some time with a question that Orlando asks rhetorically throughout the play: “Who am I?” We first meet the character as a young nobleman, born into Elizabethan-era luxury and a home containing 365 rooms. (The real-life inspiration for this vast property was Knole House, the countryside home of Vita Sackville-West, the author and socialite for whom an adoring Woolf wrote the novel.)But as time hurtles forward, Orlando barely ages and awakens one day from an extended slumber, age 30, as a woman. “Well, knock me down with a flipping feather,” says Orlando’s longtime housekeeper, Mrs. Grimsditch, in response. On the other hand, this loyal sidekick has seemed comfortable with gender fluidity from the start: “Ladies and gentlemen — no, sorry, everyone” she says in an early speech to the audience. The invaluable Deborah Findlay, hair disheveled but her sense of fun unimpaired, is a delight in the role.Corrin is more than game for whatever the play requires. This includes putting on and taking off Peter McKintosh’s ravishing costumes, to keep pace with the passing centuries.The youthful male we glimpse at the play’s start has an impishly androgynous allure, along with a gift for rewriting Shakespeare: “Shall I compare me to a summer’s day?” a glinting Orlando asks early on. But with age comes experience and exposure, not just to royalty (Lucy Briers makes a memorably stern Elizabeth I) but also to lovers and intimates of various genders and circumstances, including a bawdy Nell Gwyn (Millicent Wong) who tells Orlando, “For a lady, you’re really quite the gentleman.”Corrin is in full-throated voice throughout the vicissitudes of Orlando’s fraught love life — when Orlando’s heart is broken, you know it — and in moments when Orlando is taken over by fear. It’s not just that gender is fluid, we feel, but emotions are, too, and the play comes blessed with an actor who can project confidence one minute, and surrender to uncertainty the next. “Orlando” features a cast of Virginia Woolfs, who the titular character turns to to amend or amplify the story. Marc BrennerThe production features a bustling chorus of Woolfs, nine in all, bespectacled and drably attired; each of them adroitly handles at least one additional role, and sometimes more. (That supporting cast includes another nonbinary actor in Oliver Wickham, who plays Clorinda, an early crush for Orlando.)The sobriety of the author on view in this version contrasts with the vivacity of her creation. We see an anxious Orlando interacting with the lineup of women: “Come on, you wrote me,” she says, almost pleadingly, as if Woolf could posthumously amend the story. And yet the play sustains a spryness of tone.Bartlett’s adaptation is more of a sparky, affectionate pastiche, whether invoking another Woolf title, “A Room of One’s Own,” or handing a song lyric from the musical “Cabaret” — another show about shifting identity — to an especially ardent suitor, the Archduchess Harriet. (Richard Cant has particular fun with that role.)We get a synoptic survey of changes in women’s circumstances over time — I loved the sight of the Virginias producing teacups from their bags to signal the arrival of the Victorian era — and there’s a verbal lob in the direction of Britain’s governing Conservative Party that surely owes more to Bartlett than Woolf. But Corrin’s gorgeous performance lifts the 90 minutes, no intermission, well beyond anything resembling a history lesson or a night out requiring preparatory homework.“I once did love,” Orlando says wistfully, and the play leaves us hopeful that this mutable, mesmerizing character will find his, or her, or their, own way to do that again.OrlandoThrough Feb. 25 at the Garrick Theater, London; thegarricktheatre.co.uk. More