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      ‘Heart’ Review: First a Starter Marriage, Then Real Love

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      In her new autobiographical solo play, the actress Jade Anouka recounts the joys and fears of falling for a woman after her marriage to a man ends.At 24, the actress and writer Jade Anouka got married. Had it been a movie, the first dance would have been set ominously to the theme from “Jaws.” Before the wedding, Anouka dismissed the fact that her fiancé had bought her a ring that did not fit. At 28, she got divorced.That relationship sounds like it had its share of drama — “he’s visited by the Beast,” Anouka says of her then-husband — but she evokes it only in passing in her new autobiographical solo play, “Heart,” which is presented by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan. The brief marriage was only a preamble to what really matters: Anouka then fell in love with a woman. It was easy at first, even though she had never been in a lesbian relationship. Then it was hard. Then it was easy, or easier, again.The director Ola Ince’s production can be oddly heavy-handed at times, as when Anouka must climb up and down a very tall chair, perhaps meant to symbolize her being thrown back into romantic infancy, or love as a precarious balancing act. Mostly it is distracting. Jen Schriever’s expressive lighting design, on the other hand, does an incredible amount of effective work.Anouka occupies the stage with confident grace, despite the heavy-handed production.Trévon JamesIn truth, Anouka needs little, occupying the stage with confident grace as she toggles between naturalistic storytelling and a more rhythmic and poetic spoken-word flow.Obviously her love life’s unexpected turn has been a paradigm shift for her. But at this point, the coming-out tale is a well-trodden genre. Over the past decades, checkpoints have emerged, and obligatory scenes have surfaced, so venturing onto this familiar terrain in 2022 is tricky.“Heart” feels disconcertingly generic at times: Anouka, perhaps in an attempt to make the show feel more “universal,” tends to prefer bromides like “love is love” over the details that would have grounded the play.This starts with her job as an actress. She relates how she couldn’t bring herself to be open about her new relationship with a woman, fearing that it might impact her career. “I wanna stay working, and not just in gay roles,” she tells herself. “I don’t wanna be seen as different.”Putting aside the fact that nowadays stars as big as Kristen Stewart and Tessa Thompson can be openly queer and get cast as Princess Diana and Valkyrie in high-profile films, the complex relationship between an actor and an audience’s gaze deserves more scrutiny than Anouka gives it here.Oddly, this casually charismatic, effortlessly charming performer does not even reflect on her past roles that have scrambled gender expectations, like the powerful witch queen Ruta Skadi in the series “His Dark Materials.” Of her starring in Phyllida Lloyd’s hit Shakespeare trilogy, which was set in a women’s prison, Anouka simply says she lands “a good job, a dream role in a company I already love.” She accompanies those words with some brief shadowboxing, a reference to her Hotspur in “Henry IV.”Information about Anouka’s family is not forthcoming, either, which is especially frustrating since she demonstrates a quicksilver ability to bring her parents to life in a couple of brief scenes — in a classic move, for instance, her mother brings out the Bible when told of the new affair.As for the love interest, she remains frustratingly devoid of identifying details, as if she were in a witness protection program. Those who would like to know more are better off heading to YouTube to watch “Her & Her,” a lovely short film Anouka made on a smartphone in 2020, for the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine project. It is anchored in all the quotidian minutiae we so miss in the play.HeartThrough Aug. 14 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; hearttheplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Billy Crystal’s ‘Mr. Saturday Night’ Will End Its Broadway Run

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      The stage musical, adapted from a 1992 film, will close Labor Day weekend after five months at the Nederlander Theater.“Mr. Saturday Night,” Billy Crystal’s musical about an aging comedian trying to reboot his career, will end its Broadway run on Labor Day weekend.The production, which, like many during this challenging time on Broadway, has been facing soft sales at the box office, began previews March 29 and opened April 27 at the Nederlander Theater. The production announced Sunday evening that its final performance will take place on Sept. 4; at the time of its closing, it is expected to have had 28 previews and 116 regular performances.The musical is about a fictional comedian, Buddy Young Jr., whom Crystal has been portraying off and on for decades, first for sketches in HBO specials and on “Saturday Night Live,” and then in a 1992 Hollywood movie. The musical, like the film, was written by Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel; it features music by Jason Robert Brown and lyrics by Amanda Green, and is directed by John Rando.Crystal, 74, once again stars as Young, who is a septuagenarian insult comic, employing jokes honed in the Jewish resorts of the so-called Borscht Belt in the mid-20th-century Catskills, trying to reclaim his relevance in a world that has moved on. Crystal had previously succeeded on Broadway with a solo show, “700 Sundays,” that first opened in 2004.“Crystal is utterly in his element performing live,” wrote the critic Laura Collins-Hughes in a review of “Mr. Saturday Night” for The New York Times. “If you are a fan of his, or simply someone who has missed that kind of symbiosis between actor and audience, it’s a pleasure to watch.”The show was nominated for five Tony Awards, including for best musical, book and score as well as for the performances by Crystal and Shoshana Bean, who plays his daughter, but won none. Crystal and Bean both tested positive for the coronavirus in May, and a few performances were canceled; similar health challenges have plagued many shows in recent months.The show has generally been staged just seven times a week — one fewer than the industry standard of eight — and its box office grosses have been middling, and dropping this summer. During the week that ended July 10 — the most recent for which data is available — the show grossed $542,696 for a six-performance week, playing to houses that were 61 percent full, according to the Broadway League.The musical, with James L. Nederlander as lead producer, was capitalized for $10 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money has not been recouped.Crystal is turning from Broadway back to television — he plans next to star in an Apple+ series, “Before,” which he will also executive produce. More

