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      Interview: Taking a short trip to Barcelona for Just Sayin’

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      Tina Zucco talks to us about new play, Just Sayin’

      Tina Zucco’s Just Sayin’ is heading to Islington’s The Hope Theatre as part of this year’s Camden Fringe. Yes, we know, Islington isn’t technically in Camden, but hey, it’s a growing festival, it needs all the space it can get! 

      The play follows Cat, new to Barcelona and eager to find love. But when she starts to do voluntary work in the homeless community, it makes her question what it is she really wants from life.

      It certainly looks to contain themes we’re always pleased to see covered, so we couldn’t resist the opportunity to grab some time with Tina and find out more.

      Lovely to meet you Tina – first things first, how much of you is there in your character Cat? Are you from Barcelona originally?

      Thank you so much for having me! It’s great having the chance to talk about Cat and Just Sayin’ in general because this show has been a part of my life for a year now and I’m so excited any time I get to share it with more people!

      I would say that Cat(erina) is 50% me, and 50% my best friend… Although I did live in Barcelona for a while, the character of Cat and her story was actually inspired by my best friend, an Italian girl, working in Barcelona, and volunteering with the homeless community there. But then, all of Cat’s flaws and quirks come from me, and she has some of my interests too, like the fact that she loves salsa dancing and watching Vampire Diaries is definitely something we have in common. 

      But Is London your home now? And do you still feel it is as much home now as when you first arrived, hope Brexit hasn’t affected your love of our wonderful city?

      London is my home and I love it! I’ve been in the UK for about 6 years now and I’ve had the chance to live in York, Manchester and now London! Brexit was a bit of a shock because the referendum happened just after I got accepted into university in the UK so I feared I wasn’t going to feel welcomed. But all of the wonderful people I met in England never made me feel unwanted, everyone is lovely and polite, which is one thing I love about the UK! But it is a bit saddening that other Italians now can’t just as easily move here and start a new life.

      Your new play is Just Sayin’ – what drew you to write a play that seems to be very much about homelessness? Is this a subject close to your heart?

      Like I mentioned earlier, this play is inspired by my best friend, Carlotta. She volunteers with a local Christian charity to help the homeless every Sunday, and when she started talking to me about it, her eyes had a wonderful spark in them, you could see how happy she was to be making a different in people’s lives, and how great she felt to be meeting all these different unique people every Sunday. 

      One day we were having a drink in Barcelona and one of the regulars that she sees quite often during her time with the charity came to talk to her, to catch up and ask for her help for a problem he was having, and I realised how she was actually building very personal relationships with many of them. That’s when I decided to start writing Just Sayin’. It actually had a working title of “Carlotta” for about 6 months.

      Did you do much research into the subject, do you think people aren’t aware of just how much of a problem homelessness is?

      Once I left Barcelona I still called Carlotta every Monday night. She would tell me about who she had met that week and the stories she’d heard. I started writing down everything she was saying. So that was the beginning of the research project. I wanted to make sure that all of the homeless characters Cat meets in her journey were real people and not just cliches.

      Needless to say, the more I would hear about these people the more I got into tackling the problem of homelessness in the UK. I found a director who was also active in helping the homeless. We then picked London and Brighton as the places to stage Just Sayin’ because both of these cities have an incredibly high percentage of homeless people.

      We don’t expect our play to change the world, but we do hope we can make a small difference, so we partnered with Beam who run individual fundraisers to help people get off the streets, and we’re fundraising for them on the days of our show, hoping to raise enough to help at least one person start a new life.

      It’s also about how your actions can make a difference in someone else’s life, is this something you’ve experienced. Is it more about the small things we do, or are you hoping people might think much bigger – such as going out to volunteer?

      I think it’s definitely about the little things. If we could just inspire our audience to be nice and kind, to acknowledge the people asking for help and honestly thinking is there anything I can do for them now? Like, maybe I don’t have change on me, but I’m going into Tesco, is there anything they need? Literally one smile can go a long way, so yeah, we can’t change the world, but we can try to change the mood of the people who inhabit it.

      What can we expect from the play, are you going to tug on the heartstrings or just planning to make us laugh?

      Well, I’m a massive fan of comedy. I think people remember things that make them laugh, so you can expect laughter for sure. But ultimately, we talk about some serious stuff, so there will be some heartfelt moments that will make our audience reflect, maybe even feel something they wouldn’t have expected to feel when coming into the theatre.

      Camden Fringe is looking very big and bold this year, how excited are you to be part of it, and are there any other shows you’ve got your eye on and hope to see?

      I am both excited and terrified to be part of the Camden Fringe this year. The thing I love the most about London is its theatre scene and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be part of it. But the competition is extremely high and I myself have a growing list of shows I want to watch! I’ll definitely start with Someone Else’s Shoes because it opens the festival and it’s put on by a group of young artists, which is something I always admire! Then I’ll catch Hooks and Hookups which is on the same days as me at the Hope Theatre. (You can listen to our interview with the creatives of Hoops and Hookups here.) One other show I would recommend is Blue Balloons Pink which is also at the Hope Theatre and I’ve had the pleasure to catch at the Brighton Fringe. It’s also a new piece of writing full of twists! 

      With so much to see, why should we make sure Just Sayin’ is on the top of the list of shows that should be seen at the festival this year then?

      All I’ll say is that if you’re looking for a new, fresh, one-woman show that will make you forget you’re in London and transport you to the magical Barcelona for one hour, then come watch Just Sayin’, and you will not be disappointed! 

      Honestly, I am so grateful I had female creatives such as Lara Cosmetatos, the director, and Siân Elissa and Tee, the producer and designer, working with me on Just Sayin’. They all brought something wonderful and unique to the team and the show, and we were all amazed when we were nominated for Best Play at the Brighton Fringe. It was the first time we were all working together and seeing the results, and the way our first audience reacted to the show, was really gratifying! 

