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      ‘Dom Juan’ Review: The Perks of Being a Professional Hypocrite

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      Piety is just a pose in Ashley Tata’s gender-swapped production of Molière’s tragicomedy at Bard’s SummerScape festival.It’s a funny feeling and not always a welcome one when a play reaches out across the centuries and punches you in the throat. This happens toward the end of “Dom Juan,” Ashley Tata’s gender-swapped production of Molière’s 1665 tragicomedy at Bard’s SummerScape festival.Dom Juan (Amelia Workman), libertine extraordinaire, has finally reformed. Or has she? Turns out, her piety is just a pose. “In today’s world the finest role you can play is that of the morally upright person,” Dom Juan explains to her long-suffering, devious servant Sganarelle (Zuzanna Szadkowski). “The profession of hypocrite has countless perks.”Her cynical avowal speaks — loudly — of politics today. But wait. It gets worse. This same speech seems to prefigure internet trolling (“hypocrites create a cabal of the like-minded, if you attack one, they all turn on you”) and the way that so-called cancel culture seldom cancels anyone in power (“they just bow their heads, sigh contritely, roll their eyes, and everyone forgives them”). Lines like these might suggest savvy interpolations by the authors of this new translation: Gideon Lester, the artistic director of the Fisher Center at Bard, and Sylvaine Guyot. But no, they’re faithful renditions of the 17th-century original. The language has barely been updated.Great playwrights often have themes that they return to, over and over again. Molière’s is hypocrisy. Which should make Dom Juan, a freethinker who spends most of the play discarding social convention as casually as you or I might wad a Kleenex, a hero. Or as in this production, a heroine. Sure, Dom Juan remains a seducer. But a woman doing what she wants with her body? Sounds nice!Dom Juan’s reality is more complicated — for Molière and for Tata, too. Here is how Sganarelle describes her boss: “The greatest scoundrel who ever walked the earth, a fury, a dog, a devil, a rat, a blasphemer who doesn’t believe in heaven or hell or werewolves or anything.” Which doesn’t sound as great.“Dom Juan” asks questions — perennial ones — about what an individual owes the community and what she owes herself. As seductive as it is to see a woman resist subjugation, we are now years removed from #girlboss slogans, which is to say that the idea of freedom in the absence of ethics or solidarity has lost its shimmer. And a particular lesson of the pandemic has been how easily freedom can be weaponized, how it can make other people less free.Tata’s busy, restless production introduces these complications, though it sometimes forgets them amid the commotion of the sock puppet, the rock band, the swordplay, the lace cuffs, the haze and some very cool visual and sonic effects. (Afsoon Pajoufar designed the set, with lighting by Cha See, video design by Lisa Renkel and sound design by Chad Raines.) I laughed out loud when the show’s curtain — a tapestry of a pastoral scene — appeared to shrivel and burn. Because what fun! But for a long time in the middle, the play goes nowhere, breathlessly, and pleasure palls before Dom Juan’s comeuppance arrives.As Lester and Guyot have respected Molière’s original text, the gender-swap rarely feels complete. A woman could never have behaved this way in Molière’s day. She could barely behave this way now. Still, the swashbuckling role remains a showcase for Workman, an actress of both swagger and steel. Her Dom Juan is groovy, rowdy, but also adamantine, so unmoved by others that she is half-statue already. The supporting cast doesn’t always equal her, but Jordan Bellow offers lovely physical comedy as Dom Juan’s deserted husband, Elver, and Szadkowski’s Sganarelle has some fine unruly moments.Despite its adornments and seductions, the play is bitter at its heart. Invest too deeply in Dom Juan’s liberation or even in her punishment and the ending will leave a bad taste. The only alternative is not to care — to lose yourself instead in the production’s delights, which is not a particular chore on a sun-drenched afternoon.Otherwise, you might find yourself thinking, uneasily, of the play’s prescient moral, spoken by Sganarelle: “To have power and a wicked soul — that’s a terrible thing.”Dom JuanThrough July 17 at the Fisher Center LUMA Theater; fishercenter.bard.edu. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      A Chameleon Flies From ‘The Blacklist’ to ‘The Kite Runner’

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      After nine seasons on the NBC series, Amir Arison is making his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s popular 2003 novel.An early scene in the new Broadway play “The Kite Runner” is mostly spoken in Dari, the Afghan dialect of Farsi, though the action depicts a distinctly American art form.“This town ain’t big enough for the two of us!,” the 12-year-old Amir exclaims to his best friend, Hassan. The two boys, pretending to be cowboys, love American westerns, especially “Rio Bravo” with John Wayne. After a standoff, Hassan charges at Amir, but Amir trips him and Hassan stumbles and falls. They wrestle, tumbling and giggling — blissfully unaware of the dark forces that will soon tear them apart.The place is Kabul, the year is 1973 and the two actors playing the boys are actually adults. One of them, Amir Arison, 44, the veteran stage actor who recently left NBC’s hit series “The Blacklist” after nine seasons, portrays Amir as a young boy and an adult.The show, which is scheduled to begin previews on July 6 at the Helen Hayes Theater, is based on Khaled Hosseini’s popular 2003 novel of the same name. It tells the story of Amir, a privileged Pashtun boy growing up alongside Hassan, the Hazara son of his father’s servant. After a childhood act of cowardice, Amir spends most of the play reflecting on and trying to atone for his failure to come to the aid of his best friend.Arison, center, during rehearsals. He plays the protagonist, Amir, as both a child and an adult. