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      At Edinburgh’s Festivals, Big Names and Live Issues

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      While marquee productions have featured star turns from Ian McKellen and Alan Cumming, smaller shows deal with contemporary life.EDINBURGH — Some big names have been leaving their mark this month in Edinburgh, where both the International Festival and the bustling theatrical grab bag that is the Fringe are in full swing after a slimmed-down pandemic lineup last year. Ian McKellen and Alan Cumming have proved box-office catnip, both of them in dance-intensive enterprises that take already long-established careers in new directions.There is excellence, of course, among the less well-known talent here, too. But there’s no denying the marquee appeal of McKellen, now 83 and pretty much alone among his generation of British actors in still being onstage. (Too many of his onetime colleagues have either retired or died.) Last year, he gave us a limber, age-defiant Hamlet, for an extended run. And this month, he is revisiting that hallowed text, in a 65-minute fusion of dance and theater that is unremarkable but easy on the eye.The performance, devised by McKellen and the Danish choreographer Peter Schaufuss, finds the veteran Shakespearean delivering excerpts from the text in his familiar, deep-voiced rumble; all the other performers are dancers, many from the company of the Edinburgh Festival Ballet, which Schaufuss runs. The approach includes Ophelia (an expressive Katie Rose) swooping to the stage floor in grief, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hopping briefly into view and the charismatic dancer Johan Christensen whirling in torment as the young Hamlet: He and McKellen offer dual aspects of a split psyche. Luke Schaufuss, the choreographer’s son, completes a central triangle of sorts as a model-handsome Horatio in a decorative outing that is watchable, to be sure, but doesn’t run very deep.Alan Cumming performing an extract from the poetry of Robert Burns in “Burn,” created by Cumming and Steven Hoggett. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty ImagesAlan Cumming, the Tony-winning Scottish actor, gets the stage all to himself in “Burn,” an official Festival entry in conjunction with the National Theater of Scotland that will travel next month to the Joyce Theater in New York. It’s a portrait in words and movement of the 18th-century poet Robert Burns, Scotland’s national bard, whom Cumming and his co-creator, Steven Hoggett, have conceived as a lank-haired, black-clad goth. (The show finished Aug. 10 in Edinburgh and will tour Scotland before its New York run.)And what if Burns was 37 when he died — 20 years younger than Cumming is now? The protean actor brings to this assignment a lithe, sinuous physicality that belies his years, while a digital clock counts down the passage of time in Burns’s too-brief life. The show couples enticing visuals (Tim Lutkin’s lighting is suitably stormy) with a canter through Burns’s verse. We’re left at the end with a sweet recitation from in front of the stage curtain of “Auld Lang Syne,” the traditional New Year’s Eve melody, for which this Scotsman wrote the words.Contemporary themes are being dealt with in Edinburgh, too, even as this year’s celebrity names chose to look toward the past. “Silkworm,” at the Assembly Roxy, tells of a lesbian couple from Nigeria who arrive in Glasgow seeking permanent asylum in Britain. Ewa Dina, left, and Antonia Layiwola in Vlad Butucea’s “Silkworm.” Tommy Ga-Ken WanWritten by Vlad Butucea, a Romanian-born, Glasgow-based dramatist, the play is set 17 floors up in a low-income housing project where, we are told, “You can hear the wallpaper peeling.”Abidemi (a radiant Ewa Dina) is the more expansive of the pair; her partner, Omolade (the intense Antonia Layiwola) is fearful that the authorities won’t recognize the gravity of the women’s plight. That the previous occupants of this same apartment leaped to their deaths amplifies the air of unease: Once their fates are decided, the lovers’ bond gets tested in a slow-burning drama that could be teased out further for greater impact.Calvin (the live-wire Michael Dylan), the gay man at the endearingly manic center of James Ley’s “Wilf,” is in the process of ending a relationship when we first encounter him center stage, chattering away and wearing a Celine Dion T-shirt. His story, he tells us at the start, involves love, loss and the comfort he takes in the car of the title, a used Volkswagen Polo that he has come to cherish as if it were a person. The play is at the Traverse Theater — always a reliable Fringe destination — and directed by Gareth Nicholls, the house’s artistic director.Irene Allan and Michael Dylan in James Ley’s “Wilf,” directed by Gareth Nicholls.Mihaela BodlovicIts good nature proves entirely infectious as Calvin learns to motor his way, literally and metaphorically, through the pain of separation, en route to a possible new start with any of the various men he encounters along the way. Neil John Gibson gives vivid life to a broad array of romantic prospects, and a third performer, Irene Allan, is a hoot as a polyamorous onetime therapist. The play’s sexual candor was something of a surprise at 11 a.m. — performance times vary throughout the run — but “Wilf” is highly engaging whatever the time of day, and very touching, too.The sexual peccadilloes in “Boris the Third,” at the Pleasance Courtyard, belong to Britain’s prime minister. The writer-director Adam Meggido’s overextended comedy puts center stage a teenage Boris Johnson in a production of “Richard III” at Eton, one of Britain’s most elite boarding schools. The troubled show took place — or maybe not, given that Johnson’s father remembers that the actual Shakespeare play was “Richard II” — with a leading man who, in this account anyway, was more intent on bedding two sisters at once than on learning his lines.Meggido’s play tries to connect the conniving if doomed charmer Johnson may once have acted onstage to the modern-day leader who has been repeatedly called out for deceit. While it is worth seeing principally for Harry Kershaw’s pitch-perfect performance in the title role, it still feels like a shaky first draft.From left, Naima Swaleh, Fionn Ó Loingsigh, Anna Healy and Fiona Bell in Sonya Kelly’s “The Last Return,” directed by Sara Joyce.Ste Murray I had a much better time at Sonya Kelly’s wonderful “The Last Return,” the best of the seven shows I attended last weekend. Also at the Traverse, this production by the Druid Theater of Galway, directed by Sara Joyce, gathers a disparate array of characters, all clamoring for entry at any price to the sold-out final performance of a fictitious play.The ebb and flow of the queue is of scant interest to the ticket seller (Anna Healy), who repeats ‌as if ‌by rote that there are no seats left, and the prospective playgoers become increasingly fractious. A disaffected 60-something academic (Bosco Hogan) has tried 36 times to make it through the show but hasn’t managed, because he is incontinent; this performance is his last chance. Among those also jockeying for admission are a battle-scarred American soldier (Fionn Ó Loingsigh) who just wants to rest his feet after the trauma of war and, most memorably, a querulous Scotswoman (Fiona Bell) who offers homemade snacks to the other characters as she angles for a spot at the front.The lineup of hopefuls also includes a mostly silent Somali woman (Naima Swaleh) who has crossed continents, we discover, to get to the theater and whose final gesture ends the play on an unexpectedly touching note. Chaos, “The Last Return” suggests, lies in wait everywhere, but so, too, do humanity and compassion, if we are lucky enough to experience them — and this play.Edinburgh International FestivalThrough Aug. 29 at various venues in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk.Edinburgh Festival FringeThrough Aug. 29 at various venues in Edinburgh; edfringe.com. More