      As always, our thanks to Tina for finding the time to chat to us about her play.

      You can catch Just Sayin’ at The Hope Theatre between 12 and 14 August at 9pm. Further information and tickets here.

      The show plays after Hoops and Hookups (7pm) so we do highly recommend a double bill! You can find out more about Hoops and Hookups in our recent podcast with the writers/ performers here.

      If you want to support Just Sayin’, they have a GoFundMe page here for donations. If you donate the price of a ticket you will receive a link with the professionally filmed performance of the show when it is available. More

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      Interview: Taking A Trip Through Time with Free School Lunch

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      Free School Lunch’s Aurelia Gage on her new play, All This Must Pass

      Free School Lunch impressed us last year with their Camden Fringe offering, Sisters Of Charity. They are back again at the Fringe this year with their brand new play All This Must Pass. The play looks an epic exploration through time as a woman tries to find how she came to be.

      It certainly sounds an ambitious and exciting endeavour, and you know we love ambitious and exciting new writing here at ET. So it felt a great time to get ourselves some Free School Lunch as we sat down to chat with Aurelia to ask her about the play.

      Book tickets here.

      The play promises to cover hundreds of years, how do you manage to squeeze so much into just an hour?

      Not even an hour: 55 minutes! I wish I was a talented enough writer to do that, but it has required a generous edit. All This Must Pass tells the story of one woman travelling through time and space to discover the people that made her – it is the ultimate family reunion and because of that, it’s very exclusive. We meet celebrated heroes, despised villains, and those who history doesn’t care to remember – but all of whom serve a purpose for our main character.

      What made you want to write a play spanning centuries?

      I wanted to write about people who would/could never be put together and have them all share the same stage. For me, it was the perfect way to explore all the faucets of one person and properly articulate how they could possibly experience such a life-changing event.

      And what is it that will bind all the moments in time together?

      Every person, every decision, every moment has led to the life of our main character. She is the thread that binds them together and they, through every decision (good and bad) have created her.

      The central theme of the play is the loss of a child during pregnancy, can you tell us a little more about this theme and why you wanted to explore it in this way?

      I’ve wanted to explore child loss in my writing for a long time. I couldn’t reconcile the fact that something was so common and yet endless testimonies create a picture of an ordeal people largely navigate alone. I recently lost my father; and the outpouring of love and support was incredible, but what do you do when you’re told “it’s just one of those things” and the world moves on without you? How do you share your grief with others? How do you grieve someone you never got to know? These questions crop up in a quarter of all pregnancies, and for our main character in All This Must Pass. She is left without a map to navigate her grief and so looks to her ancestors to share their strength, their pain, and to know them in a way she couldn’t know her child.   

      Last year’s Sisters of Charity was a very Irish based play, and All This Must Pass makes mention of the Potato Famine of Ireland – is there a strong Irish feel throughout?

      Irish identity crops up in a lot of my plays, Sisters of Charity in particular was a homage to the Irish women and children who were let down so badly by the Catholic Church. We get to spend some time in Ireland (and discover the best theme park on earth) in All This Must Pass but it’s one stop on a much more expansive journey through time and space.  

      Sisters Of Charity was a fantastic play, but very dark in its themes, is All This Must Pass going to follow a similar path? And how do you avoid things becoming too bleak?

      First of all, thank you! And yes, there’s no getting away from the darker themes in both my plays. My focus as a writer is to bring light to maligned or forgotten people, but the driving force behind that is the strength, joy and humour people can show in the darkest of times. All This Must Pass in a one-woman show performed by the phenomenal Aidan Morris. Aidan is an actor, dancer and stand-up comedian; the energy she brings to the stage is just incredible. It was important for me to have a living breathing character tell this story, not just a vessel for a trauma. And as much as this is a story of grief, it is also a story of love, laughter and a good old knees-up at a family reunion.  

      Reheasal images of Aidan Morris

      The play is on at Lion and Unicorn Theatre, how much has the venues support helped (or is helping) in getting this play ready?

      Honestly, Sisters of Charity and All This Must Pass wouldn’t have happened without The Lion and Unicorn or David Brady (Artistic Director of Proforca Theatre). In 2021 we were in the midst of a pandemic (and still are), the industry was on its knees, and I had never produced my own play. There wasn’t a question too stupid or a problem too big for the theatre and its team. For an early career theatre maker like me, David and his team really gave me a roadmap for a seemingly impossible task and the all-round support of some really good people.  

      All This Must Pass plays as part of Camden Fringe between 18 – 20 August at The Lion and Unicorn Theatre. Further information and bookings can be found here. More

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      The Times’s Theater Critic Reviews Stratford’s New Theater