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn playing Amir as both a child and an adult, Arison jumps between acting out his childhood memories and narrating them from the present. He doesn’t leave the stage once.It may be a daunting part, but Arison, who cut his teeth on Off Broadway stages before appearing as an FBI counterterrorism expert in some 190 episodes of “The Blacklist,” is up for it.Over the years, he’s played a flashy Iraqi dermatologist in the documentary drama “Aftermath”; a mysterious newlywed in Christopher Durang’s dark comedy “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them”; and a government accountant in Stephen Belber’s “The Muscles in Our Toes,”Still, he said over lunch recently, this role is the biggest challenge of his professional and personal life. “In the theater, you cut a vein open,” he said. “You give your voice, your body, your mind and your soul.”Matthew Spangler, who adapted the story for the stage, said of the role: “It does raise the bar for that actor quite a bit, but then it becomes something truly virtuosic.”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.While the casting director Laura Stanczyk and the cultural consultant Humaira Ghilzai ensured that Afghan actors auditioned (and that it was easy for them to do so), the role of Amir ultimately went to Arison, who is Israeli American. He grew up in Florida the son of Israeli immigrants; his mother was born in a refugee camp to Holocaust survivors.In March, when Arison landed the audition for Amir, his first call was to Ghilzai, whose family fled Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. He didn’t know of her affiliation with the show, but he had worked with her twice before — once for his role as a colonel in the Pakistani army in a West Coast production of J.T. Rogers’s “Blood and Gifts” — and asked for advice on his accent.Arison is a chameleon, Ghilzai said: He’s played Afghans, Arabs, Americans and “metamorphosizes into whatever you need him to be.”“The Kite Runner” was first staged in 2007 at San Jose State University, where Spangler teaches performance studies. Its first professional production took place in 2009, and it has since been staged in multiple countries. The Broadway production, directed by Giles Croft, is based on the version that ran at Nottingham Playhouse in 2013 and at Wyndham’s Theater in the West End three years later. (The play “mostly works on the level of childlike fable, satisfyingly schematic but frustratingly simplistic,” Stephen Dalton wrote in a Hollywood Reporter review.)The book — published two years after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to depose the Taliban — has captivated millions of readers around the world. Now the play arrives on Broadway almost a year after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban seized power again.Hosseini’s tale gave readers a rare inside perspective on Afghanistan and the intricacies of life there, but it also has, as Arison pointed out, universal themes of immigration, power, redemption, and father and son relationships.Azita Ghanizada, who plays Amir’s wife, Soraya, with Arison.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“The immigrant story never goes away,” Croft, the director, said in an interview. “Most of us have it in us somewhere. Even if we didn’t experience it ourselves, somewhere in our background, somebody will have traveled to get somewhere that they think will be better or safer. So we carry it with us.”As does Hosseini, whose family sought political asylum in the United States in 1980 after the Soviet army invaded the country, and told The Times last year that he still has “a perspective, and I do feel strongly about what’s going on in Afghanistan.” (In “The Kite Runner,” Amir and his father also escape Afghanistan — first to Pakistan, then to the United States.)Along with Arison, the cast has deep Middle Eastern and South Asian roots. Azita Ghanizada, who portrays Amir’s wife, Soraya, and Salar Nader, who plays the tabla onstage throughout the show, are both Afghan.“It’s been really heartening for me to see how devoted they are to representation,” Ghilzai, the cultural consultant, said of the cast members. “I think because their culture has been misrepresented so much that they really, really, really want to get it right.”Still, placing a non-Afghan in the central role was not a choice made lightly.“The thing that swung it for me,” Croft said of Arison’s casting, “was that he has an inherent warmth and generosity and vulnerability — all of which are qualities that the character has.”The director Giles Croft, left, said he cast Arison as Amir because he “has an inherent warmth and generosity and vulnerability — all of which are qualities that the character has.” Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn coaching the cast and creative team, Ghilzai guided actors through Dari pronunciations — including the names of characters and towns. The dialect is sprinkled throughout the script.One actor recently asked Ghilzai about Afghan body language: What should he do if he loses in a competition? She advised making a thumbs up motion, a Middle Eastern insult. (They later replaced it with a different gesture, so the meaning wouldn’t get lost in translation.)This production is Ghilzai’s first involvement as a consultant, and she worked closely with Spangler and Croft to re-evaluate the text. In a pivotal scene in the second act, Assef (Amir Malaklou), the neighborhood bully turned-Taliban member, taunts Amir, who has returned to Afghanistan from America.“But America’s not all bad,” Assef tells him. “You know who taught me how to use a Stinger missile? Your C.I.A.”The line emerged from conversations between Ghilzai, Spangler and Croft and was added for this production. It recognizes the role that U.S. foreign policy has played in the militarization of various groups in Afghanistan.Arison, third from left, played an F.B.I. special agent on the NBC series “The Blacklist.”David Giesbrecht/NBCIn his last episode of “The Blacklist,” Arison’s quirky character Aram Mojtabai told his colleagues that he’s leaving the FBI and plans to move to New York, where among other things, he’d likely see “a Broadway show.” (The episode left open room for him to return.)On Twitter, the actor explained to fans that he was a big fan of Hosseini’s novel, had done his first play in second grade, and couldn’t pass up the lifetime dream to be on Broadway himself.While his part there is “the most unheroic hero you’ll ever see,” he said in the interview, he has come to see it as personally meaningful in ways he didn’t expect.At the beginning of the second act, Amir and his father are hidden inside a fuel truck, fleeing Afghanistan to neighboring Pakistan. Soviet soldiers stop the truck, and father and son don’t know if they’ll live or die.“The other day I just lost it because I thought of my grandparents — that’s what happened to them,” Arison said. “That’s another way I connect, even though I’m not Afghan.“So I’m hoping — and I think every audience should take what they want,” he added, that “through an individual story, we do not forget that history is repeating itself.” More