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      92NY’s New Season Includes Ian McEwan and Tom Stoppard

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      The fall season also features Ralph Fiennes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Katie Couric and Ken Burns.Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Katie Couric and Ralph Fiennes are among the array of actors, authors and dancers who will feature in the 92nd Street Y, New York’s upcoming fall season.“It was very important coming out of Covid and coming now into the 2022-23 season to really make a statement that we’re back,” Seth Pinsky, the organization’s chief executive, said of the programming. (The cultural institution has an updated name this year and is known as 92NY, for short.) “Every night is going to be something different, something stimulating.”In a nod to T.S. Eliot, Fiennes will read “The Waste Land” (Dec. 5) on the very stage where Eliot read the poem in 1950. The reading will coincide with the centenary of the poem, which was published in December 1922.Slated early in the season is Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, who will speak about his new book, “Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir,” in a conversation with his longtime friend Bruce Springsteen (Sept. 13).The following day, the filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, Sarah Botstein and Daniel Mendelsohn will preview their forthcoming documentary series, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” followed by a panel moderated by the journalist and podcast host Kara Swisher.The playwright Tom Stoppard, in what is believed to be his only New York talk of the season, takes the stage on Sept. 18 for a discussion about his new play, “Leopoldstadt,” with the German author and playwright Daniel Kehlmann.On Sept. 12, Couric, the journalist and author, will discuss her book “Going There,” with the New York Times investigative reporter Jodi Kantor. Also on the lineup are the Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan, who will read from his new novel, “Lessons” (Sept. 19); the Nigerian novelist Adichie reading from her new memoir, “Notes on Grief,” with the memoirist and CNN anchor Zain Asher (Sept. 11); and Joshua Cohen discussing his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Netanyahus” (Dec. 12).Last year, the Harkness Dance Center at the 92NY brought dance back to its stage. That tradition continues with the tap dancer Leonardo Sandoval and the composer Gregory Richardson (Dec. 22), and a celebration of the late dancer and choreographer Yuriko Kikuchi (Oct. 27), among other performances.The schedule will continue to be filled out with new events over the course of the season. The venue plans to continue requiring proof of vaccination for all attendees; masking requirements will be determined in the coming weeks.A full lineup can be found at 92ny.org. More

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      ‘Shy’ Excerpt: Mary Rodgers on Creating ’Once Upon a Mattress’