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      Review: In ‘Between the Lines,’ Romance Is Thwarted by Reality

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      A new Off Broadway musical, based on the best-selling young adult novel by Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer, is uneven but sweet, our critic writes.What a tricky business adaptations are. A musical based on a novel can never be the same as its source material, and it isn’t meant to be. But throw out too many of the original elements and you leave an audience wondering how you lost your way.Case in point: “Between the Lines,” the new Off Broadway musical based on the best-selling young adult novel of the same name, about a teenage romance thwarted by stubborn reality. The novel’s heroine, Delilah, lives in the same world we do, while Oliver, the boy she loves, is a fairy-tale prince trapped inside a book, forced to perform a princess-rescuing adventure each time a reader opens it.He and the other characters spend their lives on perpetual standby, waiting to be called to speak their lines. They are actors, in other words, and everything that happens in Oliver’s world when the book is shut is essentially a backstage drama. But that theatrical setup, so vital to Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer’s 2012 novel, gets hardly a glance in the musical, directed by Jeff Calhoun (“Newsies”) at the Tony Kiser Theater.The musical rebalances the story to center Delilah and her troubles. She’s a little older here — 17, not 15 — so her sudden interest in a children’s book is even more peculiar, but then again, she’s lonely. At school, she’s the friendless new kid; at home, she argues with her overwhelmed mother and misses her father, who left them and has a new family. It’s no wonder that her strongest impulse is to lose herself in fantasy.When Oliver starts speaking to her, she thinks she’s imagining it, but he swiftly becomes the ideal boyfriend — if only she could figure out how to bring him into her world.With a book by Timothy Allen McDonald and an innocuous score by Elyssa Samsel and Kate Anderson, “Between the Lines” has significant assets in Arielle Jacobs, who brings a savvy-sweet appeal to Delilah, and Jake David Smith, who makes Oliver a comically good-hearted naïf.“I had a fight with my mom,” Delilah tells him one night, the fairy tale open to the only page where he’s alone and can speak freely. “She loses it every time I mention my dad.”“Ah!” Oliver says, all sympathy. “Was he taken by a dragon?”These two are adorable, and so is Frump (Will Burton), Oliver’s floppy-haired best friend — a human transformed by a curse into a dog, which does not help his chances with the princess he adores, Seraphima (cleverly played at the performance I saw by an understudy, Aubrey Matalon). Also winning: Wren Rivera as Jules, who in the novel is Delilah’s closest friend but here is a fellow outcast she’s only just met.From left, Vicki Lewis, Wren Rivera and Jerusha Cavazos in “Between the Lines.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesThese characters leave you wanting more of them, while the musical spends time on the fractured relationship between Delilah and her mother, Grace (Julia Murney), who is made to look unaccountably drab when all she needs to look is tired. (Costumes are by Gregg Barnes; wigs, hair and makeup are by J. Jared Janas.) Too much oxygen is also given to the popular kids at Delilah’s school, in what feels like an attempt to lure theater’s “Mean Girls” demographic.Jules, who is nonbinary here, isn’t permitted simply to be a cool person the way they might be in life. Instead, the show uses the character as an occasion for teachable moments about what it means to be nonbinary. It’s well intended but demeaning.The musical makes a big deal of Delilah rejecting the fairy-tale notion of happily ever after in favor of shaping a more deeply fulfilling life. But the script forces antediluvian clichés on some of the grown-up female characters. Ms. Winx (Vicki Lewis), the school librarian, is a tragic spinster, warning Delilah not to end up in the same situation; Mrs. Brown (Lewis), the chemistry teacher, “has more plastic in her than the ocean” and is evidently sleeping with the principal. When Queen Maureen (Murney), Oliver’s fairy-tale mother, and the Lady in Waiting (Lewis) trade insults, they go like this: “Spinster.” “Wench.” “Lush.”The musical does nail its very sweet ending, which is different from the ending of the novel. The show also gives Frump, the dog, a darling tap dance (choreography is by Paul McGill), and has fun with its book-lined set (by Tobin Ost).But one of the show’s most enchanting visual effects — tableaus of Oliver and other fairy-tale characters upstage, as if illustrated on the page — has an unfortunate flaw: Faintly behind the scrim, we can see the actors clambering into and out of position. It doesn’t seem deliberate, just distracting. (Lighting is by Jason Lyons; projections are by Caite Hevner.)For Delilah and Oliver to be together, it seems, they need to change the story he’s in so that they can follow their own narrative. “Between the Lines,” then, is an empowerment musical about using the agency you have to shape the existence you want.This show’s creators certainly have used their own agency to rewrite a story. Alas, for them and the audience, the results are decidedly mixed.Between the LinesThrough Oct. 2 at the Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan; betweenthelinesmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Medieval Times Employees Vote to Unionize in New Jersey

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      The horsemen, courtiers, stablehands and other performers at ye olde New Jersey tourist attraction formed a new kind of medieval guild when they voted to unionize.LYNDHURST, N.J. — In 11th-century Spain, a nobleman trying to put his hand up the queen’s skirt after a royal feast might be subjected to medieval torture methods.But at the Medieval Times just off Route 3, dealing with that kind of behavior has been accepted as part of the job for too long, said Monica Garza, one of several actresses who plays the queen at the dinner-and-a-tournament attraction.Garza said management made her feel like a “diva” for requesting additional security protocols after she pointed out increasingly bold behavior from guests. It was only after an incident in which a rowdy ticket holder got close to her throne and tried to shout into her microphone, Garza said, that management installed a chain to block access to her.The desire for bolstered security and other safety measures at the castle — where falling off horses can be part of the job description — was one reason that queens, knights, squires and stablehands at the Lyndhurst castle voted on Friday to unionize.The unionization effort, first reported by The Huffington Post, prevailed on Friday, when the employees voted, 26 to 11, to join the American Guild of Variety Artists. The medievalists will join a wide array of performers