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      ‘53% Of’ Review: Zinging Pro-Trump Women, and Everyone Else

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      A new comedy by Steph Del Rosso starts as a satire of conservatives, then takes aim at progressives. Too bad the jokes barely cut either side.In America, to vote in a federal election is to commit a secret act. One votes in private, in a curtained booth, on intimate terms with an oversize ballot. But little in American public life stays private for long.Exit polls soon provide precise demographic breakdowns, illuminating just who voted for whom. Perhaps you remember this statistic from back in 2016: Despite the “locker-room talk,” to say nothing of the accusations of groping, forced kissing and assault, 53 percent of white women voted for Donald J. Trump. The fitful new comedy “53% Of,” by Steph Del Rosso at Second Stage’s uptown space, takes that data point as inspiration. (Corrected metrics later showed it was more like 47 percent, but whatever.)The play begins in a middle-class living room, embellished with “Home Sweet Home” throw pillows and an outsize American flag. The setting is a small city in Pennsylvania. The time is wine o’clock. Four white women, members of a local conservative club called the Women for Freedom and Family Group, have met to toast Trump’s win and to make plans for his visit to their city. They’re joined by a fifth white woman, PJ (Eden Malyn), who arrives in a sweatshirt bearing the Confederate flag. That sweatshirt upsets the other women because it says the quiet part — the racism that undergirds their politics — loud and proud. It helps explain why these women have voted against their own gendered interests.After internal squabbles, the meeting devolves — a gelatin salad is thrown — and the actresses return, with slight changes of clothing (jackets instead of skirts), this time playing the women’s boorish husbands. It is a month or so later, and the men, also white, have gathered to watch the Trump inauguration.Grace Rex, Wake, Marianna McClellan and Crivelli, now as a progressive coalition in New York.Joan MarcusAfter a second change, the same actresses return again, this time as an urban collective of the pussy hat-knitting variety. The set, barely altered, has become a cramped New York apartment in some outer borough. The flag has gone, replaced by feminist ephemera. These women are white, too. Apparently the group had one Black member at one point. She hasn’t returned. There’s racism here, too, of course, which manifests as enthusiasm and tokenism.Del Rosso’s play is a kind of target practice, and in every act those targets are big. But the effect is hit or miss. The conservative women crave status and recognition. The conservative men crave women who aren’t their wives. The liberal women mask ego as sanctimony. None of this surprises. (I saw “53% Of” the day after the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, when in progressive corners of social media, ostensible allies had already begun to turn on one another.) The jokes are very shallow when they could go deep. Flesh wounds only. Take for example a moment in which the women contemplate going to a march against police brutality, only to ditch it for a bridal shower, a documentary screening, a date.A note in the script advises that “no one is a caricature in this play. Embrace their full complexities.” But Del Rosso and the director, Tiffany Nichole Greene, judge these characters energetically, which sours the play and leaves the actresses little space to expand beyond parody, though Anna Crivelli and Marianna McClellan find a few more grounded moments.The best scene of the play is also the last, in which Crivelli’s Sasha, who is white, goes for a drink with her college friend KJ (Ayana Workman), who is Black. (She is the one who bailed on the collective.) This dialogue also tackles white privilege, but from a place of greater realism rather than scattershot satire. Crivelli makes us feel Sasha’s good, misguided intentions; Workman delineates KJ’s frustrations with not being seen as fully, fallibly human. It’s a sad scene. And a good one. Here, finally, the aim is true.53% OfThrough July 10 at McGinn/Cazale Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In a Powerful ‘Hamlet,’ a Fragile Prince Faces His Foes

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      Alex Lawther makes for an especially riveting hero in Robert Icke’s chic if imperfect modern-dress production at the Park Avenue Armory.Many Hamlets I’ve seen are wily. Some kooky. Narcissistic, aloof, even pretentious. Less common is a Hamlet who is tender and romantic and achingly vulnerable, like a petal falling from the head of a flower at the end of its bloom.When Alex Lawther’s fragile Danish prince drags himself onstage in Robert Icke’s modern-dress production of “Hamlet,” which opened Tuesday night at the Park Avenue Armory, he recalls the 19th-century poets Arthur Rimbaud and Percy Shelley, a brilliant yet dejected young man who seems resolved to his sorrow — and to a tragic end.In the last decade, Icke has gained prominence for his heightened and contemporary-inflected adaptations of classics. This “Hamlet” played in the West End in 2017, with the hot-priest-sized package of magnetizing charisma known as Andrew Scott in the lead. He was one of the best Hamlets I’ve ever seen — though, as in so many other takes, the focus fell on his brooding and banter more than his emotional depth.Lawther, best known for his role in “The End of the __ing World,” doesn’t have Scott’s starry flair, but he possesses his own demure kind of charisma; he draws you in even as he withdraws into himself. As a result, this rendition honors Hamlet as not just self-indulgently melancholy, but as grappling with legitimate, heartbreaking loss.We begin at a swanky wedding party. (Hildegard Bechtler did the stylish sets and costumes.) Beyond