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      In this excerpt from “Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers,” a Broadway musical is born at a summer camp.A hundred-mile drive from New York City, on the fringe of the Pocono Mountains, Tamiment was for much of the last midcentury a resort for singles and a summer intensive for emerging theatrical talent. During the first half of each season, writers assembled an original musical revue every week; in the second half, if they were interested in cranking out a show with a story — and if Moe Hack, the barky, crusty, cigar-smoking sweetheart who ran the place, thought it was a good idea — they would be free to try.Among those who tried in the summer of 1958 was Mary Rodgers, a young composer whose father’s reputation preceded her; he was, after all, Richard Rodgers. Also at Tamiment was the lyricist and book writer Marshall Barer, her mentor and tormentor. Together, with assists from Dean Fuller and Jay Thompson, they would write the musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” a perennial favorite that grew from a summertime opportunity into an Off Broadway and Broadway success starring Carol Burnett. “Mattress” was also an unintentional self-portrait of a displaced young princess trying to find happiness on her own terms.“Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers,” written by Rodgers (1931-2014) and Jesse Green, the chief theater critic of The New York Times, is the just-published story of that princess. Over the course of two marriages, three careers and six children, sometimes stymied by self-doubt, the pervasive sexism of the period and her overbearingly critical parents (not just Richard but the icy perfectionist Dorothy), she somehow triumphed. But in this excerpt about the birth of her first (and only) musical hit — there would be substantial successes in other fields too — she recalls how triumphs can sometimes depend on little more than scrappiness, high spirits and a castoff from Stephen Sondheim.In New York City, Carol Burnett won the role of the Princess, whose sleep is disrupted by the incessant shrilling of the Nightingale of Samarkand, in “Once Upon a Mattress.”Friedman-Abeles/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsMARSHALL FOUND ME a nice four-bedroom cottage for very little money, right down the hill from Tamiment’s main buildings and near a rushing river. He even saw to it that an upright piano was waiting in the living room. And Steve, now flush from “West Side Story,” sold me his old car for a dollar. Off we went like the Joads in early June: 27-year-old me; the kids, ages 5, 4, and 2; and the Peruvian nanny — all of us scratching westward thanks to Steve’s itchy fake-fur upholstery.My von Trapp-like cheerfulness in the face of uncertainty soon crashed, though. The whole first half of the season was, for me, demoralizing. Everybody was more experienced than I. Everybody was, I felt sure, more talented. Everybody was certainly more at ease. At the Wednesday afternoon meetings to plan material for the coming week, when Moe would fire questions at us — “Who’s got an opening number?” — the guys would leap up to be recognized like know-it-alls in math class. If they were little red hens, I was the chicken, silently clucking Not I. “Who’s got a comedy song?” More leaping; more ideas. “Who’s got a sketch?” Woody Allen always did.At 22, Woody looked about 12 but was already the inventive weirdo he would become famous as a decade later. His wife, Harlene, who made extra money typing scripts for the office, was even nerdier, but only inadvertently funny. She looked, and sounded, a bit like Olive Oyl, with reddish hair, freckles, and a bad case of adenoids. Woody, whenever he wasn’t working on his sketches — his best that summer was about a man-eating cake — was either sitting on a wooden chair on the porch outside the barracks, practicing his clarinet, or inside with her, practicing sex, possibly from a manual. He was doing better, it seemed, with the clarinet.I would spend eight hours a day plinking out tunes to accompany Marshall’s lyrics. These were revue songs, with titles like “Waiting to Waltz With You,” “Miss Nobody,” and “Hire a Guy You Can Blame,” fitted to the talents of particular performers with no aim of serving a larger story. “Miss Nobody,” for instance, with its super-high tessitura, was written for a thin little girl named Elizabeth Lands, who couldn’t walk across the stage without falling on her face but was a knockout and had an incredible four-octave range like Yma Sumac.Burnett, left, and Rodgers moving a mattress into the Alvin Theater (now the Neil Simon Theater) on Broadway in November 1959. The show had premiered earlier that year at an Off Broadway theater, the Phoenix, in the East Village.Bettmann/Getty ImagesMusic did not pour out of my fingers; the process was more like wringing a slightly damp washcloth. With Marshall’s lyric propped up on the piano desk, precisely divided into bar lines as a road map, I would begin with some sort of accompaniment or vamp or series of consecutive chords, then sing a melody that matched the lyric and went with the accompaniment, then adjust the accompaniment to service the melody, which began to dictate the harmony, until I had a decent front strain that satisfied me and, more important, satisfied Marshall, who wouldn’t stop hanging over my shoulder until he liked what he’d heard. Then he’d leave me to clean it up and inch it forward while he took a long walk on the golf course to puzzle out the lyrics for the bridge. Back to me, back to the golf course, back and forth we went, until the song was finished.Even when I did that successfully, I had another problem. My abandoned Wellesley education had taught me the rudiments of formal manuscript making, but Daddy had ear-trained me, not eye-trained me. As a result, I kept naming my notes wrong, calling for fourths when I meant fifths, and vice versa. This made the orchestrations sound upside down. I could just imagine the guys saying, “Get a load of Dick Rodgers’s daughter, who can’t even make a lead sheet.”Actually, the orchestra men, kept like circus animals in a tent apart from the rest of us, were the merriest people at Tamiment. They weren’t competitive the way the writers were. They just sat there with a great big tub filled with ice and beer; you tossed your 25 cents in and had a good time. And I had the best time with them. Especially the trumpeter.Mary, left, with her parents, Dorothy and Richard; her sister, Linda, center; and Zoë d’Erlanger, right, who lived with the family for a time during World War II.via the Rodgers-Beaty-Guettel familyElsewhere at Tamiment, I felt patronized. It didn’t help that Marshall tried to dispel my parental paranoia by preemptively introducing me to one and all as “Mary Rodgers — you know, Dorothy’s daughter?” Between that and the chord symbols, it was enough to drive me to drink.Or pills, anyway.“What’s that you’re taking?” Marshall asked, when he saw me swallowing one.“Valium,” I told him.“Valium!” he screamed. “Why Valium?”“I asked the doctor for something to help me write.”“And he gave you Valium?” said Marshall. “Here. Try this.”He handed me a pretty little green-and-white-speckled spansule.Bingo! I wrote two songs in one day, and, whether because of the Dexamyl or the songs, felt happier than I’d ever been. It completely freed me up. Whatever inhibitions I had about playing in front of Marshall or feeling creative and being able to express it were suddenly gone.The story of me and pills — and, much more dramatically, Marshall and pills — can wait for later; what matters now is that Marshall had for a couple of years been nursing the notion of turning the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” into a musical burlesque for his friend Nancy Walker. Nancy, a terrific comedian, liked the idea but was too big a star by then to be summer-slumming at Tamiment. Still, since Marshall was stuck with me anyway, he figured it was worth a try. Did I like the idea? he asked.As it happens, I did, very much, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I hated it. I did what I was told. At Tamiment, even Marshall did what he was told. Moe said we could write this “pea musical” on the condition that it would accommodate his nine principal players with big roles. Nine big roles? Moe had hired them at a premium, he said, and he wanted his money’s worth.The deal struck, Moe scheduled the show for Aug. 16 and 17. It was now late July.The program for the Tamiment Playhouse performance of “The Princess and the Pea,” as the musical was known that summer of 1958.Jesse Green/The New York TimesTo save time, we custom-cast the show on the cart-before-the-horse Moe Hack plan, before a word, or at least a note, was written. There was, for instance, a wonderful girl, Yvonne Othon, who was perfect for the lead, Princess Winifred: appealingly funny-looking, very funny-acting, and the right age — 20. But there was a significant drawback: She wasn’t one of Moe’s principal players. Meanwhile, Moe wanted to know what we were going to do for Evelyn Russell, who at 31 was deemed too ancient to be the Princess but was a principal player. OK, OK, we’d cast Evelyn as the Queen: an unpleasant, overbearing lady we just made up, who is overly fond of her son the Prince and never stops talking. We would give her many, many, many lines and maybe even her own song. And to seal the deal, even though the Princess was (along with the Pea) the title character, we would cut her one big number; we’d been planning to have her sing “Shy,” a revue song that hadn’t worked earlier in the summer. That was just as well because it was a tough, belty tune and Yvonne couldn’t sing a note. She was a dancer.Lenny Maxwell, a comedian and a schlub, would be Prince Dauntless, the sad sack who wants to get married but his mother won’t let him; since he had limited singing chops, we’d only write him the kind of dopey songs any doofus could sing. We created the part of the Wizard for a guy who, I had reason to know offstage, was spooky; he was practically doing wizard things to me in bed. Meanwhile, Milt Kamen, by virtue of his age (37) and credits (he’d worked with Sid Caesar), was considered by Moe, and by Milt, to be the most important of the principal players, but he too had a couple of drawbacks: He couldn’t sing on key and couldn’t memorize lines. He claimed, though, to be an excellent mime, so Marshall and Jay invented the mute King to function as counterpoint to the incessantly chatty Queen. Marshall brilliantly figured out a way to make his lyrics rhyme even though they were silent: They rhymed by implication.In this way, one role at a time, we wrote the show backward from our laundry list of constraints: a dance specialty for the good male dancer who played the Jester, a real ballad for the best singer, even a pantomime role for Marshall’s lover, Ian, who moved beautifully but, well, fill in the blank.Soon all personnel problems were solved except what to do with Elizabeth Lands. You remember, the gorgeous but klutzy Yma Sumac type? When Joe Layton, the choreographer, and Jack Sydow, the director, started teaching all the ladies of the court — who were meant to be pregnant, according to Marshall’s story — how to walk with their hands clasped under their boobs, tummies out, leaning almost diagonally backward, Liz kept tipping over. Pigeon-toed? Knock-kneed? We never discovered what exactly, but she was a moving violation. Thus was born the Nightingale of Samarkand, who was lowered in a cage during the bed scene while shrilling an insane modal tune to keep the Princess awake.Do not seek to know how the musical theater sausage is made. More

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      Chase Mishkin, Tony-Winning Producer of ‘Dame Edna,’ Dies at 85