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      The Stratford Festival in Ontario opened a glamorous new theater last month that prioritizes the theater itself, not just what surrounds it.Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, has just returned from the Stratford Festival in Ontario, where the 2022 season started with the opening of a new theater.Leaving aside the plays themselves, the most dramatic presences at the new Tom Patterson Theater may in fact be absences. The usual whir of swiveling lights and the endless whoosh of moving air that infiltrate most theaters are undetectable here. Likewise, the blackouts are fully black — just the kind of inky dark to set the mood for “Richard III,” the play that opened the glamorous new building at the Stratford Festival in June.I got a tour of the theater, which cost 72 million Canadian dollars, during a six-day, five-show visit last week. Greg Dougherty, the Patterson’s technical director, led me from the depths of the traps beneath the stage — useful for drownings, burials and the like — to the catwalks high above it. The various noise abatement measures, most notably air handlers that look like space capsules and take up a room the size of a playing field, reduce the ambient sound to 10 decibels, Dougherty told me, similar to that of a recording studio.That’s a lot of silence. I understood its real value at that evening’s “Richard III” performance, in which Colm Feore, as the title character, delivered the play’s famous first line — “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York” — in what he later told me had been a whisper. No need to project, let alone overact, here; I heard him as clearly as if he were sitting next to me.Next to me is not a place I would usually want to find the evil king — except for dramatic purposes. But that kind of intimacy is part of the inheritance of the new Patterson, built on the site of the old one, a building that had previously been a curling rink, a dance hall and a badminton club, with all the charm of a Quonset hut. Despite that, its long thrust stage was much beloved, at least by actors, bringing them uncommonly close to audiences. To create that intimacy, though, the 480 seats (575 when configured in the round) were so steeply raked that finding mine when I first saw shows there in 2017 felt like an Alpine event.By 2019, the old Patterson was gone. That summer, Antoni Cimolino, the festival’s artistic director, took me on quite a different tour, of a campus under construction. Though it was the only time I’ve worn a hard hat on the job, it wasn’t the only time I could have used one.Jesse Green, left, at the work site for the Stratford Festival’s new theater in 2019, with Antoni Cimolino, right.Andrew MirerThe building, then a skeleton, was already mammoth. The auditorium, a kind of enclosed fortress, was beginning to take shape, but the surrounding public foyers and event facilities, which mimic the eddies and bends of the Avon River directly across Lakeside Drive, were as yet difficult to discern among the girders. I was concerned that, like so many new performance spaces built in the last half-century, the new Patterson would be blandly luxurious, deferring more to art donors than to art.I planned to find out in 2020, but by then the coronavirus pandemic had shut down almost all theater in North America, including Stratford. When I finally returned last week, I was wearing a mask instead of a hard hat. (Masks are strongly encouraged but not required.) I saw both shows running then at the Patterson — “Richard III” and “All’s Well That Ends Well” — and participated in five discussions and interviews in Lazaridis Hall, one of the event spaces. I admired the sensuous materiality of the undulating brass-and-glass facade, the riverine expanse of white oak floor, the roughness of the pale brick girdling the auditorium. I noted the whiz-bang electronic screens as well as the sparkling and seemingly infinite bathrooms.But those you can get anywhere. What makes the Patterson the best new theater I’ve seen in years is the clear prioritization of the theater itself, which sits like a treasured heirloom in a custom case. The silence and the dark are part of that, creating a plush space that is paradoxically full of emptiness, exerting a pressure of expectation as you sit in one of its 600 rust-colored seats. Watching a play there, you are always watching your fellow audience members as well, who sit across the thrust watching you. Because the seating is relatively compressed, you feel them, too.In an event at Lazaridis Hall on Saturday — part of what Stratford calls New York Times week at the festival — I talked to Mr. Cimolino and to Siamak Hariri of Hariri Pontarini Architects, the Toronto firm that designed the building. We of course nerded out on details like where the rippling glass had been obtained and how the sound was tuned so that no microphones are needed.Yet we kept returning to something more abstract: the seemingly opposing feelings of intimacy and community that theater as a human endeavor, and this theater in particular, were designed to encourage. It’s an approach that acknowledges the art form as a palimpsest: a text that has been revised and overwritten for thousands of years. (In that sense, the choice to open with “Richard III” was no accident; the play, in a production starring Alec Guinness, opened the first Stratford festival, in 1953.) If we go to the theater in part to commune with the ghosts of our human past, we also go to feel a deeper connection to people living and breathing right now, in the seats immediately to our right and left.Trans CanadaThis week’s Trans Canada section was compiled by Vjosa Isai, a news assistant for The New York Times in Canada.Laylit, or “the night of” in Arabic, is a party based in New York and Montreal that spotlights music from the Middle East and North Africa.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesDance floors in New York and Montreal are ground zero for Laylit parties, which highlight music from the Middle East and North Africa and their diaspora. Laylit, which translates from Arabic as “the night of,” was co-founded by a Montreal-based music duo from Lebanon.Sean Kelly, the Quebec-born writer who helped infuse sharp-edged humor in the National Lampoon magazine, has died at the age of 81.In Nunavut, the discoveries of fossils of giant fish that had evolved limbs for walking around 375 million years ago, and then reversed course to become swimmers again, are challenging one of the biggest myths of evolution.Last summer, the Canadian women’s soccer team enjoyed a thrilling victory over the U.S. national team. This week, their rivals made a comeback in the Concacaf Women’s Championship final.Kinkcorn. Confloption. Sish ice, slob ice, nish ice. Duckish. You’ll find these words in “The Dictionary of Newfoundland English,” and if you happen to be traveling there, check out these book recommendations from a local author, Michael Crummey.In Ontario, the Shaw Festival is another draw for theatergoers besides Stratford. Here’s a preview of the ambitious reboot of the play “Gaslight.”Inflation in Canada has hit 8.1 percent, according to Statistics Canada, the national census agency, and is climbing at the fastest pace since 1983. Central banks in the U.S., Europe, Canada and parts of Asia are rapidly lifting interest rates to try to bring inflation under control.Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The New York Times. His latest book, “Shy,” with and about the composer Mary Rodgers, will be published this fall. Follow him on Twitter at @JesseKGreen.How are we doing?We’re eager to hear your thoughts about this newsletter and events in Canada in general. Please send them to nytcanada@nytimes.com.Like this email?Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here. More

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      ‘Cannabis!’ Review: Preaching to the Partaking Choir