a wall of sliding glass panels, we see Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude (Jennifer Ehle), and her new husband, his uncle Claudius (Angus Wright), dancing amid balloons and strings of lights. Dressed in a black suit, Lawther slowly shuffles across the stage and sits close to, but removed from, the action. He roughly rubs his palms against his thighs, as though to rub the fabric off his body.Throughout the hefty 3-hour-and-45 minute production, Lawther fully embodies Hamlet’s despondency, shuffling like a wayward toddler, with knees slightly bent and a constant sway that makes him appear near collapse. Planning to enact his vengeance on his scheming uncle, he holds a gun off at an angle, as though his arm is being puppeted by someone else pulling the strings above the stage.And when he speaks, it’s in a slow, warbling singsong, at once contemplative and idiosyncratic, especially when he pauses in the middle of sentences as though his mind is hiccuping with existential thoughts.Though the peculiar line readings sometimes turn monotonous, he snaps out of it, erupting into a surprising fit of mania. And Lawther threads the famed “What a piece of work is man!” monologue with poetic resonance, moving from wonder to despair through slow articulation and emphatic rhythm.From left: Lawther, Michael Abubakar, Hara Yannas, Angus Wright (as Claudius),Gilbert Kyem Jnr and Tia Bannon in the modern-dress production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIcke, whose one-woman “Enemy of the People” played the Armory last year and whose “1984” had a brief Broadway run in 2017, brings a cinematic eye to the proceedings, using foreground and background to create dimension. In one clever bit of staging, Hamlet tarries in the forefront as the king and queen canoodle in back and guards race by mid-stage between them, fresh from sighting the former king’s ghost.At the same time, the director brings some curious adjustments to the characters, giving Polonius a touch of dementia and depicting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a couple clearly at odds about how they should respond to the royal request to monitor Hamlet.The women, in particular, get short shrift. Gertrude is unreadable, despite Ehle’s punchy line readings, and Ophelia’s descent into madness occurs faster than you can say “something rotten” — doing a disservice to Kirsty Rider’s perfectly matched delicate companion to Lawther’s Hamlet.As Claudius, Wright has the self-consciously composed air of a politician but misses some of the menace, while Peter Wight leans too heavily on the bumbling as Polonius. Luke Treadaway, however, makes the most of Laertes’s transformation: from refined gentleman and doting brother to unhinged revenge seeker, wildly swinging a gun at the news of his father’s murder and sister’s suicide.There are actual gunshots, too — ghastly pops and flashes of light that make the audience jump to attention. This is nowhere as gratuitous as, say, the 2019 DruidShakespeare production of “Richard III,” or even the current Broadway staging of “Macbeth,” with its severed limbs and crotch wounds. Still, the sight and sound of a gun onstage today, given our country’s despicable relationship to firearms, is unsettling.What’s most frustrating about Icke’s otherwise intriguing approach is the inessential, and, by now, highly unoriginal, incorporation of high tech. A grid of 12 screens hangs overhead, and two larger screens flank the stage, showing security footage from the castle and news reports about Denmark’s conflict with Norway.Clockwise, from lower right: Lawther (as Hamlet), Kirsty Rider (as Ophelia), Luke Treadaway (as her brother Laertes), Wright and Kyem.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe screens also flash “pause” and “stop” before the two intermissions and the final scene, mawkishly calling attention to the audience as spectators. The way Icke and the lighting designer Natasha Chivers handle several of Hamlet’s monologues is more effective; soft overhead light halos Lawther as he seems to addresses theatergoers directly from the edge of the stage, only to snap off when he’s done speaking.Tom Gibbons’s sound design envelops the proceedings in ominous atmospheric gloom:a distant howling wind; the cold, mechanical hum of static and feedback; and, finally, the thunderous exclamations of drums. Less fitting are the production’s folksy compositions (by Laura Marling) and use of Bob Dylan songs, which, even deployed ironically, are a bit too Midwest-porch-jam for this chic production.“Hamlet” is one of the Shakespeare plays that most suffers from diminishing returns — adaptations that try too hard to innovate, to render a classic modern and hip. Though Icke’s protracted production occasionally falls into that trap, ultimately the creative team’s visual and technical prowess — along with its provocative young lead — make this a tale of musing, mania and murder for our age.HamletThrough Aug. 13 at the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 3 hours 45 minutes. More

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      In Munich, Young Directors Offer Horrors Both Real and Fantastical

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      The Radikal Jung festival transports theatergoers to Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine and an American high school in the Middle Ages.MUNICH — At the end of a recent performance of “Bad Roads” here, the play’s Ukrainian director, Tamara Trunova, thanked the audience for staying for the entire 180-minute production, a harrowing succession of vignettes set in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which Russia invaded in 2014, eight years before it undertook a larger war against Ukraine.