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      She was nearly 60 when she began producing shows on Broadway. In 19 years, she had a hand (and her money) in 30 plays and musicals.Chase Mishkin, a prolific theatrical producer who received two Tony Awards, one for bringing the uninhibited Australian character Dame Edna Everage to Broadway, and who was something of flamboyant figure herself, chauffeured around town in her London taxicab, died on July 24 at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.Her sister Julie Kahle confirmed the death, adding that Ms. Mishkin had dementia. She had also had two strokes.After her husband died, Ms. Mishkin arrived on Broadway in 1996 with her first play, “The Apple Doesn’t Fall . . . ,” which she had produced in Los Angeles. Over the next two decades, she became one of the most prominent female producers on Broadway, with a hand, and her money, in 29 more shows.“She had a real commitment to be a Kermit Bloomgarden” — who produced “Death of a Salesman” and “The Music Man” in the 1940s and ‘50s — said Joe Brancato, a friend who is founding artistic director of the Penguin Rep Theater in Stony Point, N.Y., in Rockland County. “She had a real dedication to each show.”Working with other producers, her hits included the musical “Memphis,” for which she shared the Tony for best musical in 2010; Martin McDonagh’s Irish drama “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” (which opened in 1998); Claudia Shear’s Tony-nominated play “Dirty Blonde” (2000), and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (2005), a musical adaptation of the Frank Oz film with Steve Martin and Michael Caine as con men.“Dame Edna: The Royal Tour” was one of Ms. Mishkin’s most conspicuous successes. It starred the Australian actor Barry Humphries as a former housewife-turned-self-appointed “gigastar” who, dressed in an elaborate evening gown, mauve wig and wild eyeglasses, held court with the audience, whom she called “possums.”It was a profitable hit during its run, from 1999 to 2000, and earned Ms. Mishkin, along with her frequent producing partner Leonard Soloway and two other producers, a special Tony for live theatrical presentation. But when Mr. Humphries went on tour two years later, he stunned his producers by leaving them behind.Ms. Mishkin said she felt betrayed. Asked if she would work with Mr. Humphries again, she told Michael Riedel, who was then the theater columnist for The New York Post, “I am in the enviable position of being able to say that once you lose me, you lose me forever.”Ms. Mishkin in 1997 with, from left, Steven M. Levy, Peter Crane and her frequent producing partner Leonard Soloway, inside the Gramercy Theater, which they were converting from a movie house to an Off Broadway theater. It is now a live music venue.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShe was born Mary Margaret Hahn on Jan. 22, 1937, in Vanduser, Mo., and grew up in Sparta, Ill., and Dexter, Mo. Her mother, Violet (Phegley) Hahn, was a homemaker. Her father, Harold Hahn, was not a part of her life. She attended Washington University in St. Louis for a semester in 1955.Little is known about her next decade or so, other than that she was a dancer in Las Vegas who met her future husband, Ralph Mishkin, while modeling for an advertisement for his carpet manufacturing company. By then she had changed her given name to Chase.She and Mr. Mishkin married in 1970 and lived for a while in an estate they had bought from the singer and actress Cher in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. Ms. Mishkin became known as a hostess and philanthropist, but she turned to theater after Mr. Mishkin’s death in 1993.In 1996 she staged Trish Vradenburg’s “The Apple Doesn’t Fall … ” — about a woman’s relationship with her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease — at a small theater in Los Angeles before taking it the Lyceum Theater on Broadway, with her friend Leonard Nimoy directing.It flopped, but Ms. Mishkin moved on, becoming increasingly familiar on Broadway for her flaming red hair and mink coats and her arrivals at premieres — and at Sardi’s, the theater district gathering spot — in her black London cab, which she had reupholstered in Burberry plaid.“She came on the scene in a bold way,” said Mr. Riedel, the author of “Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway” (2016) and a co-host of a morning radio show on WOR-AM in New York. “She was part of a new breed of female producers who said, ‘If I’m going to give you $500,000, I won’t be a passive investor — I want to be involved in every aspect of the show.’”Daryl Roth, another woman who started to find success as a theatrical producer in the late 1980s, wrote in an email about Ms. Mishkin, “My impression of her is one of being a ‘dame’ in the best possible way; she was outspoken but always gracious; she had a great attitude about enjoying life.”Ms. Mishkin endured failures like “Prymate,” about the battle for control over an aging gorilla between an anthropologist and geneticist, and “Urban Cowboy,” a 2003 a musical adaptation of the 1980 film about a Texas honky-tonk.In 2003, Ms. Mishkin and other producers decided that “Urban Cowboy” — devastated by bad reviews, a four-day musicians’ strike, the start of the war in Iraq and dismal ticket sales — would close after its fourth performance. But as Lonny Price, who directed the musical, walked to the stage to say goodbye to the audience, he encountered Ms. Mishkin backstage.“She said, ‘We’re not closing,’ and I said, ‘What did you say?’” he recalled in a phone interview. “She said, ‘I’ve decided not to close the show,’ and I said, ‘May I say that?’ And she said, ‘Go ahead.’ And she funded the show for the rest of its run.”The musical stayed alive — it got two Tony nominations — but closed after 60 performances.“When business didn’t pick up, she reluctantly closed the show,” Mr. Price said.She was just as persistent with Mark Medoff’s 2004 play, “Prymate.” At its center was a Black actor, André De Shields, as Graham, a 350-pound gorilla. Wearing a baggy T-shirt and shorts, Mr. De Shields grunted, screeched and scooted about onstage and, in one notorious scene, was masturbated by a sign-language interpreter.Faced with poor reviews and ticket sales, Ms. Mishkin bought an advertisement in The New York Times that urged theatergoers to see the play, which also starred Phyllis Frelich, James Naughton and Heather Tom. “Come Be Engrossed!” she wrote. But it closed after five performances.“I don’t try to defend that one,” she told New York magazine in 2009. “But I don’t throw rocks at it, either.”Ms. Mishkin also produced Off Broadway shows and earned an Emmy Award as executive producer of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street In Concert,” which Mr. Price directed on PBS in 2001. Her final Broadway show, “Doctor. Zhivago” (2015), closed after 23 performances.In addition to her sister Julie, she is survived by another sister, Dixie May; a stepson, Steve Mishkin; and five step-grandchildren. More

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      Daniella Topol of Rattlestick Theater’s New Calling: Nursing

