Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Interview: Spinning A Tune With James Broadbent

      by

      James Broadbent on The Recollection of Tony Ward

      It can be the little things that grab our attention, making us eager to know more. In the case of The Recollection of Tony Ward it was simply the image of vinyl records, which along with the title, suggested that this was going to be a play about memories explored through a music collection. And that was enough to get the interest of one of our music obsessed team.

      So, we dropped the needle on our current favourite record (Fontains D.C.’s Skinty Fia just in case you were wondering), poured a couple of drinks and sat down with writer James Broadbent to find out more about the show that will play as part of May’s Peckham Fringe.

      The show follows a man who appears to be having a midlife crisis, divorced and forced to return to live with his mother – you’re clearly too young for this to be autobiographical, so what was the inspiration?

      Thanks for noting this is far from an autobiographical piece! It comes from a variety of places; the strongest of which being from when I worked in a record shop aged 17/18 – shout out to CrazyBeat Records in Upminster. I wasn’t writing at this point, and it was a simple Saturday job alongside plenty of my first experiences as a young adult.

      What struck me and inspired this piece I suppose were the customers themselves that came into the shop. How they found solace in a shop of used records and what was happening outside of the shop’s doors didn’t seem to matter. Most Saturdays were a blast and I think about them often but stepping outside I was always reminded of the strange expectation and traps of suburbia. That’s what this is all about really; traps and lessons.

      You’re bang on! Tony finds himself back at his mother’s house and while sitting alone he remembers that his record collection must be somewhere in the very house. It’s a little bit more freeform than: ‘This record reminds me of this’. Tony Ward, the protagonist, seems to be in the quietest place he’s been for a while, and this brings out an awful lot from within him.

      We’ve really tried to utilise the stage and lighting design in Tony’s journey through his youth. For a subject manner that can come across as self-pitying and defeatist it’s these memories that personally are my favourite part of the play – of the writing anyway- how Tony relishes in these moments of the past with his best friends and I really hope that the audience revels in them too.

      It’s also not all positive and yearning for the past either; Tony faces difficult memories within his marriage and experience as a father that Tal (The performer) is doing wonders with.

      So is music an important part of your life, is it an area you’d want to explore more in your writing?

      Music is an incredibly important part of my life. My older brother, Matthew, is a tremendous musician who has been writing and performing since I was around about ten. I remember my Dad bartering with bouncers at the Water Rats in Camden to let me in with him to watch because I was so underage. After this I’ve always surrounded myself with musicians as they’re always the funniest people. I’m happiest when I’m listening to new music, and I tend to write a lot more when I do too.

      This accompanied by my experience in CrazyBeat and core memories being formed at gigs and festivals with my closest friends. It’s something I love exploring in my writing too. One of my personal highlights from my previous show was seeing the audience bob and clap along to the dance routine performed at the end of the show. I want to reach that level of energy again and music is the only thing that really brings that side out of people.

      The play looks at identity and how we find our own; is this a theme you explore often, and how do you make it authentic when you aren’t anywhere near middle aged yet?

      I feel as though identity is something you are challenged with consistently in your adult life and the mistakes you make along the way. The play goes from Tony’s teenage years to the present day and there are plenty of mistakes in his lifetime. His biggest mistake for sure is the refusal to learn from any of them and that’s where the commentary on the past fifty years comes in – people believe they don’t have time for themselves because everything is moving so fast and that’s nobody’s fault, but I’m a strong believer we can always become better people. This theme is consistently challenged in my writing because I know that everybody struggles with the same big questions – ‘who am I and how do I fit into it all?’ and myself like plenty of others tend to avoid questions like these and put something on the TV for noise. 

      Making it authentic has been easier than I had envisioned. It’s not entirely naturalistic so that helps and working with an actor in Tal Profs who has been through similar life experiences to Tony has meant that he’s been able to bring an awful lot to the role. I’m nowhere near being middle-aged but the play isn’t about age really – but about proving who you are – even if that is just to yourself. Nothing more authentic than that.

      The show is part of Peckham Fringe, are such festivals a vital step in developing shows?

      Fringe festivals or shows off the beaten track of any form are the best ways to experience new art. Personally, I’ve no aspiration for anything to end up on the West End or even on screen and some people might disagree with this, but at this moment in time I think Fringe Festivals hold far more excitement than anything Between Charing Cross and Tottenham Court Road.