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      This vaudevillian show at La MaMa in Manhattan is like a party where weed is the guest of honor, thrown by ardent, uncritical hosts.The reminder takes up only a single line of small print in the program, but it’s the kind of rule that doesn’t usually need spelling out: “No smoking permitted inside the venue.”“Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville” knows its crowd. A music- and dance-filled celebration of marijuana, it belongs — no question — to downtown theater’s cherished tradition of weird art. Inside the doors of the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa in Manhattan’s East Village, audience members are enveloped in a thick cloud that’s really just theatrical haze, not a pot-smoke fug. But it does the trick, visually if not aromatically, of establishing the atmosphere.Created by Grace Galu, a magnetic, powerhouse vocalist whose character here is called Sativa Diva, and Baba Israel, who conceived the show and serves as its Magical Mystical M.C., “Cannabis!” is like a party where weed is the guest of honor, thrown by hosts whose ardent, uncritical devotion is about pleasure but also politics. Because as much as this experience allows you to get a little soft-focus while the entertainment swirls, there’s no missing its call to activism.“Tonight is for anyone who carries a felony on their back for smoking, growing or distributing a flower,” Israel says at the top of the show. A few moments later, he adds: “Tonight is for my mother, who has dementia, whose morning tincture turns tantrums into a Bob Marley shuffle.”Produced by Here and inspired by Martin A. Lee’s 2012 book “Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana,” the show is built around a call-to-action American history lesson that ties hostility toward the drug to racism in the culture. Yet “Cannabis!,” whose excellent performers include the hip-hop-jazz collective Soul Inscribed and members of the dance company Urban Bush Women, is indeed a vaudeville. Directed by Talvin Wilks and Israel, it occasionally gives in to the stoner tendency toward shagginess but is in many ways quite sharp.Lighted by Tuce Yasak, with a multilevel checkerboard stage and a mammoth marijuana leaf suspended glittering above, the set (by Nic Benacerraf) makes uncommonly elegant use of the theater’s cavernous space, employing a diptych of projection screens as the backdrop. It’s there that we see the video (by David Bengali) that seamlessly complements the narrative we hear in song and spoken word, as Sativa Diva’s glamorous, vegetal-green costume (by Kate Fry) evolves piece by piece through the decades.Louis Armstrong’s affinity for marijuana gets its own chunk of the performance, as do the 1960s. The show also revisits the emergence of medical marijuana as a compassionate response to the AIDS epidemic, and makes a heartbroken case for legalization in the song “No More Drug War,” about a mother and her military veteran son, whose marijuana use lands him in jail. (Galu, who composed the show’s original music, is also its music director.)Grace Galu, center, cocreated the show and composed its original music. The show is a call-to-action American history lesson that ties hostility toward the drug to racism in the culture.Maria Baranova“Cannabis!” has a whole flock of dancer-choreographers: Chanon Judson, Courtney Cook, Mame Diarra (Samantha) Speis, Twice Light and Tatiana Barber. Yet that abundance seems right for a tribute to a plant that can change the way that people feel in their bodies, alleviating pain and allowing bliss.In its interrogation of American hostility to marijuana, though, the show never acknowledges any danger associated with it, even as high THC levels can make cannabis products extremely potent. This is an ill-advised omission. Plenty of drugs come with asterisks, after all. But if “Cannabis!” is unlikely to make converts of skeptics, it’s not only for zealots.This is at heart a gentle show, never more so than when we see projected the beguiling image of a beautiful, gracefully dancing old woman. This is Israel’s mother, Pamela Mayo Israel, once a member of the avant-garde downtown company the Living Theater, now ailing and taking those tinctures that her son gives her.Also gentle: the palpable pleasure that ensues, at the end of the show’s first half, when audience members are invited to come down and join the cast in dancing. The night I saw it, there was zero awkwardness — just a mass of people moving joyfully in their bodies, under that giant leaf.Cannabis! A Viper VaudevilleThrough July 31 at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Review: ‘The Kite Runner’ Trips From Page to Stage