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      The artistic director of Rattlestick Playwrights Theater is making an unusual career change after preparing the company for a major renovation.There’s been a lot of turnover in theater leadership lately. Some have been drummed out of their jobs. Others have quit to do something else in the arts. Many have retired.Daniella Topol, the artistic director of Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and a career-long theater director, is leaving to become a nurse.The unusual move arrives at a pivotal time for Rattlestick, a small Off Broadway company that, in addition to rejuvenating following the long pandemic shutdown, is about to embark on a much-needed renovation of its cozy but imperfect West Village home, located in a 19th-century church parish house.Topol, 47, has been leading Rattlestick since 2016, succeeding David Van Asselt, who co-founded the company. Just before assuming the leadership position, she directed at Rattlestick a production of “Ironbound” by Martyna Majok, who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for “Cost of Living.”Marin Ireland played a Polish immigrant in New Jersey in Martyna Majok’s “Ironbound,” directed by Topol for Rattlestick in 2016.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThree years later, another production Topol directed at Rattlestick altered her trajectory. While working on “Novenas for a Lost Hospital,” a play that both chronicled and mourned the demise of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village as patrons moved from location to location connected to the story, she consulted with nurses and nursing students, and something sparked.“A seed was planted and then we continued forward — a pandemic happened six months after that, and there was a lot of reflection around, ‘Where are we as a field?’ ‘Where are we as a city?’ ‘Where are we as a country?’ ‘Where are we going?’ ‘What role do we play or not play?’ ‘How do I as white woman hold power and privilege?’ ‘How don’t I?’ ‘Where do I fit in a constellation in a way that is productive?’” she said. “I have been doing, obviously, a lot of reflection about my own personal life, and meaningful and challenging experiences that I have had, on a very personal level, and many of them have centered inside of maternal care complexities, and so it sort of felt like it was aligning with the stars.”She said she is not sure exactly what she wants to do as a nurse, but she plans to stay in New York, and said that maternal health and birth equity — a term used to describe efforts to reduce racial and class inequities for new mothers and their infants — have become particular interests, intensified by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “I’ve been pregnant many times — I’ve had a late-term loss, early term losses, and I have a child,” said Topol, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband and 10-year-old daughter. “I feel like it’s a way to hold the loss and let that help inform my next steps on a very personal level.”Ensemble members in “Novenas for a Lost Hospital,” a play marking the death of St. Vincent’s Hospital. “A seed was planted,” Topol said of her work on this 2019 production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSo now, while preparing to direct a final play for Rattlestick this fall and working on other theater projects, she is taking prerequisite courses and volunteering at a hospital; Rattlestick is beginning a search for her successor, and she hopes that she will overlap with that person and then leave sometime next year, before starting nursing school next summer or fall.“I’ve only been a theater person,” she said. “Here I am, I’m waking up at 4:30 a.m. to study science and memorize muscles and bones and I’m dissecting a pig. It’s all kinds of things I never thought I would do.”Topol said there were other factors as well. She said that she has thought about “how long should anybody stay in any kind of leadership position,” and that the civil rights unrest of 2020 had intensified that thinking: “Part of the reckoning was about who is running companies, where does power lay, and how much power sharing is there — defining what the trajectory of the field is.”“There are other wonderful artists who can take over Rattlestick and do a beautiful job leading it and imagine things I haven’t been able to imagine,” she added.As the paths of Topol and Rattlestick diverge, she’s interested in highlighting the theater’s survival and growth, and its commitment to a smooth transition.Dael Orlandersmith in her one-woman show “Until the Flood,” which was produced at Rattlestick in 2018 during Topol’s tenure.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe company, founded in 1994, is small — its annual prepandemic budget was $1.2 million, of which 80 percent was raised from foundations and donors — but has consistently attracted attention for its ambitious work, including not only Majok’s early play, but also work by Annie Baker, Samuel D. Hunter, Dael Orlandersmith and Heidi Schreck. The theater describes its mission, in part, as prompting “social change,” and much of its programming reflects that; its first post-shutdown play was “Ni Mi Madre,” a much-praised autobiographical examination of culture and sexuality by Arturo Luís Soria, whom the theater has now commissioned to write a follow-up.“What I’ve loved about Rattlestick is we’re small and scrappy and authentic and take chances and aren’t burdened by huge institutional issues of massive unaffordable space — we’re like a motorcycle, not a cruise ship,” Topol said. “You don’t get the luxury of the cruise ship — you get the scrappy ride of the motorcycle — but you get the flexibility to be able to twist and turn as things go.”Topol said she feels comfortable leaving in part because the theater now has a fully financed plan to redo its performance space, which it rents harmoniously from St. John’s in the Village, an Episcopal church. The theater space, where it has been located since 1999, has had two serious challenges: The only way to get there is to climb a narrow stairway, which means the theater is not accessible to those who can’t navigate those stairs; and the only way to use the bathroom is to traverse the stage.Rattlestick has now raised the $4 million — about half from the city — to finance a project that will, at its most basic, add an elevator and patron bathrooms, but will also modernize the entrance and the theater itself by relocating the front door, adding a box office and a small lobby, and removing the raised stage so that the performance and seating areas are flexible, as well as accessible. The theater will be able to seat up to 93 people — about the same as it does now. “It’s not ‘bigger is better,’” Topol said. “It feels like we are really right-sized for the work that we are doing.”“I was shocked, but also, as I thought about it, I saw where there was a connection with who she was,” Jeff Thamkittikasem, the chairman of Rattlestick’s board, said of Topol’s move.Dana Golan for The New York TimesThe renovation will allow Rattlestick to stay in the West Village, which has become a very pricey area, but is the neighborhood where the theater has long been located and is determined to remain. Rattlestick also shares a rehearsal space on Gansevoort Street with three other theater organizations. “It is critical to maintain places for artists in our neighborhoods,” said the renovation’s architect, Marta Sanders.Construction, Topol hopes, will begin next summer, pending city approval, and would last a year; during construction, the theater would present work at other locations. The theater is continuing to raise money for programming and operations.The chairman of the theater’s board, Jeff Thamkittikasem, acknowledged surprise at Topol’s move, but said he had become supportive.“When I first heard about it, I tried to talk her out of it, but my mom is a nurse, and at some point it switched for me and I saw that connection about wanting to care for others in a much more direct, physical way,” he said. “I was shocked, but also, as I thought about it, I saw where there was a connection with who she was.”Thamkittikasem said the organization is healthy and that the board has retained a search firm to look for Topol’s successor. He added, “Rattlestick is in a very strong place since Daniella took over — we’re stronger financially, we have good connections to foundations and funders, we have an active board and a solid staff, and our reputation has grown.” More

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      Interview: (Brit)Pop’ing all the way to Berlin

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      Writer Holly Whinney on new play Berlin

      Not only do we love theatre here at ET, but many of our team also love live music. So how could we not be interested in a show centred around a 90s Britpop band? Ok, the show is obviously much more than just that, but hey, it got our attention which is a good start.

      Holly Whinney’s Berlin brings together the remaining members of that Britpop band as they try to deal with the death of their lead singer. It’s a dark comedy exploring grief, toxic masculinity and betrayal. It plays at Etcetera Theatre as part of Camden Fringe between 23 – 27 August (more information here).

      We couldn’t resist wanting to know more, so we dug out our best 90s band t-shirt, put Oasis on the stereo (no streaming for us) and sat down with Holly to ask some questions.

      Berlin features an imaginary 90s Britpop band, what made you decide on that era and music? Were you a 90s groupie at all?

      Britpop was definitely a massive influence on me when I was younger. I have very fond memories of being in my dad’s van on the way to a B&Q with Cigarettes and Alcohol blasting so loud! I was only about 6 at the time but, the first time I heard the opening to that song (blatantly T-Rex) I knew that it was the coolest thing ever and I had to learn guitar and all I wanted to be was Noel Gallagher. My taste has changed more with age and I’m really starting to believe that the coolest person was  Jarvis Cocker and because of this I now have several tweed jackets and chunky glasses due to him.

      Did you have any real bands in mind as you were writing the play?

      The [untitled] band that is depicted was never massive during their heyday – they sold a lot of records of course but, they were never at the level of Oasis or Blur – when I described the band to the actors during an early rehearsal I said Pulp. If you were to pin the band down to a culture reference purely on popularity at the time it would be them.

      The idea of the play came after reading a passage from Peter Hook’s book Substance which looks into New Order and him navigating a post-Joy Division world. Within the book he writes two lists: ‘Ten things you should always do when you form a group’ and, ‘Ten things you should never do when you form a group.’ These two lists really formed the gem behind Berlin. They were both contrary to one another – one list said to work with your mates and the said never work with your mates as you won’t stay mates. I also reflected on the passage on Ian Curtis where Peter Hook mentions that the band ‘never talked about it [Ian’s suicide] in depth. Never analysed any of it.’ Instead, they made jokes and ‘pithy’ comments and ‘never confronted the grief’. This was where I started to write the play. It’s since developed and grown into something completely different and by no means am I trying to represent New Order.