represented by the guild, including the Radio City Rockettes, some circus performers, and the character actors who perform at Disneyland — including Mulan and Aladdin, for example — in California.The employees are also seeking higher pay (Garza receives $20 per hour, and squires start at about $14 per hour), and for higher-ups to treat them more like skilled workers — trained stuntmen who perform intricate fights with lances, swords and axes, and experienced actors who do more than just read lines. Medieval Times management did not respond to requests for comment.A knight, Sinan Logan, with one of the horses backstage in 2007. Sylwia Kapuscinski for The New York Times“A huge point of the union is just basic respect,” said Garza, 25, a trained actor and self-described history nerd. “People will always exploit you when it’s something you love, because they know you’ll do it for nothing.”Many performers ultimately fall in love with the job, even if they didn’t initially dream of working at the concrete castle, with its vast hall of arms and seemingly endless supply of tomato bisque. The two-hour shows are staffed by a motley crew that includes an ex-Marine, an erstwhile Elton John backup singer, a musical theater student turned stuntman, a former zookeeper and an actor known for his voice work on the video game “Grand Theft Auto.”“We are a bunch of misfits,” laughs Sean Quigley, 33, the backup singer who is also a classically trained actor from London, giving him no need to fake a British accent. (The show is technically set in Spain, but New Jersey audiences aren’t picky.)Read More on Organized Labor in the U.S.Apple: Employees at a Baltimore-area Apple store voted to unionize, making it the first of the company’s 270-plus U.S. stores to do so. The result provides a foothold for a budding movement among Apple retail employees.Starbucks: When a Rhodes scholar joined Starbucks in 2020, none of the company’s 9,000 U.S. locations had a union. She hoped to change that by helping to unionize its stores in Buffalo. Improbably, she and her co-workers have far exceeded their goal.Amazon: A little-known independent union scored a stunning victory at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. But unlike at Starbucks, where organizing efforts spread in a matter of weeks, unionizing workers at Amazon has been a longer, messier slog.A Shrinking Movement: Although high-profile unionization efforts have dominated headlines recently, union membership has seen a decades-long decline in the United States.Taking orders from their corporate headquarters in Texas, the Lyndhurst shows are engineered to follow the same structure each night. Visitors here put on the same paper crowns and eat the same four-course meal as in Atlanta and Baltimore. The queens are paid to say the same lines as in the company’s other nine castles, where a reported 1.5 million guests visited last year.“Good nobles, welcome to the hall of my forefathers,” Garza says as she rides atop a white Andalusian into an arena of shrieking children wielding light-up swords.The queen hasn’t been in charge of the realm for long. The show had always cast a king as the lead, but about five years ago the company rewrote the script, putting a queen on the throne to accommodate requests for more substantive roles for women.The new story goes something like this: After inheriting the realm, the queen stages a tournament in which six knights on horseback compete for a vaunted title, but her power is threatened by a sleazy adviser who plots to marry her off. The dialogue is often drowned out by the aforementioned shrieks and the bustle of the “serfs and wenches” (Medieval Times-speak for waiters), who are known to end the evening with, “Cash or card, milady?”For the actors, who can perform the same script several times a week, year after year, the lines start to feel tattooed on their brains — so they find ways to entertain themselves.Paper crowns have long been de rigueur at the castle, as seen in 2007. Sylwia Kapuscinski for The New York Time“I’ll do a show where I’m pretending I’m secretly in love with the queen; I’ll do a show where I’m secretly in love with one of the knights,” said Quigley, who plays Lord Marshal, the show’s emcee. “In order to keep it fresh, you can tell a different story in your head.”Quigley, who auditioned for a job at Medieval Times after struggling to make a smooth transition between London’s West End and New York’s theater scene, also amuses himself by assuming various accents. He’s tried a cockney drawl, performed the whole show as if he were Sean Connery and put on a voice like Jon Snow from “Games of Thrones” — it was only when he tried doing the entire performance with a lisp that the sound department sent a runner to tell him to cut it out.For Christopher Lucas, the video-game voice actor who has also appeared in daytime soap operas, his improvisational frisson comes during a scene where, as the queen’s slimy adviser, he goes on and on about his adoration for oranges from Valencia in an oration that verges on the unhinged. For reasons that even Lucas can’t quite understand, the audience loves it, sometimes starting a chant — “Oranges! Oranges! Oranges!” — and bringing him fresh fruit on their next visit.“As a performer, these are the types of things you live for,” Lucas said.Ultimately, the enterprise of Medieval Times, which started in Spain and came to the United States in 1983, revolves around the knights, who parade around the arena on horseback before jousting and dueling for the queen.One of New Jersey’s most veteran knights, Antonio Sanchez, 31, had grown disillusioned with the idea of a long-term career in the U.S. Marines when he saw on Facebook that Medieval Times was hiring. On a whim in 2014, he drove to the Lyndhurst castle, walked into the horse stables, and soon, he was mucking out stalls and saddling up the steeds before showtime.“From the back of the stables, you could hear the crowd roaring,” Sanchez said, recalling the moment he started dreaming of becoming a knight.To get the job, no experience with horses is required. As knights’ apprentices, the men undergo hundreds of hours of training, learning both how to ride and how to roll off into the sand safely when rival knights “knock” them off.Employees at the castle in Lyndhurst, N.J., are now unionized.