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      Amir Arison stars as a guilt-ridden Afghan refugee brooding over a childhood friendship in a stiff adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel.Unsurprisingly, the most memorable image in “The Kite Runner,” which opened at the Helen Hayes Theater on Thursday night, is of the kites. They’re miniature, attached to thin poles that several actors wave, white tissue-paper flitting, birdlike, over their heads. The paper crinkles as the kites part the air with a soft swish.If only the rest of this stiff production, adapted by Matthew Spangler from the popular 2003 novel by Khaled Hosseini, exuded such elegance.A redemption story about an unlikable — sometimes downright despicable — protagonist, “The Kite Runner” opens in 2001, with Amir (Amir Arison), a Pashtun Afghan who explains that a cowardly decision he made at 12 years old shaped the person he is today.He doesn’t tell us what it was immediately; he steps back in time to show us scenes of his life in Kabul, with his single father, Baba (Faran Tahir); their servant Ali (Evan Zes), a member of the oppressed and harassed Hazara minority group; and Ali’s son, Hassan (Eric Sirakian). The rest of the cast of 13 fills in as other figures in Amir’s life, including his future wife, Russian soldiers, and various nameless characters from the Afghan community on both sides of the world.Arison (who plays the preteen Amir as well throughout) reads to the illiterate Hassan, though not without mocking him for it. He lets Hassan take the fall when they get in trouble. Yet Hassan faithfully partners with Amir in a competitive game where kite owners maneuver and use coated or sharpened strings to cut their competitors out of the sky; runners chase and catch the fallen kites as a prize.Reporting From AfghanistanInside the Fall of Kabul: ​The Taliban took the Afghan capital with a speed that shocked the world. Our reporter and photographer witnessed it.On Patrol: A group of Times journalists spent 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul. Here is what they saw.Face to Face: ​​A Times reporter who served as a Marine in Afghanistan returned to interview a Taliban commander he once fought.A Photographer’s Journal: A look at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, chronicled through one Times photographer’s lens.When Amir fails to stop an act of violence against Hassan, the boys’ friendship is irreparably damaged. Hassan never truly leaves Amir, though; he carries the guilt to America, to which he and Baba escape after Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan ushers in the vicious regime of the Taliban. After finding love and a successful career, Amir eventually returns to his homeland to redeem himself from his past transgressions.“The Kite Runner” was first staged in 2007 at San Jose State University, and went on to play throughout England, eventually on the West End. For the Broadway engagement, producers turned to Arison, an Off Broadway regular who had a supporting role for nearly a decade on NBC’s “The Blacklist.”Under Giles Croft’s direction, Arison’s Broadway debut proves spotty. He recites his opening lines with the stiffness of a child delivering a book report, and never totally eases into the role.The part would be tough work for any actor; Amir is onstage for the entire show, and the transitions between his middle-aged and younger selves, some three decades apart, require the kind of gymnastics that not every performer can stick.Not to mention the challenge of the character himself: a cowardly, insecure boy who becomes a cowardly, insecure man despite a childhood bolstered by the unfaltering love and loyalty of his friend Hassan, played with heartbreaking innocence by Sirakian.Eric Sirakian (in red) is heartbreaking as the childhood friend of Arison’s Amir in the play, which Matthew Spangler adapted from the novel.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIt’s easier in the novel to ride the twists and turns of Amir’s journey, even as he leaves Hassan behind in the first third of the story. Onstage the play shuffles along, and it’s hard to stay invested in this unpalatable hero with Hassan in the rearview mirror.For those who haven’t read “The Kite Runner” or seen the 2007 film, I won’t spoil the violent scene that causes the rift between the two friends, but it’s one that feels jarring in what otherwise reads like a tidy parable. Gasps of surprise from the audience signaled the sudden shock of real-world horror.Again, part of that isn’t negotiable, since the emotionally pandering novel is the show’s DNA. But Croft’s mechanical direction often plays up the pathos, as when a character dies too dramatically, or in a scene where Amir prays for a loved one to be spared. Then there’s the phlegm-inducing serving of cheese, when Amir finds himself in 1981 San Francisco: Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” plays as characters in gaudy ’80s duds traipse across the stage throwing out random decade-appropriate nouns like “Prince,” “Pac-Man” and “Darth Vader.”For “The Kite Runner” to work, the boys’ nemesis needs to be formidable, but Spangler’s script diminishes Assef (Amir Malaklou), the childhood bully. He is no longer the novel’s sociopathic neo-Nazi, but more of an antagonist from an after-school special — with a shaky accent.Speaking of shaky, Barney George’s set design — which includes a stage-length vert ramp seemingly borrowed from a skate park and jagged rectangular panels lined up along the back wall — is frustratingly ambiguous. Two giant fabric sails occasionally descend from on high, resembling wings of a kite, but they are mostly distracting.William Simpson’s projection design provides a dose of whimsy, however, the watercolor renderings of a kite-filled sky or a pomegranate tree lending a fanciful storybook quality to the script.Legitimacy is always a tricky question when it comes to productions about people of color. That a story about the struggles of Afghans over the course of nearly three decades is on Broadway is a feat in itself, as is the cast of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent.Chunks of dialogue are spoken in a Farsi dialect (all credit to the cultural adviser and script consultant Humaira Ghilzai) and much of the underscoring features the tuneful plinks and thumps of the tabla player Salar Nader, a steady presence on one side of the stage and one of the production’s gems. (Jonathan Girling wrote the evocative music.)Still, “The Kite Runner” is not nearly as rich as the spate of Off Broadway plays that have recently explored the individual and national losses faced by Iran and Afghanistan, including Sylvia Khoury’s “Selling Kabul” and Sanaz Toossi’s “English” and “Wish You Were Here.” As Off Broadway has often proved, there are more compelling ways to tell a story.The Kite Runner Through Oct. 30 at the Hayes Theater, Manhattan; thekiterunnerbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Putin, Chekhov and the Theater of Despair