      Can we expect a nice 90s soundtrack to go along with the play?

      Can’t afford the rights. So, instead a very good friend of mine, Tara, does the music for the show with her band, The Ramshackles – the opening guitar to Wasteland has some slight Champagne Supernova vibes which is spot on for us.

      I also thought it best to avoid any direct links to Britpop bands as I didn’t want spectators to be taken out of the experience by thinking what a ‘tune’ or walk out because they prefer Blur. Or, they are like my mum, and hate everything Britpop – bar Pulp of course.

      There doesn’t feel to be too many plays based around bands, and yet it would seem a rich tapestry to explore – do you feel there are reasons we don’t see more plays like this?

      I don’t have a clue why the premise of a band is not used a lot. I agree, I think you have so much to play with that it seems a waste. Maybe it is because of the element of music that would potentially need to be composed? But play concepts and settings and themes come in waves. With a post-covid and an inevitable recession, creatives will set their work in one location (as in one room) with fewer characters as it is more cost effective. So, maybe we will see more plays based in one location with only four characters becoming more mainstream over the next year or so and with that maybe more plays about bands.

      The band members reunite in a Berlin studio, what was the appeal of sending them all the way to Berlin then?

      Berlin is a really interesting place when considering the landscape of music and specifically the studio that influenced the production, Hansa Studios. It use to be a concert hall for the Nazis, not that that effects the story at all but, it complements the idea of the past and present being deeply intertwined within the fabric of Berlin. Berlin is this bohemian hub where artists, whether musical or writers such Christopher Isherwood, go to really focus on their work. I think the symbiosis of the past and present there really stimulates the brain and is such an alluring bait for a creative.

      A big example of this is Bowie. He famously left LA where he was living of red peppers, milk and cocaine and headed to West Berlin with Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. The idea was for him to step away from the drug scene of LA and cut entirely …so, he moved to the Heroin capital of the world in the 1970s. I always liked the irony that came with that. But, with him moving to Berlin you have others that follow such as Nick Cave who did the same in the 1980s. This is why I believe the characters and the band head to Berlin. To get their spark back or, at least this is what Nick thinks. Nick is the character that brings the band together – he just wants his mates to get along but doesn’t know how to make this happen – so, he decides to do a rehearsal in their old studio in Berlin. In my head Hansa Studio was THE recording studio for them. They followed their heroes to this mecha of a musical holy land. However, it was an artificial move at the time – they had to do this because that’s what Bowie did – or, it’s like The Beatles going to India. They feel obliged to go to a different country … but, it doesn’t change them or the course of history. It’s similar to someone deciding to up sticks and move to a different country – they believe the country they have left was the problem but after a few years they move elsewhere because they are unsatisfied – they are just running away from themselves and not addressing their own personal issues.

      So, the setting of Berlin is a combination of history being part of the fabric of the present city but, also an element of the pastiche of a creative running from their problems. This theme of running away from problems or diverting the real issue is a big theme within the production so, Berlin works very well as a setting for this theme to materialise on a symbolic level.

      The play looks at, amongst other things, toxic masculinity, do you feel the 90s Britpop and lad culture that went around it makes it perfect for those themes?

      Absolutely! I don’t at all think Liam Gallagher would be shouting this off the rooftops – he would just say they were in the late 20s – cigarettes and alcohol is what it’s about! And of course, Britpop was mainly fuelled by the media and then the Blair campaign. However, if you reflect on Britpop and a lot of cultures before this and after – Toxic Masculinity is a big theme within the subculture. The feuds of Blur and Oasis and the bullying of Robbie Williams and singing about getting drunk and high and starting fights with the press and one of the Gallaghers saying Sting is a wet wipe because he just cries in a corner are all examples of this. However, internally a lot of bands don’t get on – The Who famously didn’t get on at all. Liam Gallagher threw a plum or some form of fruit at Noel before a Paris gig and Noel walked out and quit. I think the idea of a ‘Rock ‘N Roll’ lifestyle is the demise of bands and what it means to be a quote-on-quote man.

      However, with the idea of ‘Lad Culture’ it comes with a far heavier weight than just some band members throwing various pieces of fruit at each other. You have sport, mainly football, with an idolisation of violence against opposing teams as demonstrated in films such as The Firm and Green Street. You have binge drinking, smoking like a chimney and quite an archaic interpretation of Manhood.

      With this play, they are all ‘Lads’ within their own right – but they have to grow out of this phase and deal with responsibility. One of them is going through a divorce and cannot come to terms with this – it is not until the final part of the play where we learn of this. This character is the last ‘Lad’ of the group – he is trying to hold onto the past and puts it on a pedestal of being drunk, smoking in the studio and rocking up on cocaine. But he can’t do that all the time – he has responsibility.

      You also look at grief and betrayal, what is it about these subjects that made you want to delve deeper into them?

      The subject matter of grief and betrayal seems to saturate the theatrical market however, on the other hand, there are far fewer productions which deal with it in a comedic light. Or, if they do, it can verge on the farcical. My objective with this production when it came to those themes was to be open with the reality of death and coping with this. The characters poke fun at each other and have a joke – they talk of Harry [the lead singer that committed suicide] as if he was just away on his holidays. They are very funny characters. I always found it strange going to wakes and no one really was crying but instead you had my Uncle Tappy and Malcom having a few beers and maybe a cigarette. They would check on the relatives but quite soon they would be joking about and chatting about music or talking about plans for the Farnham Beer Exhibition. However, by doing this they are not addressing the elephant in the room, and they are not grieving in a healthy and safe manner. This is where the frustration comes from and, out of that, anger and hate.

      Yet, this production does not only explore the idea of grief in the mortal sense. It also looks at the grief of a relationship, getting divorced – going from being a full time parent to barely seeing your child. It looks into the grief of not being able to do what you like as it destroys you – as demonstrated with Nick and his addiction to alcohol.

      It is a very open and brutal examination on grief and what it does to you. How grieving a person you are very close to can tear you up inside and make you angry. But, this play is exploring grief when the person commited suicide – you constantly reflect and get angry at yourself wondering if you could have done anything! Some people try and pin the blame on others, which is what Ben does, and this turns him into a dreadful human being.

      Have you put on a show at Camden Fringe before? And how important are festivals such as this for writers like yourself?

      This is my first time at the Camden Fringe – it’s really exciting! And yes, these sorts of festivals are so important for writers! And down to one pretty simple reason…economics. I’ve spent countless nights submitting my work to new writing venues and always receive the email “unfortunately we cannot take your work at the moment – we wish you all the best in your writing journey.” So, either you give up or realise thousands of people are applying to those venues thus, your chances are so slim! However, how many people would be like “you know what, screw it, this is good – it is going on and I will finance it myself.” That is why Camden Fringe is so good – it is just a buzz of loads and loads of creatives doing what they love and producing what they want with no check list and pressure from the top executives! It’s so liberating!