“It’s much easier to drink a glass of wine than it is to watch our play,” Trunova said from the stage of the Münchner Volkstheater, where “Bad Roads” opened this year’s Radikal Jung (Radical Young) festival, an annual showcase of productions by up-and-coming directors.The two previously scheduled installments of Radikal Jung were canceled because of the pandemic. This year’s edition, which kicked off on June 26 and runs through this Saturday, is the first to be held in the Volkstheater’s brand-new home, a luxurious performing arts complex in a former slaughterhouse.The festival is traditionally focused on theater from the German-speaking world, but this year’s lineup of 11 plays was unusually international. The widened geographical perspective seemed to acknowledge the artistic affinities between the work of young German theater makers and their counterparts in Greece, London and Paris. All but one of their productions were of recently written dramas, which seemed to reflect a desire to tell new stories that specifically address contemporary concerns. Many of today’s burning issues — including the pandemic, debates around gender and sexuality, the ubiquity of pop culture and social media, life during wartime and climate change — surfaced in Radikal Jung’s varied crop of productions.In a strong lineup that also featured an innovative digital reworking of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and a brilliantly acted one-woman show about Britney Spears, “Bad Roads” stood out — and not just for its torn-from-the-headlines immediacy.The Ukrainian writer Natalya Vorozhbit based the play, subtitled “Six Stories About Love and War,” largely on reports she gathered while traveling across combat zones in eastern Ukraine. An earlier version of “Bad Roads” was staged, in English, at the Royal Court Theater in London in 2017; Trunova’s production premiered at the Left Bank Theater in Kyiv in 2019. (A film version directed by Vorozhbit was Ukraine’s official entry in the 2022 Academy Awards.)On a stage dominated by a giant fence, a dozen actors vividly conjure Vorozhbit’s nightmarish tales. Hallucinogenic and frequently absurd, they alternate between the barbarically cruel and the banally quotidian. In the opening narrative, a journalist on a fact-finding mission in the Donbas needs to list her identifying body marks, such as moles and tattoos, on an application before entering the region, in case she is killed while on assignment.A scene from Natalya Vorozhbit’s “Bad Roads,” directed by Tamara Trunova at the Munich Volkstheater.Spyros RenntAnother moment in “Bad Roads,” which is subtitled “Six Stories About Love and War.”Spyros RenntThe reporter, who in initiating us into the war zone seems to be a stand-in for the playwright, recites a lengthy monologue that combines the prosaic and the poetic. She tells us about the suffering she finds as well as the conflicted sexual attraction she feels toward the soldier who leads her around. “You aren’t just some ripped Brad Pitt look-alike,” she says. “You really have killed another person.”This introductory story sets up the moral ambiguities of the tales that follow, in which ordinary people, robbed of their lives by a senseless conflict, are driven to extremes.The production is relentlessly dark and savage, even if it’s shot through with morbid humor, such as the moment when a medic who is transporting her lover’s corpse propositions the soldier who has accompanied her on the mission: “A body without a head in a body bag just doesn’t turn me on.”It was sometimes difficult, at least for this non-Russian- and non-Ukrainian-speaking viewer, to tell who was on which side. (The performance had German surtitles). The disorienting atmosphere brought to mind Sergei Loznitsa’s extraordinary film “Donbass,” another anthology of surreal episodes about the 2014 conflict. At the same time, Vorozhbit’s sensitivity to her characters’ psychologies — and her desire to understand the perspective even of violent perpetrators — make “Bad Roads” a deeply human work about the compromises, cunning and sheer blind luck that surviving in an inhuman time requires.It was almost a relief to leave the real-life horrors of “Bad Roads” behind for the immersive dystopia of “Gymnasium,” a “high school opera” written and directed by Bonn Park with music by Ben Roessler. The only Volkstheater production at Radikal Jung, it is quite possibly the loopiest and most entertaining German production that premiered last year. Set in a kooky mash-up of the late Middle Ages and the 1990s, the show is a campy, riotous sendup of films like “Carrie,” “Heathers” and “Clueless” that gleefully pokes fun at American high school myths.The stock characters and plot devices of teen comedies transposed to the eccentric setting provide Park and Roessler plenty of fuel for skewering our off-kilter world. Tribalism, feudalism and superstition are among the medieval codes that are resurgent in the “post-truth” digital age. With scrappily sung musical numbers and eye-poppingly colorful sets and costumes, “Gymnasium” comments on trolling, viral rumors and climate change skepticism with a gentle satirical touch.The hand-drawn sets, the low-budget special effects — including an active volcano that looms over the school — and the rough and spirited playing of the Orchestra Academy of the Munich Philharmonic (credited as the Orchestra of Cheerleaders) help make “Gymnasium” the senior play you wish your school had been awesome enough — or your classmates talented enough — to put on.While “Gymnasium” constructed its sui generis world from history and pop culture references, “We Are in the Army Now,” from the Greek director Elias Adam, plunged its audience into a largely digital theatrical universe to probe the hopes, anxieties and confusions of Gen Z.First presented as part of an online theater festival put on by the Onassis Foundation-Stegi in Athens, this impossible-to-categorize show is a social media vaudeville where four fearless young performers bare their souls (and a lot of skin) while screaming into the cyber void.“We Are in the Army Now,” from the Greek director Elias Adam, at the Munich Volkstheater.Pinelopi GerasimouWhile their tools of self-expression are TikTok and Instagram — and many parts of the live performances are captured with the performers’ smartphones or computers and projected at the back of the stage — their grievances are old as the hills: rage at their parents, unhappy loves, the impotence to change a world that refuses to accept them. Their autobiographical monologues, staged with furious energy and physicality, are alternatively heartbreaking and empowering. In an exuberant finale, the actors engage in some kick-ass cosplay, battling against the patriarchy and their own self-destructive tendencies as glam-rock Power Rangers.Our world and the people in it need some serious sorting out. The innovative productions at Radikal Jung suggested that theater can help us untangle things, however modestly, by fostering a greater sense of solidarity with the victims of complex systems of oppression. As an actor in “We Are in the Army Now” says, “Ideology can’t be explained using emojis.”Radikal JungThrough Saturday at the Münchner Volkstheater; muenchner-volkstheater.de. More