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      In London, a new play about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and a revival of “The Seagull” explore undercurrents of pain.LONDON — There’s a chill in the air at the Almeida Theater, notwithstanding the record-breaking heat here. That drop in temperature comes from the coolly unnerving “Patriots,” a new drama whose look at power politics in Russia over the last quarter-century induces a shiver at despotism’s rise.The gripping production, directed by Rupert Goold, runs through Aug. 20.Written by Peter Morgan (“The Crown,” “Frost/Nixon”), “Patriots” surveys the sad, shortened life of Boris Berezovsky, the brainiac billionaire who died in 2013, age 67, in political exile in London. An inquest into Berezovsky’s mysterious death returned an unusual “open verdict,” but on this occasion, it is unequivocally presented as a suicide: The play ends with this balding man, bereft of authority, preparing to end his life.An academic whiz-turned-oligarch who expedited the rise of the younger Vladimir V. Putin, Berezovsky later fell out with the onetime ally who enlarged his power base, according to the play, with promises of “liberalizing Russia,” yet proceeded to do anything but.Morgan introduces Berezovsky, age 9, as a math prodigy whose mother hoped he might become a doctor. (A gleaming-eyed Tom Hollander plays the role throughout.) From there, we move forward 40 years to find Berezovsky an integral member of Russia’s moneyed elite welcoming to his office an obsequious Putin, then deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.“Respected Mr. Berezovsky,” says an initially indrawn, ferret-like Putin, “one would have to live on another planet not to know you!” But it isn’t long before Putin has changed his tune, and his tone, as he rises from prime minister to president and consolidates power around himself. In one notably effective wordless scene, Putin tries out poses in front of a mirror to see which makes him look most impressive. His earlier hesitancy has given way to a man in love with his own heroism.Berezovsky looks on at so dramatic a change in character appalled, urging the former K.G.B. operative to “know your place.” But Putin by this point simply won’t be sidelined. And besides, reasons Putin, why hold your enemies close when they can just as easily be destroyed?Tom Hollander as Boris Berezovsky in “Patriots.”Marc BrennerGoold, the director, dealt with a different headline-maker at the Old Vic this spring in “The 47th,” which imagined Donald J. Trump in the run-up to the next presidential election. Goold is in better company this time: “Patriots” is a richer, less fanciful play, with grim resonances for today. Although Morgan rightly leaves it to the audience to make the connection, you can draw a line between the glorious empire Putin yearns for in the play and his ongoing attack on Ukraine.In one of the performances of the year, Will Keen, as the Russian leader, astonishes throughout, bringing his character to agitated, unpredictable life. His early fawning in Berezovsky’s presence gives way to an icy rejection that finds its fullest expression when his onetime mentor writes as a fellow patriot requesting permission to come home to Russia. Putin dictates a reply, then tells his secretary to rip the letter up: Berezovsky, Putin concludes, “is not worth it.”Hollander impresses, too, as he did in a dazzling star turn in “Travesties,” which won the actor a 2018 Tony nomination — two talky plays requiring an actor at home with reams of language. His character is both a quick-tempered womanizer, and too naïve to realize the young Putin’s potential for authoritarian misrule.Widening the play’s scope yet further is the Russian president’s friend, the oligarch Roman Abramovich (the excellent Luke Thallon), who battles Berezovsky over ownership of the oil company Sibneft. That case, which came to trial in London in 2012, plays out here as a resounding defeat for Berezovsky that only amplifies his psychic distress. Alexander Litvinenko (Jamael Westman, a former leading man in “Hamilton”), the Putin critic who was poisoned in 2006, shows up, too, as the “most honorable” of dissidents (or so Morgan maintains): a political casualty wreathed in glory that the sorrowful Berezovsky never knew.There’s an aspect of bravery, you feel, in writing “Patriots” at all while Putin is on the march. (That said, like Trump with “The 47th,” it’s possible these men’s egos would thrive on the attention.) In the days after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, orchestras, concert halls and opera houses pulled Russian works from their stages, and it looked as if it might no longer be allowable to perform the Russian repertory in the West; overseas trips by the Bolshoi Ballet, among other storied Russian arts companies, were canceled, as well.Emilia Clarke, second from right, in Anya Reiss’s interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” directed by Jamie Lloyd at the Harold Pinter Theater.Marc BrennerSo it’s a relief to welcome a Russian classic, “The Seagull,” first presented in 1896 by Anton Chekhov, who died nearly a half-century before Putin was even born. That this first of Chekhov’s four great plays ends, as does “Patriots,” with a suicide is an intriguing coincidence that also points to the undercurrents of pain that inform both plays.Performed barefoot and in modern dress, Jamie Lloyd’s enthralling production, at the Harold Pinter Theater through Sept. 10, furthers the stripped-back approach to the classics he brought to a recent “Cyrano de Bergerac” that was acclaimed in New York and London.Just as that play dispensed with a fake nose for its title character, this “Seagull,” seen here in Anya Reiss’s 2012 version, never features the wounded bird of the title onstage. Doing without props of any kind, the cast members, headed by the “Game of Thrones” alumna Emilia Clarke in a terrific West End debut, deliver the play seated on green plastic chairs and boxed in by chipboard; they speak with a quiet intensity, as though we were eavesdropping on the characters’ innermost thoughts. Some will be exasperated by the approach, but I was riveted from the first hushed utterance to the last.Like “Patriots,” this “Seagull” draws from its own well of grief, even if the world of writers and actresses in Chekhov’s play is a long way from Morgan’s power-brokers and politicos. Lloyd’s ensemble communicates the shifting affections of a quietly devastating play that leaves you transfixed by the theatrical potency of despair.Patriots. Directed by Rupert Goold. Almeida Theater, through Aug. 20.The Seagull. Directed by Jamie Lloyd. Harold Pinter Theater, through Sept. 10; in cinemas Nov. 3. More

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      A Bold Concert of Songs and a Potent Play Leave Audiences Abuzz