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“I don’t think I had ever been face to face with a horse before,” said Joe Devlin, 28, who started as a squire after he returned home from a stint as a touring musician and was in desperate need of a job.Protecting themselves with aluminum shields, the apprentices learn fight choreography that will gradually become committed to muscle memory.Still, accidents happen. The fact that the show is dependent on a stable of about two dozen horses adds an element of constant danger, said Purnell Thompson, a stablehand who was hired after losing his job taking care of farm animals at a local zoo. In an arena of boisterous revelers, there are many potential triggers for a horse to spook, including if audience members flout the rules and bang their metal plates and bowls onto the tables.Once, when Devlin was in training, he fractured his ankle learning how to jump off a horse. And Jonathan Beckas, a knight of two years, has dealt with an injured knee and two head injuries, including one that involved taking a wooden lance to the head. (Full-time workers receive health insurance.)One reason the knights are unionizing, said Beckas — a 27-year-old trained stuntman who is paid $21.50 per hour, up from $12 when he started working as a squire — is that they feel acutely underpaid considering the risks they take at work. “I am a knight, but I’m also a human,” he said.This isn’t the first time a union vote was held at this castle. There was a similar effort in 2006, where complaints largely centered around a lack of job security and fears that squires were becoming knights too quickly. That vote narrowly went against forming a union.Even before the vote on Friday’, employees said, they were seeing changes. After news of the unionization effort went public, garnering support from Gov. Phil Murphy, management installed a more robust barrier to her throne, Garza said.Now, the knights have bargaining power, and they plan on using it.“Being a knight is every little kid’s dream,” Sanchez said. “But I got older, and fun doesn’t pay the bills.” More

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      Review: In ‘Sex, Grift and Death,’ One-Acts That Test Perceptions

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      PTP/NYC, celebrating its 35th repertory season, returns to New York with short works by Steven Berkoff and Caryl Churchill.Two strangers on a park bench by the beach, partnering in a vicious dance of seduction. A woman from a family of swindlers, lying her way through dates with a wealthy new beau. Mourners at a funeral, and the deceased man himself, facing the frightening notion of the future and the afterlife to come.These scenarios, explored in three short, wily plays — “Lunch” (1983), by Steven Berkoff, and “Hot Fudge” (1989) and “Here We Go” (2015), by Caryl Churchill — create a triptych about the ways we love, lie or steal, and how we may act when the realities of the world don’t suit our expectations. Produced by PTP/NYC (Potomac Theater Project), the one-acts are being staged together at Atlantic Stage 2, where they recently opened under the title “Sex, Grift and Death.”In the first play, “Lunch,” directed by Richard Romagnoli for this New York premiere, a lonely salesman (Bill Army) spots a woman (Jackie Sanders) sitting on a park bench. The man approaches and begins an exchange — verbal but also physical, a pantomime of sex and combat — that reveals the primal urges that underlie courtship rituals.Army makes a virtue of his character’s sleaziness, so that even his outpouring of distasteful stream-of-consciousness thoughts, mixed with his desperate cajolery and odious asides, take on a kind of charm as he conspiratorially winks and nudges in the audience’s direction. Sanders’s character is aloof — calculating and willing to play the mating game but only on her terms. She’s both a player and an umpire, engaging him one moment and enforcing imaginary calls the next. Their verbal attacks feel like barbarous blows: “Your expressions are the buried side of a stone, moving with strange fetid life,” she fires at him. He describes her as a “lump of fornicatory stew.”A British playwright, director and actor, Berkoff is a kind of Shakespeare of invective, writing with a savagery of scorched earth warfare but also an alluring eloquence and imagination. A mad scramble of metaphors that activate the senses, Berkoff’s text for the two characters contains such indelicate imagery as “various succubi and incubi swarming” in a woman’s underwear, and boorish men in suits who “stream out like diarrhea” from their offices at 5 p.m.Berkoff’s script is written in a kind of speedy Morse code with asides, dashes and ellipses, all delivered in an unrelenting pace onstage. Under Romagnoli’s direction, the play moves like a speeding train — so fast that it throws you off, making it hard to get back onboard, which is unfortunate, given the compelling content and performances. Romagnoli incorporates physical theater — the kind of interpretive range of movement that characterizes much of Berkoff’s work — but even the more daring choreography and tableau, like the woman ripping open her shirt or straddling the man like a pony on a horse ranch, feels tame in comparison to the language.There’s a similar lack of punch in the Churchill works, both of which felt narratively incomplete and directionally imbalanced. “Hot Fudge,” the second play of the evening, begins with a family drinking in a pub and debating the best strategy for hustling banks out of money. Sonia (Molly Dorion) and her partner Matt (Gibson Grimm) lay out a convoluted scheme of deposits and withdrawals under fake names, but Sonia’s father, the cantankerous Charlie (Chris Marshall), praises the old tried-and-true stickup while his sloshed wife (Danielle Skraastad) makes crude jokes.This band of thieves is fascinating — enough to carry a whole play — and the perfect example of Churchill characters, who are often eccentric and inhabit unpredictable worlds. But there’s a bait and switch: The introduction of these relatives only for them to be forgotten doesn’t surprise as much as the shift to the character with the least amount of lines in that first scene — Sonia’s sister Ruby (Tara Giordano), who is thinking of getting out. Still, that doesn’t mean Ruby’s coming clean to her suitor, Colin (David Barlow), who thinks she’s the owner of a successful travel agency. Instead she doubles down on the lies as they go clubbing with his pretentious rich friends.From left: Chris Marshall, David Barlow, Tara Giordano, Teddy Best and Wynn McClenahan in Caryl Churchill’s “Hot Fudge,” directed by Cheryl Faraone.Stan BarouhThe last play, “Here We Go,” in its New York premiere, is similarly missing some bite. It begins at a funeral with several of the chatting mourners gossiping about petty matters and occasionally describing, in abrupt asides, when and how they’re going to die — whether in their sleep, by suicide or in a homicide. Then we hear from the dead man (Barlow, who gives a convincing performance, particularly in the ending), in a breathless existential monologue about life and death. The last scene, a solemn yet matter-of-fact couple of minutes of pure realism, is performed in total silence.As with “Hot Fudge,” this play seems at first to pull us toward the mourners, and their fascinating moments of prophecy, but quickly disposes of them. Cheryl Faraone, who directs both Churchill plays, tackles them with an even hand, though the tone and pacing could do a better job of helping to steer us to an understanding of each play’s priorities. As presented, it is hard to discern which moments and characters should most grab our attention. And Churchill’s overlapping dialogue