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      ‘Titanique’ Review: A Musical Finds Its Sea Legs

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      The camp reimagining of the maritime blockbuster revs up into increasing absurdity and Celine Dion songs.“Titanic” got a lot right. After all, it grossed roughly a bazillion dollars, cemented Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as stars, spawned catchphrases and iconic poses and, most important, reminded us that romance was not dead.Yet some fans still think that wasn’t enough. After all, the movie featured only one Celine Dion song, and you had to wait over three hours to hear it. Clearly this structural defect had to be fixed.Enter “Titanique,” a musical retelling of James Cameron’s nautical blockbuster in which the co-authors, Tye Blue (also the director), Marla Mindelle and Constantine Rousouli, have cranked the Celine-o-meter all the way up. They added not just a bunch of her songs to the story, but the Canadian superstar herself. As played by Mindelle (Broadway’s “Sister Act” and “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella”), she is now a narrator who keeps popping in and out of the action.The premise is that Dion was on the doomed cruise liner in 1912 and is somehow still around to explain what happened — cue “I’m Alive,” of course. The singer mingles with the passengers, and by mingle I mean she shamelessly tries to overshadow them, sneaking in one of her hits at every opportunity. As James Corden said in his epic “Carpool Karaoke” with Dion: “You really have a song for every moment.” (The music supervisor Nicholas Connell did the arrangements and orchestrations.)Unlike, say, Bob McSmith and Tobly McSmith’s spoofs (“Love Actually? The Unauthorized Musical Parody,” “Showgirls! The Musical!”), “Titanique” does not feature an original score. It feels closer to “Cruel Intentions: The ’90s Musical Experience,” which added a number of tracks from that decade to its adaptation of the film (itself an update of “Dangerous Liaisons”). Rousouli, who portrayed the scheming Sebastian Valmont in that 2017 production, distinguishes himself again here as the lovelorn Jack. He renders him as an aw-shucks, wide-eyed naïf straight out of “Newsies,” a very funny performance that teeters inches from caricature yet never quite spills into it.“Titanique,” playing at Asylum NYC, incorporates a measure of improvisation and a strategy of shattering the fourth wall.Emilio Madrid“Titanique” is playing at the subterranean Asylum NYC, the former home of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe, a fitting spot for a show that incorporates a degree of improvisation. But it takes a little while to find its sea legs. The first scenes are frantic yet oddly sluggish, and it looks as if the entire evening will consist of Mindelle leaning hard on the goofball humor, idiosyncratic body language and seemingly random non sequiturs that have made Dion’s interviews so popular on YouTube.But eventually “Titanique” comes into its own as it revs up into increasing absurdity and the actors try to out-ham one another. Contrast that with Michael Kinnan’s one-man retelling of “Titanic,” “Never Let Go”: If that production captured the emotion running through both the movie and the feeling of watching it, this one doubles down on “Titanic” and Dion as modern camp icons. And speaking of camp: Ryan Duncan, in the drag role of Rose’s mother, is reminiscent of Everett Quinton at his Ridiculous Theatrical Company finest. Younger pop-culture fiends are more likely to spot Frankie Grande — yes, Ariana’s half brother — as Jack’s pal Luigi and Victor Garber (who played Thomas Andrews, the ship’s builder, in the film).That Grande plays the actor and his character in “Titanic” is typical of the show’s fourth-wall-shattering strategy, which is pretty much its entire strategy. As the production spins ever more crazily into a finale that involves that darn iceberg (Jaye Alexander), a lip-syncing contest and “River Deep, Mountain High,” you might as well admit you have been clubbed into satisfied submission.TitaníqueThrough Sept. 25 at Asylum NYC, Manhattan; titaniquemusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      She’ll Have You at Moo: Milky White and the Power of Puppetry

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      Once upon a time on Broadway, back in 1987, the skinny old “cow as white as milk” in the new James Lapine-Stephen Sondheim musical “Into the Woods” was played by a prop as still as a statue. The cow, Milky White, has no lines, so it worked.Years went by, the fairy-tale mash-up musical returned to Broadway in 2002, and this time Milky White was played by an actor in a cow suit. Now she could dance, and that worked, too.Decades passed, and in the frenzied spring of 2022 came a hit Encores! revival so delicious that it transferred almost instantly from New York City Center to Broadway. Now in previews at the St. James Theater, where it opens on July 10, this “Into the Woods” presents Milky White as a puppet who breathes, coughs, moos and mourns — which works enchantingly.Or as an enchantment? It is a mysterious thing, the preternatural dynamic between a puppet onstage and the people in the seats, even the grown-up ones.”We’re best friends,” the actor Kennedy Kanagawa said of the cow puppet that he brings to life in “Into the Woods.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWe, the savvy spectators, know that the puppet isn’t what it pretends to be. We can plainly see, for example, that Milky White is not an actual cow, that her scrawny ribs are built of cardboard, that an agile actor — the Broadway newcomer Kennedy Kanagawa — is operating her. But we look right past the artifice and invest in the puppet. Whereupon it unlocks in us a less guarded, more primal sympathy than we might allow ourselves to feel for a human performer.