      It is a showcase of talent and really it’s only about the art! It doesn’t matter if your show is not profiting thousands (yes, that would be nice) but, that is not the objective. The objective is putting on a great play that says something about the world we live in – and showing it to people of Camden!

      Any other Camden Fringe recommendations you can put our way?

      Everything looks so good! I haven’t had time yet to go through the online brochure yet – but, everything looks brilliant from what I’ve seen posted on Instagram.

      And to wrap things up, give us a last pitch as to why we should all be heading into the moshpit at Etcetera Theatre to catch Berlin?

      It’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry. It is a venue on top of a pub and on at 21:30 during the weekday and 17:30 weekends so a perfect way to finish off a night in Camden!

      Our thanks to Holly for a wonderful insight into her play. You can catch Berlin when it comes to Etcetera Theatre 23 – 27 August as part of Camden Fringe. Further information and bookings can be found here.

      Note that the show starts at 9.30 all nights except 27 August (5.30pm), so why not take advantage of seeing two shows in one evening? There are a host of shows playing at both the Etcetera Theatre and others nearby, check the Camden Fringe website for more information. More

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      ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ Review: An Adaptation That Needs Tailoring

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      The new Elton John-Shaina Taub musical, based on the popular film about a fashion-world ingénue and her demanding boss, isn’t yet ready-to-wear.CHICAGO — A movie-to-musical that wants to have its cake and eat it, too, and still fit into a sample size, “The Devil Wears Prada,” opened at the James M. Nederlander Theater here on Sunday. With music by the rock god Elton John and lyrics by the Off-Broadway sweetheart Shaina Taub (“Suffs”), it had seemed poised to set a trend or two.Though the show takes place at a fashion magazine, its creative team doesn’t seem to have agreed on a style. Is this a sincere story of a young woman’s education — sentimental, professional, sartorial — or a Fashion Week party? An inquiry into toxic workplace culture or an excuse to put an Eiffel Tower (technically, two Eiffel Towers) onstage? This is a show that has tried on everything in its closet. Nothing fits.Adapted from the 2006 film, itself adapted from Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 roman à clef of her year at Condé Nast, it follows Andy Sachs (Taylor Iman Jones), a recent journalism graduate. Andy has big dreams. The Big Apple quashes them quickly in “I Mean Business,” the show’s efficient opener. After six months of rejections, she somehow lands a coveted job at Runway — a fictional stand-in for Vogue — as the second assistant to its imperious editrix, Miranda Priestly (Beth Leavel.)Andy doesn’t care about fashion. She has the cable-knit tights to prove it. But she needs a job to pay the rent. (Yes, the musical assumes that an entry-level media gig guarantees financial security. How dear.) So she makes what she perceives as the first of many Faustian bargains — to put her dreams on hold and stick it out for a year.“My voice can wait,” she tells Miranda. I mean, Joan Didion got her start at Vogue. But sure.The trouble is, Andy isn’t very good at her job. Certainly she lacks the maniacal perfectionism and bonkers wardrobe of Emily Charlton, the venomous first assistant (Megan Masako Haley, wasted until the second act). For help, she turns to the magazine’s creative director, Nigel Owens (Javier Muñoz), who gives her the makeover she so desperately needs, in “Dress Your Way Up,” a power ballad inspired by the Met’s costume collection and the coffee mug platitude that you should dress for the job you want.But Andy remains ambivalent about her work. And is a hot pink romper and thigh-high boots really anyone’s idea of office wear? (The costumes, which range from the flamboyant — the chorus — to the unpersuasive and oddly wrinkled — the principals — are by Arianne Phillips.) The musical is ambivalent, too. The film, with its sleeker wardrobe and more substantial visual pleasures, seemed grudgingly admiring of the fashion industry, as commerce, as art. The show, directed by Anna D. Shapiro, a serious-minded artist I would not have associated with glitter or caprice, can’t make up its mind.The songs unfold pleasantly enough, with flashes of glam and morsels of wit, but they tend to feel last-season. The choreography, by James Alsop, defers to Broadway vernacular, with glimmers of ballroom. Of course there is voguing. Though Kate Wetherhead’s book makes a few updates — there’s a reference to collagen powder — it doesn’t take a point of view. And in a show with a stated aversion to starches, the jokes are deeply corny.“What should I do?” Andy wails as Miranda approaches.“Find a better exfoliant, for starters,” Nigel says.Javier Muñoz, center, as the creative director of Runway magazine, which is overseen by the imperious editor Miranda Priestly, played by Beth Leavel.Joan MarcusAt times, I wondered what a writer who takes bigger, more trenchant comic swings — Bess Wohl, say, Jocelyn Bioh, Halley Feiffer — might have done with this material. Would a score that acknowledged the last 40 years of popular music have made a difference? This version takes Jones, a charismatic actress with a lithe, flexible voice, and gives her little to do except stress and dither. (She glows, by the way, no exfoliant needed.) And though magazines like Vogue have finally admitted a lack of diversity, the musical never acknowledges that everyone mistreated by Miranda, who is white, is a person of color.“The Devil Wears Prada” wants to impart a vision of luxury and style — which explains the makeover scene, the gala scene, the Paris fashion week scene. Christine Jones and Brett Banakis, the set and media designers, have a lot of fun with Paris. But Andy, a woman with no professional bylines, seems to feel that fashion is somehow beneath her. Even when she comes to appreciate couture on a personal level (“Who’s She?”), she never recognizes it as substantive, rejecting the chance to write about it. It remains frivolous, unserious, girl stuff, which gives the musical, despite the presence of so many women on the creative team, a shade of antifeminism.None of the female characters in the show support one another until nearly the finale. Andy’s two roommates (Christiana Cole and Tiffany Mann) are sketched so thinly I never caught their names. They still make time to judge her. As looks go, it’s not great.Another nervous day at Runway: Jones, left, Muñoz and Leavel, with members of the ensemble.Joan MarcusWhich brings us, of course, to the Miranda of it all. In the film, Meryl Streep played Miranda with sleek silver hair and a voice like liquid nitrogen — an ice queen to sink the Titanic. But Leavel is an actress of humor and warmth with a gift, demonstrated in “The Drowsy Chaperone” and “The Prom,” for arch self-parody. Miranda should have her underlings shaking in their Louboutin boots. Here, everyone stands pretty tall.Has Wetherhead’s book melted Miranda or does Leavel lack the necessary frost? Both, really. The musical gifts her a late confessional, “Stay On Top.” Because if you have a voice like Leavel’s, of course you should showcase it. But Miranda isn’t built for self-reflection. And “Stay On Top” doesn’t offer much anyway.Curiously, the character the musical represents most fully isn’t uncertain Andy or meanie Miranda, but cucumber-cool Nigel. In addition to “Dress Your Way Up,” the musical’s best number, he also delivers the second act’s “Seen,” a poignant song about how fashion magazines succored him as a gay adolescent. Muñoz, a consummate performer, elevates both.The musical’s first act closes with its title song, a suggestion that the fashion world is a kind of inferno. “Hell is a runway,” the chorus sings (with a sound mix so muddy that I had to look up the lyrics later), “where the devil wears Prada.” But nothing in the show confirms this. The worst anguish Andy suffers? Her boss calls too often. “The Devil Wears Prada” isn’t as sumptuous as it should be or as bitingly incisive. If it wants a life beyond Chicago, it could use some alterations.The Devil Wears PradaThrough Aug. 21 at the James M. Nederlander Theater, Chicago; devilwearspradamusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. More

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      Interview: We go Late Night Fish(ing) with Shipwreck Theatre

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      Liam Alexandru on Camden Fringe bound play, Late Night Fish

      Shipwreck Productions’ Late Night Fish promises us more than a passing nod to Harold Pinters’ The Dumb Waiter, as a pair of ‘Waste Management experts’ head to the lakes to dispose of a package. We think we can all guess what that means!