could be smoothed out in some of the production’s choppier moments. (Under tighter direction it can move in a satisfying rhythm of interrupted sentences, outbursts and exclamations.)This production of short plays, which runs just under two hours, has hints of the remarkable among the more conventional moments. PTP/NYC (celebrating its 35th repertory season) goes for understatement here, aided by Mark Evancho’s minimal staging (one large projector screen; a bench and a lamppost in “Lunch”; and three smaller vertically hung projector screens, some stools and chairs for “Hot Fudge” and “Here We Go,” all on a stage roughly the size of a small New York City apartment living room).Still, the text could be enlivened, even challenged, with more forceful direction. A night of sensual play, manipulation, machinations and tragedy courtesy of two fiery playwrights like Berkoff and Churchill should never leave a room as cool as it does here.Sex, Grift and DeathThrough July 31 at Atlantic Stage 2, Manhattan; ptpnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. More

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      Avignon Festival Gets Its Buzz Back

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      With striking premieres in the main program and enchanting discoveries on the supplementary Fringe, the eminent event in European theater is flourishing after some difficult years.AVIGNON, France — After two years of pandemic-related disruption, the Avignon Festival is well and truly back. As the event, a longtime highlight on the European theater calendar, got underway here last week, there were familiar sights everywhere. All around the small city center, buzzing crowds filled the streets, while blasé regulars zigzagged between performers handing out fliers for some 1,570 Fringe productions.That’s 500 more shows than last year, when the open-access Fringe — known as “le Off,” and running in parallel with the Avignon Festival’s official program, “le In” — attempted to find its feet again after the 2020 edition was canceled. While coronavirus cases are rising again this month in France, even masks have been few and far between in the Avignon heat.In the “In” lineup, one world premiere captured the boisterous mood better than any other. “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop at the Belgian playhouse NTGent, is loud, preposterous and extremely entertaining — if a little troubling. It requires superhuman feats from a group of musicians, dressed like sports competitors, who are alternately cheered on and screamed down by performers cast as zealous fans, in front of a mumbling referee.A double bassist plays his instrument horizontally while doing ab crunches; one of his colleagues must jump up and down to reach a keyboard set above his head. A metronome sets the often wild tempo for the production’s “one song,” composed by Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, which the group performs on a loop. It could hardly be more literal: Its opening lines are “Run for your life/’Til you die.”The cast in “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival Near the end of the performance I saw, the physical extremes that Warlop pushes her cast to execute became a little too real. A violinist who plays on a high beam, sometimes balancing on one leg, became disoriented after jumping off the beam and hit her head hard against it. Despite the concussion risk, she climbed back up and kept going, her face tight with pain.When the show ended with much of the cast collapsed from exhaustion, the instant standing ovation for the show was more than earned, yet it also felt like “The Hunger Games” for theater aficionados. Still, it is a classic Avignon production: ripe for debate long into the night.Other productions from the official lineup were less invigorating, but together they made for a respectable lap of honor for the Avignon Festival’s departing artistic leader, the French writer and director Olivier Py. His eight-year tenure has felt muddled, with quarrels about the event’s dearth of female directors and several ill-conceived premieres on Avignon’s biggest stages.That was especially true of productions at the open-air Cour d’Honneur, a majestic stage inside the city’s Papal Palace. This summer, however, Py corrected course with a high-profile and thought-provoking show, Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Black Monk.”“The Black Monk” was first staged at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany, in January, yet much has happened since. A message against a red backdrop during the play’s curtain calls at Avignon — “Stop War” — was a reminder of the conflict in Ukraine and Serebrennikov’s status as a high-profile Russian dissident, who was put under house arrest in Moscow in 2017 and prevented from traveling outside his native country for five years.Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Black Monk.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival Not that war features in “The Black Monk,” which is based on an 1894 short story by Anton Chekhov. Despite its scale — four parts, a running time of nearly three hours and an expanded cast of 22 in Avignon — it is more personal than political in nature, and mainly focused on the descent of one man, Kovrin, into delusion and megalomania.Each part of the show focuses on a single character’s perspective. First there is Yegor, Kovrin’s childhood guardian; then Tanya, Yegor’s daughter, who marries Kovrin. He makes for a terrible husband, unsurprisingly, and in the third and fourth parts, his recurring hallucination — a black monk — takes over the stage as well as Kovrin’s mind.At the midway point, the structure starts to feel repetitive, and a few people walked out as a result. Yet Serebrennikov wisely pivots to a more operatic approach in the second half with a large chorus of singers and dancers, all in black monk’s cowls. The result aptly fills the expansive Cour d’Honneur stage and testifies to Serebrennikov’s obvious craft and passion for the characters, although the choreography remains too generic to fully carry the piece to its intended destination.On other stages, the mood was also bleak, as it often has been under Py. “Iphigenia,” staged at Avignon’s opera house, sneaked in a nod to Py’s successor, the Portuguese writer and director Thiago Rodrigues. The director, Anne Théron, opted for Rodrigues’s 2015 retelling of the myth of Iphigenia, sacrificed by the Greeks in exchange for the wind needed to carry them across the sea to Troy. It is a delicate, evocative version, told by characters who remember — or refuse to remember — the story even as it happens, as if the tragedy was bound to happen over and over again.Bashar Murkus’s “Milk.