“There is a funny sort of yes-and that has to take place,” said James Ortiz, the Obie Award winner (for the puppet-filled Tin Man prequel “The Woodsman”) who designed Milky White. “There’s a magical sort of agreement that automatically happens. I really can’t explain fully why, but an audience just leans in and goes, ‘It’s real.’”In the musical, Milky White is the cow traded by Jack — the not-so-bright boy of beanstalk fame — for a pittance of five magic beans. With floppy ears, a free-swinging udder and a head of soft foam textured with paper, she has a handmade aesthetic that’s ideal for Lear deBessonet, the revival’s director, who confessed to having “almost an inverse emotional relationship” to slickly engineered production elements.For her, high-tech means low emotion. Whereas with Milky White, deBessonet melted as soon as she saw her move — though that initial glimpse was digital, in a short video that Ortiz shot after he first built Milky White.Kanagawa, Milky White and Cole Thompson during a rehearsal of “Into the Woods” at New 42nd Studios.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“He conceived a cow that has a full range of ecstasy and sadness and embarrassment and longing and all of these things,” said deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores!, who is making her Broadway debut with this production. “He knows how to leave just that right amount of space for the actor’s imagination, the puppeteer’s imagination and the audience’s imagination to combine and lift that object into this whole other stratosphere of meaning and play.”As high-profile Sondheim revivals tend to be, deBessonet’s is packed with stars: Brian d’Arcy James as the Baker, Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife, Phillipa Soo as Cinderella, Patina Miller as the Witch, Gavin Creel as the Wolf and Joshua Henry as Rapunzel’s Prince.Milky White is the principal puppet, but Ortiz has designed her some puppet company: a gargantuan and sinister pair of witch’s hands; the Giant’s elegant, open-weave boots (for which Ortiz tapped the wicker expertise of a fellow puppet designer, Camille Labarre); and, as Cinderella’s loyal friends, a flock of normal-size birds. Their wings have fragments of text on them, even though Ortiz knows the detail is too tiny for the audience to see.“The feathers are made out of torn-up pieces of poetry,” he said. “There’s also bits of Shakespeare in there from ‘Twelfth Night,’ because it’s about a young girl who disguises herself and finds love.”Early one evening in June, after the first rehearsal for the Broadway run, Ortiz and Kanagawa were sitting in a rehearsal studio on West 42nd Street, giving an interview for this article. A few feet away Milky White hung next to the birds on a metal rack, looking as lifeless as any puppet does without its puppeteer.Phillipa Soo, right, as Cinderella and Albert Guerzon, rehearsing a scene in which he operates a flock of birds, Cinderella’s loyal friends.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesKanagawa walked over and, after checking with Ortiz to make sure it was OK, took her down. Holding her by the handles, Kanagawa played with her spindly, splaying cardboard legs and recounted how he learned to shift her udder to one side when she needs to sit down. But he wasn’t puppeteering her just yet; she was still inanimate.Then he tilted her head ever so slightly, and instantly there she was: imbued with life and seemingly quizzical — even if her big, almost teary eyes are really just beveled foam coated with clear epoxy that catches the light.“Yeah, we’re best friends,” said Kanagawa, who was praised for his expert puppeteering in Alexis Soloski’s review of the Encores! production in The New York Times.It’s a recent skill for Kanagawa. Ortiz asked him to play Milky White because of his playfulness and imagination as an actor and his deep-rooted passion for the show. Then he taught him how to do it.This production has offered both of them the space to evolve the musical’s performance tradition, considering the sparsely written Milky White as a full character in puppet form.“We just kind of talk endlessly about cow logic,” Ortiz said.“Which honestly is kind of dog logic,” Kanagawa said. “Milky is a pet.”There’s the “right amount of space for the actor’s imagination, the puppeteer’s imagination and the audience’s imagination to combine and lift that object into this whole other stratosphere of meaning,” said Lear deBessonet, the revival’s director.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOrtiz, 38, grew up in Dallas, and made his Broadway debut this spring, designing the frolicsome mammoth and dinosaur puppets for “The Skin of Our Teeth” — and, the season being what it was, filling in for three performances as that show’s head puppeteer. The first live musical he ever saw was a high school production of “Into the Woods,” with a statue-style cow.Kanagawa, 37, was born in Tokyo and moved to the Washington, D.C., area when he was 10. In seventh grade, at a birthday party, he watched the video recording of “Into the Woods” with its original Broadway cast and original Broadway cow — then got his own VHS copy and, he said, “absolutely destroyed it with watching it so many times.”More recently, in Rob Marshall’s 2014 movie version (with James Corden as the Baker, Emily Blunt as the Baker’s Wife, Anna Kendrick as Cinderella, and Meryl Streep as the Witch), a genuine cow played the cow — not a casting decision likely to be emulated by many stage productions.Long before that, though, an idea percolated in Hollywood that might have permanently altered the performance tradition of “Into the Woods.” The Muppets creator Jim Henson was interested in making a film adaptation. He “saw the show and was a fan,” Lapine wrote in an email. “He was a wonderful fellow.” But Henson died in 1990.Five years later, the idea moved forward anyway at Columbia Pictures. As Sondheim recalls in his book “Look, I Made a Hat,” the animals in the movie were to be played by “Henson creatures.” The script got a couple of readings with a couple of deliriously starry casts (one had Robin Williams as the Baker, Cher as the Witch and Carrie Fisher and Bebe Neuwirth as Cinderella’s stepsisters) before, Sondheim writes, the project was killed in a studio shake-up.It’s easy to envision a profusion of puppet Milky Whites, a whole generation’s worth, blossoming forth onstage if that film had happened. Instead, the cow that deBessonet asked for, and Ortiz designed, and Kanagawa operates, will be Broadway’s first puppet Milky White.Just lean in and look into her eyes. There’s no question at all: She’s real. More

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      To Play Hamlet, Alex Lawther Became an ‘Expert on Grief’