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      At the Williamstown Theater Festival, Daniel Fish’s “Most Happy in Concert” confounds and Anna Ouyang Moench’s “Man of God” raises its own question.WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Saturday matinee of “Most Happy in Concert” had just let out at the Williamstown Theater Festival, and grumbling disgruntlement hung in the air, along with surprised puzzlement.“Was there supposed to be a story involved in that?” a woman asked her companions, on a patio outside the ’62 Center for Theater & Dance at Williams College.No, ma’am, evidently there was not. Or if there was, it isn’t the story that Frank Loesser tells in his 1956 musical “The Most Happy Fella,” about the romance between the unhandsome middle-aged Tony and the waitress Rosabella. To be fair, no one promised that it would be. This is not the musical but rather a 70-minute program of songs (and song fragments) from the score. And it may leave you, as it’s left me, humming those tunes for days. This, though, is no friendly, pattering cabaret.Conceived and directed by Daniel Fish, this fast and busy show on the festival’s main stage (through July 31) is far more aggressively experimental than the sexy, bloody reboot of “Oklahoma!” that he put on Broadway with its book intact. That production was so conscious of the audience’s presence that intermission featured a communal meal of chili and cornbread. Granted, Fish wanted ultimately to implicate us in the American culture of gun violence that’s at the core of that show. But it mattered that we were there.“Most Happy in Concert,” whose fella-free cast of seven includes two terrific veterans of Fish’s “Oklahoma!,” Mary Testa and Mallory Portnoy, is a starkly different creature: aurally rich and gorgeous, visually austere and glamorous — and utterly aloof from its audience.It’s not just that one song bleeds into the next with no pause for breath, let alone applause. It’s that from the opening number, “Ooh! My Feet!,” which the actors perform in a remote corner way upstage, there is the strange, shrugging sense that this production needs nothing from us, and would hurtle right along even if no one were watching from the auditorium. Maybe that will change in future iterations, as Fish gets closer to solving the show’s mysteries. For now, it’s a real obstacle.From left: Maya Lagerstam, Erin Markey, April Matthis, Tina Fabrique and Testa in Fish’s minimally staged production. Emilio MadridThe trouble isn’t an absence of artistry, and it certainly isn’t the cast, which also includes Tina Fabrique, April Matthis, Erin Markey, Maya Lagerstam and Kiena Williams. Songs like “Somebody, Somewhere” and “Big D” are lovely, and Fabrique makes every second of “Young People” entirely her own. The sole case that this concert unambiguously makes is that someone needs to hand Fabrique a big, juicy role in a full-on musical as soon as humanly possible.But any larger point is lost. What does it mean to take the girl-watching harmonies of “Standing on the Corner” out of the mouths of men and put them into the mouths of these actors? Unclear. Given that no one is playing a character from the musical, what is the actors’ relationship to one another meant to be? Ditto. Fish has uprooted these songs from their original context without planting them in a solid new one. (Music arrangements are by Daniel Kluger and Nathan Koci, vocal arrangements by Koci and Fish, orchestrations by Kluger. The music director is Sean Peter Forte.)On a set by Amy Rubin whose main feature is a kinetic curtain of golden fringe that we see stagehands lower so it puddles on the floor and raise so it spins in the air, Fish seems more interested in exploring architectural space and the geometry of bodies within it than he is in communicating with audience members. Who, depending on where they’re sitting, can’t necessarily see the parts of the show happening in the wings.Is this chilly production — which boasts choreography by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the Urban Bush Women founder, but is hardly rife with dance — an album in three dimensions? Is it a music video? As striking as “Most Happy” is to look at (lighting is by Thomas Dunn, costumes are by Terese Wadden), it feels like something less alive than theater, and less shared.In a Q. and A. in the digital program, Fish says that the show — seen in an earlier version last year at Bard SummerScape, with many design elements not yet in place — is ideally “a proposition or a provocation to the audience that asks ‘What happens when this person sings this song in this space with these people?’”It’s an interesting question, but he doesn’t help us to hazard a guess. He is provoking his spectators, absolutely, but to what end?From left, Erin Rae Li, Ji-young Yoo, Shirley Chen and Emma Galbraith as high school students on a mission trip to Bangkok in “Man of God.”Stephanie BergerNext door on Williamstown’s smaller Nikos Stage, Anna Ouyang Moench’s “Man of God” (through Friday) builds and builds, bringing its audience along on an unsettling, darkly comic ride. Not that a plot summary suggests hilarity.A pastor (Albert Park) has taken four high school girls from his California church on a mission trip to Bangkok. He has also hidden a camera in their bathroom, the discovery of which, as the play begins, throws the teenagers into crisis — inciting some of them into thoughts of murdering this supposedly holy man who took such advantage of their trust.“If you read the Bible,” one says, “it’s full of examples. People get killed for a lot less.”At 15 and 16, the girls have little in common beyond their church. Jen (Emma Galbraith) is a brainy, ambitious feminist; Mimi (Erin Rae Li) is a knee-jerk rebel with a fondness for four-letter words. Samantha (Shirley Chen at the performance I saw) is naïve but more intelligent than the others give her credit for, while Kyung-Hwa (Helen J Shen, who took over the role on July 16, the day I saw the show) is deeply conservative, keen to give the pastor the benefit of the doubt.Directed by Maggie Burrows on a messily lived-in hotel room set by Se Hyun Oh, “Man of God” could use some tightening, in both text and performance. But it’s a play whose potency accumulates as it balances ordinary adolescent bickering with stomach-dropping realizations. We see the girls’ illusions crumble as they consider the common ground between lurid sexual exploitation and quieter, more insidious predation.It’s a smart and thoughtful play, with a wordless, minutes-long penultimate scene that’s a tour de force of tension: the girls packing their suitcases to go home, radiating fury and betrayal. And the revenge fantasies that lead up to it? They’re lots more fun than contemplated homicide ought to be.All of which sparks its own kind of post-show chatter — people heading to their cars, eagerly asking one another: “Would you have killed him?”Man of GodThrough July 22 on the Nikos Stage, Williamstown Theater Festival, Williamstown, Mass.; wtfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.Most Happy in ConcertThrough July 31 on the Main Stage, Williamstown Theater Festival, Williamstown, Mass.; wtfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      An Immersive ‘Next to Normal’ Debuts in Barcelona