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon FestivalChild sacrifice also features in Bashar Murkus’s “Milk,” albeit in a very different context. Murkus, a young Palestinian director based in Haifa, took maternal milk as a central metaphor for this wordless work about mourning mothers. The women onstage cradle mannequins, slowly then frenetically; milk flows from the fake breasts they wear, ultimately filling the stage. The result is full of arresting tableaux, despite a subpar musical score.For vibrant, energetic theater, however, the best bet remains to delve into the motley Fringe offerings. This year, for instance, nine companies from the French island of Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, banded together to present an invigorating mini-series of shows.David Erudel and Lolita Tergémina in “The Game of Love and Chance,” directed by Tergémina.Sébastien MarchalOne company, Sakidi, is performing Marivaux’s “The Game of Love and Chance,” a classic 18th-century French comedy, in the Creole language spoken on Réunion (with subtitles). Réunion Creole is very rarely heard on French stages, and this vivacious production by Lolita Tergémina, at the Chapelle du Verbe Incarné theater, suggests that is a shame. Since the language is heavily influenced by French, a lot of it is understandable without the subtitles, and the translation is full of images that make Marivaux feel fresh again.New French plays often come to Avignon for a trial run, too, and at a theater called 11, the playwright Jean-Christophe Dollé has landed a hit with “Phone Me.” This well-crafted intergenerational story revolves around what now feels like a 20th-century artifact, the phone booth. There are three onstage along with three central characters — a member of the French Resistance during World War II and her son and granddaughter, in the 1980s and 1990s — whose secrets converge in this unlikely setting.Amal Allaoui, left, and Alice Trocellier in “Tales of the Fairies,” directed by Aurore Evain.Mirza DurakovicAmong 1,570 shows, there is a special kind of delight in happening upon a gem like “Phone Me,” or “Tales of the Fairies,” a bright, family-friendly production at the Espace Alya. The director and scholar Aurore Evain is part of a French movement aiming to reclaim the legacy of forgotten female artists, and in Avignon, she has revived two fairy tales by the 17th-century writer Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy.On a pocket-size stage, at lunchtime on a Monday, Evain’s three actors and musicians brought a demanding queen, a kind prince and some very helpful animals to whimsical life. Call it a sprinkle of vintage Avignon fairy dust: There was certainly some in the air.Avignon Festival. Various venues, through July 26.Off d’Avignon. Various venues, through July 30. More

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      ‘Mister Miss America’ Review: A Fight for the Crown

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      The first male contestant in his small-town beauty pageant is determined to win hearts, minds and the crown, in this solo play from the writer and performer Neil D’Astolfo.A boy forced to dim his flame discovers a local beauty pageant that sets off a spark in him again. For gay men of a certain stripe who make icons of tenacious pop divas and glamorous grandes dames, it’s a tale as old as Broadway. The self-proclaimed unicorn is now an unlikely contender in that contest, but he’s determined to win both the crown and the hearts of the town’s residents.In “Mister Miss America,” which opened on Monday night at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the writer and performer Neil D’Astolfo takes us behind the scenes and into the Southern-fried confidence of Derek Tyler Taylor, a flamboyant and fast-tongued trailblazer. Derek, in his mid-20s, is the first male contestant in an old-fashioned Virginia pageant, and though the rules have been bent just enough to let him compete, the extent of his welcome remains uncertain.D’Astolfo turns the audience into Derek’s confessor and personal cheering squad, as the other beauty queen hopefuls in this solo play, produced by All For One Theater, are talked about but not seen. He enters his dressing room shrieking with excitement, but it soon becomes clear that not everyone is as thrilled with Derek’s participation.If a beauty pageant is just a dog show for people, this one is “tops-to-bottoms full of bitches,” quips Derek, who works as an assistant manager at a Petco. His competitors include a top-seeded rival whose bigotry and ultimate hypocrisy represent the obstacles in the way of the sashaying hero’s journey.Derek’s brashness is, of course, a cover for the hurt of rejection. His mom at least stopped throwing things at him when he learned to bottle himself up, he jokes. Like any savvy pageant participant, Derek is poised and in control even as he reveals the bruises beneath his bravado. In a menagerie of toy canines, Derek is a wolf in a sapphire tuxedo with the voracious will of Patti LuPone devouring “Rose’s Turn.”Derek’s elaborate obsession with LuPone, like many of the gay cultural touchstones in “Mister Miss America,” is not exactly original territory. Indeed, as much as Derek cuts a rebellious figure on the small-town stage, his allusions and affinities as a gay man are down-the-middle, almost to the point of cliché.Still, D’Astolfo’s writing crackles with delightful turns of phrase that slip by almost before they register. “Hand to Gaga, I didn’t know it would be such a fuss to enter this here competition,” he swears. But could anyone this fabulous be an abomination? “No way, Mary J!”D’Astolfo is also an immensely likable performer. As Derek, he is haughty but vulnerable, an unselfconscious and assured storyteller, whether tearing into his adversaries or recalling an ill-fated bus trip to see LuPone perform in “Gypsy.” He can land a punchline with his eyes alone.Under the direction of Tony Speciale, the production flips easily between backstage confessionals and the showdown out front, where Derek’s talent is the beloved gay art of lip-syncing. Lighting by Travis McHale does scene transporting work on an uncluttered gray set by the designer Se Hyun Oh, while costumes by Hunter Kaczorowski, sparkling on a rack to the side, lend Derek do-it-yourself flash and flair.As up-to-the-minute as D’Astolfo’s pop references may be, there’s a retro quality to both the setting and the character that feels a step behind the times. If a country boy were looking for inspiration, the only beauty pageant of any relevance he would find on TV in the past decade is one made especially for people like him and hosted by RuPaul.Turning trauma into opulent self-presentation has long been a favored form of queer artists, and it’s more popular than ever. The global “Drag Race” franchise has turned the act of defying gender norms through polished performance and the excavation of personal hardship into mainstream entertainment. That means there’s plenty of appetite for a show like “Mister Miss America” — and that it has a lot more to measure up to than a backwater dog and pony show.Mister Miss AmericaThrough Aug. 7 at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Manhattan; afo.nyc. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Bidding Farewell to His Theatrical Flock