      We’re always in the market for someone to help us dispose of any reviewers who don’t do what they are told though, so we thought we’d get along to meet up with Shipwreck’s Liam Alexandru to find out more about the play and whether they are looking for a little extra work, no questions asked.

      Shall we start with the most obvious; by “waste management business” can we safely assume the package is going to be about the size of a body, possibly wrapped up in a big rug?

      A BIG RUG! Why didn’t I think of that? I think it is absolutely safe to assume the package is large and the size of a body. Specifically, according to Tony, one of our two “disposal men”, this “package” is roughly 110kg’s and about 6 ft tall.

      The play’s inspired by Pinter’s’ The Dumb Waiter – for those of us unfamiliar with that story, what are the connections?

      So Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter follows two hitmen, Ben and Gus, as they sit waiting in a basement for the next “assignment” to reveal itself. A very Waiting for Godot-esque piece where the two pass their time with nonsensical chatter, mind games and trivial stories which, all the while, has a deeper, menacing undertone, all building up to the big twist at the end. We also get to learn so much and yet so little from our characters which really conflicts us on who we’re routing for. We read the script and were blown away and knew we had to do something with it. We took on those same points, leaning into the dialogue, menace and character intimacy but not forgetting those moments for a little bit of comedy and real-world chat.

      Are you big Pinter fans then? Is this your first foray into his work or has it featured in previous shows?

      We’ve certainly read and watched some of his impressive rep, but this is our first time playing with it. One of our niches at Shipwreck is we like to create new work inspired by great previous works, be it a homage, parody or somewhere in-between. Call it copying but, as they say, there’s no such thing as an original story anymore ha-ha.

      This originally started with our first two hander, Waiting for Mary (I’ll let you guess which play that’s inspired by) but rather than perform it we thought “well, what if those two characters were two stoner flatmates in London and all the nonsensical chatter comes from a modern, hazy brained place?” We essentially repeated this process with the Dumb Waiter but incorporating it with our love for the gangster genre.

      The Dumb Waiter takes place in a basement, are you moving your show to the lake then? Does this make the set quite easy, a nice rowing boat for the pair to sit and chat in?

      So originally this piece came from the amalgamation of several ideas, including performing a play entirely set on a rowboat. The intimacy and lack of exits that that scenario brings is fascinating and brings up a lot of truth in conversation simply because the characters cannot escape. However, does that look pleasing? Will an audience want to watch a 2D play as two characters bicker in a tight boat setting for 30 minutes? So, alongside our boat trip out onto the lake, we decided to add the dock and create, as with so many two handers, a little bubble universe where this story solely takes place. That brought plenty of comedic and menacing moments we could exploit. Taking difficulty aside, we wanted to ensure that, however we present and set the play, it should be easy to read and manoeuvrable. All I’ll say is thank God for pallets…

      There are plenty of gangster-based films and TV shows, but we don’t see so many on stage – what can we expect from your duo of Michael and Tony?

      I like to think you can take a lot of things away from this piece (a Dumbwaiter knock off being one, I’m prepping myself for “those” reviews) but this is absolutely a love letter to the gangster genre. This is a gangster story, first and foremost, with all the nuances, cliches and real-world facts. Not only are our two characters gangsters, who talk the talk and walk the walk, but they are themselves gangster film fans and refer to these films and the effect they have on gangster culture. We see our two killers discuss the likes of Scorsese and Tarantino, what’s fictional and what’s not, and making those links between the gangsters we think we know and the gangsters actually out there. And, of course, we couldn’t avoid the opportunity to throw in a few meta jokes here and there, take for example the character names, two of Pacino’s greatest gangster performances.

      The play has already had good success at previous festivals, has this allowed you to develop it further? How much has changed from those original outings?

      It really has and we’re so proud of the journey. This piece originally started as a recommendation after an amateur festival in the Midlands ibn 2018 where I immediately started scribbling down ideas. Then in 2020, just after we formed Shipwreck Productions but just before lockdown number one, we had a phone call from the same festival asking if we could bring something to the table after our success with Waiting for Mary. Ten days and countless gangster films later we had our original draft! That version went on to win several awards, including Best Play at the festival, and offer us our opportunity to publish the play and have it produced as an audioplay via The Grey Hill.

      The piece has very much stayed true to its original draft but ever since we’ve been developing it in small ways, via constructive feedback and adjudication, adding small moments and new gags until low and behold here we are, with our most recent version at the Camden Fringe!

      You’re playing at both Hen and Chickens and Canal Café, do you have to make adjustments for the different venues? Not tempted to take it outside Canal Café to, well, the canal?

      Ha-ha, all I’m going to say about the last part is we’ve looked at the legalities of going up and down the canal in a blow-up boat, three-piece suits, a body bag and a megaphone…

      Not really, we’ve performed the play now in a few different venues of various different sizes and requirements and really this piece is so adaptable, the staging looks complicated with its dual lake and dock setting but we’ve been able to make it work on large stages like the Albany in Coventry and smaller black box spaces. It’s just a case of finding the right layout for the right venue. Honestly speaking, a dream of ours for this piece would be to perform it site specific and play it out on and besides a real lake, I imagine it would ramp up the menace of the piece to 11. But that’s a performance for another day.

      Ok, just between us, if we send along a reviewer we might need to get rid of, how easy would it be to get Michael and Tony to add them to their workload for the evening? Would you do it in exchange for a 5-star review?

      I think as 5-star review would certainty tempt Michael and Tony into making two trips out onto the lake… but how easy it is on the other hand is another question. Without giving anything away, let’s just say disposing of a “package” isn’t as simple as it seems. For one, you need a boat…

      Our thanks to Liam for his time. We’ll be in touch about that disposal if we need it!

      You can catch Late Night Fish when it plays as part of Camden Fringe at the following venues:

      The Hen and Chickens Theatre, 13 & 14 AugustThe Canal Cafe Theatre, 17 – 19 August.

      Tickets for both venues are available here. More