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      The Broadway musical and its Tony-winning star, Alice Ripley, return to the stage in this condensed and deconstructed production.BARCELONA, Spain — When Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey began writing their 2008 rock musical, “Next to Normal,” they wanted to create a piece in which, according to Yorkey, they could “bring the audience into the mind of the main character.” That character, Diana Goodman, is a suburban wife and mother with bipolar disorder who grapples with the harrowing symptoms of her mental illness while trying to maintain a functional life.The emotional musical not only won acclaim — it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010 — but also resonated with theatergoers, playing on Broadway at the Booth Theater from 2009 to 2011. In his review, Ben Brantley wrote that the show “gives full weight to the confusion and ambivalence that afflict not only Diana but also everyone around her.”Now, audiences here are experiencing “Next to Normal” in a whole new way through an immersive, hourlong production that recently opened at the Festival Grec de Barcelona. This version, stripped of its props, sets and live orchestra, is being presented in a venue with an open-floor plan, a surround-sound system and 360-degree projections. The cast performs in English, with Spanish and Catalan supertitles, alongside the audience members, who sit in small cubes and become ghostlike witnesses sharing living quarters with the Goodman family.Alice Ripley, who originated the part of Diana, has returned to the role, and she shares the stage with Andy Señor Jr., who plays her husband, Dan; Lewis Edgar, who portrays her son, Gabriel; Jade Lauren, who plays her daughter, Nathalie; and Eloi Gómez, who is Nathalie’s love interest, Henry. But some of Ripley’s most thrilling exchanges occur with an actor thousands of miles away: Adam Pascal, who plays her “rock star” doctor, and who, in a nod to the pandemic, holds his sessions with her via Zoom. Ripley and Pascal rehearsed their scenes together in Florida (he is performing in the national tour of “Pretty Woman: The Musical”), and the recordings of his scenes make Pascal appear to be a larger-than-life figure, adding to the show’s surreal effect.“I would venture to say that I am now the first actor to perform simultaneously in the United States and Barcelona in two different shows at the same time,” Pascal wrote in an email.Ripley won a Tony Award for her role as a woman grappling with mental illness. The immersive show features wall-to-wall screens, with imagery of abstract landscapes meant to evoke Diana’s inner state. David Ruano“Next to Normal” is being produced by the Grec Festival, Layers of Reality and Pablo del Campo, who first saw the musical in 2010 and became obsessed with it. (At the time, he was working as the worldwide creative director of the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, splitting his time between London and New York.) Struck by Diana’s emotional ordeal, he said he felt the story needed to be translated into other languages and began working on a Spanish-language adaptation during layovers. A determined del Campo soon found himself pitching his idea directly to Yorkey, and not long after, the Spanish-language production, titled “Casi Normales,” was onstage in Buenos Aires, where it has been running for 10 years.But that wasn’t the end of del Campo’s involvement with “Next to Normal.” In early 2020, weeks before Covid-related lockdowns began, del Campo had what he called “a moment of electroshock” while visiting an artificial intelligence exhibition at the IDEAL Center d’Arts Digitals de Barcelona, which specializes in producing and showcasing digital arts projects. As he watched robots translate texts into visual displays, del Campo said he envisioned Diana in the number “Wish I Were Here,” in which she sings, “When the bolt of lightning crashes / and it burns right through my mind.”Before long, del Campo approached Kitt and Yorkey with his idea for an immersive production, and they — surprisingly — agreed to compress their two-act, nearly two-and-a-half-hour musical. Some scenes of dialogue were cut, but all the big musical numbers remain. The British director Simon Pittman was brought in to oversee the project, and Søren Christensen and Tatiana Halbach, who work under the name Desilence, created the visuals (including abstract landscapes meant to evoke Diana’s inner state). “There’s something to look at everywhere you turn,” Christensen said. “It’s like ‘Dogville’ meets a music video.”Reflecting on the richness of the production’s images, he added: “If movies are 4K, and really good-looking movies are 8K, this is up to four times that.”During a recent rehearsal at IDEAL, the cast was practicing “Who’s Crazy”/“My Psychopharmacologist and I,” a song about adjusting Diana’s medication. At first, the actors practiced their blocking in a completely empty space. Then the wall-to-wall screens lit up, and the actors were transported to a surrealistic world with ticking clocks, larger-than-life-size neurons floating like jellyfish, and pills resembling colorful raindrops falling from the sky. “We need more pills!” Halbach exclaimed at one point.The other element flooding the space was Ripley’s achingly emotional voice.“When we first made [Diana], I didn’t know what it was going to be — the audience watched me figuring it out live,” Ripley said, reflecting on the musical’s Off Broadway run at Second Stage Theater in 2008. She drew from that same feeling of adventure in tackling this new production, though she said she found the experience disorienting at first.“We actors are told never to give our backs to the audience,” she said, “and here all of those rules are gone.”The team behind the immersive production figured it was a no-brainer to bring back Ripley, who won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Diana, even in the wake of a 2021 report in The Daily Beast in which she was accused of “having sexual conversations with a girl as young as 13 and puppeteering a cult-ish, obsessive fan base of vulnerable youngsters.” Ripley later denied the accusations in a statement to The New York Post’s Page Six. “It is a misinterpretation of my actions to say I manipulated anyone, and more shockingly, that there was abuse,” she wrote in a statement.During a break from rehearsals last month, Ripley said she had no further comment about the accusations.Musical purists might clutch their pearls at the idea of a beloved Broadway show being deconstructed, but, as Pittman put it, “We’re doing a ‘Next to Normal.’” And Barcelona might just be the perfect locale for this experiment. After all, it’s the city of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, a towering basilica that’s been under construction since 1882 and a reminder that true masterworks can sometimes never truly be finished.Ripley, seated center, with from left: Lewis Edgar, Jade Lauren and Andy Señor Jr.David RuanoFor Pittman, directing one of his biggest shows to date felt like a throwback to his Fringe days in Edinburgh, which began in 2005, when he received rave reviews for his direction of “Hospitals and Other Buildings That Catch Fire.”“It’s like being in the underbelly,” he said, before adding: “I’ve never directed a show where you’re both building the process and the venue,” referring to the new technology that was installed at IDEAL to satisfy the production’s needs. (According to del Campo, the show’s budget is close to $1.2 million.)It’s been nearly 15 years since Ripley first inhabited the character of Diana. “Playing Diana is definitely more fun than it’s ever been,” Ripley said of her role in the production, which runs through Aug. 14. “I like to use my whole body to tell the story, and now I know people will be watching my hands or my heels or something.”She added: “I have gone through hell and back since I last played Diana,” referring to life-altering events like the death of her parents and changes in her body and her voice, “but this feels incredibly liberating. We come to the theater to be impacted like that, and to make an impact ourselves.” More