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      In a 34-year run at New York Theater Workshop, James C. Nicola held that directors and writers are equal partners — and helped send “Rent” and “Hadestown” to Broadway.The Tony Awards ceremony had just wrapped up at Radio City Music Hall, and it was time for the parties. But for one honoree, James C. Nicola, the longtime artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, there would be no stop-off for toasts at the Plaza Hotel or after-midnight carousing at Tavern on the Green.Instead, he headed to a nearby parking garage, and settled behind the wheel of a rental van for the 40-minute ride back to the dorms at Adelphi University on Long Island, where he’d be sleeping that night. As far as he was concerned, there was no other choice: He had pickup duty at 10 a.m. for a group of young artists arriving by train for one of the summer workshops that have been a hallmark of his 34-year tenure at one of Off Broadway’s most beloved theaters.It’s not those gatherings that led the Tony committee to give Nicola a special honor. Or at least not fully. It’s also that his 199-seat East Village theater spawned the Tony-winning best musicals “Rent,” “Once” and “Hadestown.” That the recent hot-button plays “What the Constitution Means to Me”and “Slave Play” ran there. And that the theater’s support made a crucial difference to the careers of such writers as Tony Kushner, Lisa Kron and Doug Wright; the directors Rachel Chavkin, Lileana Blain-Cruz and Sam Gold; and many others.Nicola, center, with fellow Tony honorees Eileen Rivera and Ashruf “Osh” Ghanimah at the Tony Honors cocktail party in early June.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Tony came as a bonus after Nicola announced last year that he was stepping down, the first of the very long-serving artistic leaders of major nonprofit New York theaters to do so. And while he acknowledged that the theater-world reckoning over the whiteness of its leadership persuaded him it was time to leave, he departed on July 10 with what seems to be an unblemished record.At 72, his gait has slowed. But his ice-blue eyes still blaze when he gets animated about his affection for anagrams or who might star with Daniel Radcliffe later this year in “Merrily We Roll Along,” part of the last Workshop season he programmed. (The freelance director Patricia McGregor, a Black woman who has had an ongoing connection to the theater, is succeeding him in the top job.)Nicola spent five years working as a casting associate at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Public Theater). Comparisons with Papp and the far-larger Public are inevitably imprecise. But in his own less grandiose, more self-effacing way, Nicola is among the handful of artistic directors to make the biggest artistic impact on the New York theater world since — a magnet for iconoclastic talents who also helped develop a passel of shows with enormous commercial appeal.Jonathan Larson’s “Rent” was part of New York Theater Workshop’s 1995-96 season, a pivotal time for the theater. The cast included, from left: Jesse L. Martin, Adam Pascal, Wilson Heredia, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Rodney Hicks and Anthony Rapp.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNicola at the theater in 1997. A son of the 1960s, he once imagined he’d be a Baptist minister.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore personally, he is one of the last of his kind: a son of the ’60s who imagined he’d be a Baptist minister and made a brick-and-mortar building into a flock and a chosen family.In a video acceptance speech for the Tony, Nicola put it this way: “Our community has aspired to be a sanctuary for a certain species of artist — theatermakers who embrace their divinity, who understand their sacred obligation to lead and inspire us.”And in one of several recent conversations that included breaks between work-in-progress readings at Adelphi and lunch at a favorite Hell’s Kitchen diner, he stood firm in his conviction that idealism is the fuel that kept him going, and that bringing people together to be challenged is the goal.“Nothing makes me angrier than to be called a gatekeeper,” he said.He added: “Nothing makes me happier than to be mad when I leave the theater.”RACHEL CHAVKIN HAD BEEN inviting Nicola and his then-associate artistic director, Linda Chapman, to take in her work since she was an M.F.A. student at Columbia University. After seeing “Three Pianos,” a rambunctious reimagining of Franz Schubert as the center of a drunken posse of musicians and fans, Nicola asked Chavkin and Alec Duffy, one of her collaborators on the show, to his denlike office on the second floor of the East Village building that abuts the theater.“I think he opened by saying ‘I think that’s one of the best pieces of theater I’ve ever seen,’” she recalled in a recent phone call. “Our jaws dropped.”Programming “Three Pianos” into the Workshop’s 2010-11 season was a career-changer for Chavkin, who, while continuing to do avant-garde work with the troupe known as the TEAM, also helped to shape the boundary-busting Broadway musicals “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” and “Hadestown.” (She is co-directing at the Workshop again next season, while aiming another musical, “Lempicka,” for Broadway.)Like Chavkin, the now Tony-winning director Sam Gold earned his union card directing at the Workshop, in 2007. He still recalls Nicola’s support when he wanted to hire a scenic designer with opera-world credits to build what would be an ambitious set for Betty Shamieh’s play “The Black Eyed.”“It’s the kind of thing that a director on their first job doesn’t get to do,” Gold said. “Jim would say, ‘I don’t want to limit your imagination.’”And the commitment went beyond a single show — part of Nicola’s belief that directors are equal partners with playwrights in an American theater system that tends to privilege the latter.David Oyelowo, left, and Daniel Craig in Sam Gold’s 2016 production of “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Over the years,” Gold said, “I’ve had very few people genuinely see me as an artist — who can relate one show to another, as someone with a lifelong project.”Whitney White, who was Gold’s assistant on the 2016 Workshop production of “Othello” that starred Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo, speaks of Nicola as a presence in her life, not just a champion of her work. (White directed Aleshea Harris’s play “On Sugarland” at the Workshop this spring.)