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      The British actor shares what helped him transform into the doomed Danish prince: French poetry, “Pandemonium,” and postcard art (with breaks for lemon cake).Alex Lawther, known for his portrayal of troubled young men in projects like “The End of the __ing World” and “Black Mirror,” has taken on the Western canon’s moodiest: the title role in “Hamlet,” now running at the Park Avenue Armory.Though the English actor, 27, said his second New York stage appearance (following 2019’s “The Jungle” at St. Ann’s Warehouse) is going smoothly, the production has not been without its troubles, including an injury during rehearsals that delayed the premiere and led to the last-minute recasting of Gertrude.“Angus Wright, who plays Claudius and did so back in London, says he’s now played the part with four different Gertrudes,” Lawther said. “I suppose it’s a testament to the resilience and flexibility of actors that there’s no such thing as ownership of parts; you just find your feet in a company.”In a recent interview, Lawther described the works of art that have helped him get into the play’s tragic key; in order to embody Shakespeare’s doomed prince, he said he was counseled by the director, Robert Icke, to “become an expert on grief.”“The wonderful thing about literature is that there’s so much grief — it’s something of a whole genre,” he laughed. “So I readied some literary allies and friends, as it were; books and poets I could turn to that offered some sort of reflection on Hamlet, accidentally or not.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Pandemonium” by Andrew McMillan One of my best friends gave it to me on my birthday, and I read it in one sitting. It deals with acute suffering, but with such a language that you might have with a friend on the phone. Toward the end of the book, there are a lot of allusions to working a garden, and the connection between that, the relationship the speaker has to someone they love, and the struggle between keeping the garden alive and keeping this loved person alive. It’s not an easy read, but it’s very moving.2. The song “Grace” by Kae Tempest I started listening to the album this is from, “The Line Is a Curve,” as rehearsals kicked off, but not because I was searching for a soundtrack to the play in any way. This last song is like some ancient saint has looked something terrible in the face and come back from that only interested in talking about love. There’s this sense of experiencing pain and responding to it with masses of love. I listen to this song every night before I go onstage.3. “The Argonauts” by Maggie Nelson I remember a director once saying to me that sometimes it’s useful to think of text as an obstacle, and that you’ll never really get to say what you want to say. In the book, Maggie and her partner Harry have a conversation quite similar to that, about how you can’t blame a net for having holes, or something like that. That was a facet of something I was trying to understand with the heavy, thorny text of Shakespeare.4. “Paroles” by Jacques Prévert I live partly in France, and I speak quite good French now, but I didn’t when I first arrived. So I was trying to find French writers that I could read in French to try and get better. Prévert is amazing because, as a writer, he has immense profundity, but his language is really, really simple. For a non-speaker, you can sort of sit there quite happily, with a pencil, reading his poems, which are often quite short and with simple syntax. It’s words you might learn in high school, but the ordering of them is so beautiful.5. “Keep the Lights On” (2012) dir. Ira Sachs I wanted to watch a film set in New York before coming here, and I’d seen this one years ago and been really moved by it. It sat in my brain for a while and came back to me. There’s something so vulnerable and tender and sort of feral about Thure Lindhardt’s performance in it.6. Nigel Slater’s lemon and thyme cake I have some things that I cook again and again, and one of them is this cake. My mom introduced me to Nigel Slater, and now we both buy each other his cookbooks for Christmas. It’s basically a lemon drizzle cake but with a ton of almond powder, so it’s very moist, but it feels very grown up because you put thyme in it. It makes me feel like I’ve got control over my life and quite sophisticated, which are both sort of fantasies of mine.7. “A Common Turn” by Anna B Savage This is her debut album, and it’s extraordinary to have the courage to be as frank as she is here. It’s this otherworldly voice that touches on something almost operatic, something huge and expansive and intimate. She’s going to cringe if she reads this, but I gave our Ophelia, Kirsty Writer, a copy of this album because there’s something I think Hamlet’s obsessed with about using honesty as a tool. I think he would love Savage’s music for that reason.8. Duncan MacAskill’s postcard art MacAskill has a project he’s been doing for decades where he will send other artists pieces of his own work to wherever they are in residency. They might just be colors or cartography or collage, and he’ll often put a GPS coordinate on them, which points you to another place in London.I love the idea of an artist being in conversation with another artist through their work. I think it’s good, when you’re working in a group, to remember that there’s other work being made elsewhere, and that we’re all part of something a little bit larger.9. “Mayflies” by Andrew O’Hagan The friend who gave this to me described it as an ode to friendship, which I think is a better way of putting it than I possibly could. It’s about two young men who are best friends during their high school years. The first part is about this crazy, sort of filthy weekend they spend in Manchester and how that weekend encapsulates the whole of their youth. In the second half, 30 years later, one of them is terminally ill. It tricks you into thinking it is a coming-of-age story, but it’s more about coming to terms.10. “The Sopranos” It does something I suppose we’re trying to do with this production, which is making something on a very big scale that is ultimately about the fractured nature of being part of a family, and how complicated it is to live with other people. They live in a castle, and the choices they make influence the well-being of an entire state, but they’re still struggling as mother and son, sister and brother. More