“I’ve spoken to him about men and love and theater and everything,” she said. “It’s a fully furnished table.”That’s not easy to find, even in nonprofit theaters that don’t have to obsess over the bottom line. “It’s a different style of artistic directorship — that you’re in community, in dialogue, not just a blip,” she added.NICOLA GREW UP OUTSIDE HARTFORD, Conn., gay and closeted, the oldest of four brothers in a middle-class family. In high school and then for a while at Tufts University, he took private singing lessons, imagining a career in opera or choral music. A year studying abroad took him to the Royal Court Theater in London, where he got interested in directing.Eventually, it helped lead him to the writing of the British experimentalist Caryl Churchill, a Royal Court favorite, whose work he helped champion at the New York Shakespeare Festival and at Arena Stage, in Washington, D.C., where he had a one-year directing fellowship that turned into seven more years as a producing associate.What became New York Theater Workshop had been presenting work around Manhattan for nearly a decade when Nicola raised his hand for the top job. In conversations with Stephen Graham, its founder and current board member, he learned that the theater, which was already funding fellowships for directors, was hungry to have a bigger public profile.“They wanted to change the form,” Nicola said. “What better could I hear?”Under Nicola, the theater staged Churchill’s work eight times, more than any other writer. But no figure is more associated with his tenure than the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove. After seeing his work in Europe, Nicola brought him to direct in the United States for the first time, adapting Eugene O’Neill’s unfinished play “More Stately Mansions,” in 1997.Two years later, his deconstruction of the Tennessee Williams classic “A Streetcar Named Desire” — Blanche, Stanley and Stella each spend stage time in the bathtub — heralded the van Hove/Workshop alliance as one of the most exciting (and divisive) destinations in New York theater.During Nicola’s reign the theater presented eight van Hove productions, capped in 2015 with “Lazarus,” a rock musical with a book by Enda Walsh and songs, new and old, by David Bowie, who was secretly battling cancer during its creation and died during its run.Ivo van Hove has directed eight productions at the Workshop, including the 2015 production of David Bowie and Enda Walsh’s “Lazarus,” with Michael C. Hall and Sophia Anne Caruso.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe circumstances had echoes of “Rent” — a show the theater began developing four years into Nicola’s tenure that had its final dress rehearsal at the Workshop on Jan. 25, 1996. That night its creator, Jonathan Larson, suddenly died of an aortic aneurysm.The “Rent” story — 12 years on Broadway, the Pulitzer Prize, productions all over the world — is show business canon. Royalties from that and other Broadway transfers helped boost the theater’s annual budget from $400,000 to $10 million in the Nicola era. But as he talked about “Rent” and “Lazarus,” Nicola hinted at the ways they might have turned out had tragedy not struck, their creators wrested from the process of art-making too soon.“Lazarus,” which was sped into production and where only van Hove knew of Bowie’s precarious health, was among the most challenging experiences of Nicola’s time at the Workshop. But he pinpoints his darkest days to 2006, when a planned staging of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” a solo play about an American demonstrator for Palestinian rights who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer, was pulled.Kushner and Harold Pinter, among others, accused the theater of capitulating to political pressure; the theater maintained it was only delaying the production, which originated at the Royal Court in London. Nicola had to return from Italy to defuse the situation, which he called a “misunderstanding that was threatening to the very heart of the institution.” (“Rachel Corrie” ended up running at another theater.)More recently, debates over representation in the theater world have encouraged in him a greater self-awareness. He pointed to Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” which was championed by his theater and by notable white male critics. He later came to learn that many Black women felt otherwise.“There are impulses that I have that feel like good and positive ones, and then learn that my response is not universal,” Nicola said.“It’s really good to think about the risks and possible outcomes,” he added, “but also not be intimidated by not being able to predict. To not retreat, not get cautious or conservative.”FINISH A 34-YEAR TERM running a major theater and the hosannas will come fast and furious.Besides the Tony, Nicola was celebrated at the Workshop’s annual gala, which had a diner theme in honor of his affection for humble food. There were speeches and a musical performance from some original “Rent” cast members, a drag queen and, for a finale, four veteran stage actresses enacting a “scene” from “The Golden Girls,” a Nicola favorite.“My gratitude to the theater was giving me a sense that the world was bigger,” Nicola said, reflecting on his career. Erik Tanner for The New York TimesWeeks later, several hundred friends and associates surprised him at the theater with a reading of Moss Hart’s backstage comedy “Light Up the Sky,” the last play he had directed at Arena Stage, with a cast that included the playwrights Lucas Hnath, Dael Orlandersmith and Kron; the performer Penny Arcade; and the producers Jeffrey Seller and Jordan Roth. (“I have lived this play my entire adult life,” a grateful Nicola said later.)Uptown and downtown, artful and kitschy — it’s an increasingly illusory divide that Nicola, who soaked up the work of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, has managed to happily bridge, personally and professionally.“He’ll be talking one minute about [the French director] Ariane Mnouchkine and the next he’ll be doing an Ethel Merman impression,” said Wright, whose Grand Guignol-ish Marquis de Sade play, “Quills,” was, along with “Rent,” in the 1995-96 season that brought a new level of starshine to the theater.Nicola proudly cops to being a musical-theater show queen, quoting “Funny Girl” in his gala acceptance speech and later pointing to a lyric from (shocking!) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” as explaining his mission: “We taught the world new ways to dream.”The “director in me” decided he needed a ritual way to bring closure to his time at the theater. So he and friends rode the Circle Line on the Fourth of July. “When I board the boat I will be leaving my old life and when I get off it, I will be entering my new life,” he said beforehand.As to what’s next, all he can propose is “opening myself up to new adventures.”In the meantime, he’s taken to writing letters of thanks, sending them into the world without knowing who will (or won’t) respond.One went to the theater department at Tufts.Another to the Little Theater of Manchester, Conn., where he appeared onstage as the Mock Turtle in “Alice in Wonderland,” and was first dazzled by the art of telling a story to an audience in public.“My gratitude to the theater was giving me a sense that the world was bigger — that there were many other possibilities,” he said. “To that 12- or 13-year-old boy, this is everything he aspired to. It happened.” More