      Peckham Fringe is a wonderful festival, where I plan to see a dozen or so shows because you have people who, like ourselves, are working within difficult budget and time restraints but what is so clear to see is the love behind every show that is put on at these festivals.

      I think they help develop shows but perhaps in a different sense, you have companies that put themselves under enormous amounts of pressure to make something they never would have done if it wasn’t for the prospect of a show to fifty people at the end of it. The shows themselves take on new forms and cast and crew learn so much from these opportunities, so it’s great they exist and are popping up in new forms like Peckham Fringe.

      Your last show, Lovely Spread played at Camden Fringe, when you self-produced, was that a good learning curve for you?

      Such a learning curve. That was made with a very talented group of people who I can’t wait to work with again because we faced so many obstacles (covid relating and otherwise) and we overcame them together. Even six months after ‘Lovely Spread’ I know what I’d change and how I’d go about it and that’s not off the table now for another company or student production to take it and do it differently.

      I learned how important marketing is, how to make those who create and facilitate your show happy by having open lines of communication and finally I learned that my writing is good enough and trusting talented people is the key to success – so stop worrying about it all and have fun.

      What is it you hope audiences will walk away talking about when they see The Recollection of Tony Ward?

      I don’t know really. Theatrically I undeniably want people to walk away thinking that it was a step up in production value from Lovely Spread in terms of staging, lighting and sound design – they’ll see the choices we made, and they’ll have things to say on all that.

      Emotionally, it’s a strange bit of work that some people will resonate with, and some won’t. I suppose I want people to walk away from the show thinking about who they are and why that doesn’t feel enough. How being unspectacular can be the most wonderful thing if we learn to accept ourselves and learn from our mistakes.

      On reflection, I kind of don’t want anybody to talk about ‘The Recollection of Tony Ward’ but I’d like to think it would stay with them when they have a moment alone.

      And it’s on for just one day, with two performances, that clearly isn’t going to be all, have you got plans in place for where the show goes next then?

      Thanks for your optimism! We have a few festival slots booked in for later in the summer which I’m very excited about but they’ve yet to be announced – but keep an eye out. Hopefully that time round we’ll have an entirely different team because it will take the show in a new direction and grow in ways I could never even foresee.

      Thanks to James for taking time out to chat to us. The Recollection Of Tony Ward plays at Theatre Peckham on 8 May, with performances at 2.30 and 8.00. Further information and tickets can be found here. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Holland Taylor Plays Ann Richards One Last Time

      by

      Taylor, 79, first performed her solo play “Ann,” about the former governor of Texas, in 2010. Now, she’s saying goodbye to the white suit.The actress Holland Taylor had long been a fan of Ann Richards, the Democratic firebrand and former governor of Texas, and so she was “strangely overcome,” as she put it, when Richards died in 2006.“I was in mourning for months and months,” Taylor said. “I wanted to do something creative about her to use these feelings, and it just came to me in a flood that I was going to write a play about her and I was going to perform it. It was aberrant behavior for me: I am a supremely practical person, but I launched into this at 65 or [6]8 or something, absolutely blind to any of the pitfalls, any of the dangers, any of the impossibilities.”After a few years of extensive research, Taylor first performed her solo play, “Ann” (its title at the time was “Money, Marbles and Chalk”), in 2010 at the Grand 1894 Opera House in Galveston, Texas. Several productions followed, including one on Broadway that earned her a Tony nomination in 2013.“She’s not a Texan, but I think she captured the part of Texas that I am proud of — that kind of iconoclastic, funny, laconic storytelling,” said Julie White, who was raised in the Lone Star State and recorded the lines delivered by Richards’s assistant Nancy that we hear in the show.Holland slipped into Richards’s drawl and her tailored white suit for the last time during a monthlong run of the one-woman show at the Pasadena Playhouse that concluded this past Sunday. (A version of the play recorded at ZACH Theater in Austin, Texas, can be streamed on PBS and BroadwayHD.)Two days after her final performance as Richards, Taylor, 79, in a video conversation from her Los Angeles home, spoke about dark jokes, the stress of closing performances and the meaning of politics. These are edited excerpts from video and email conversations.“When you say ‘politics’ in our culture today, it has kind of a negative tone to it,” Taylor said.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesDid you ever consider including other people in “Ann”?No, because it is not a play that takes place in time — I never thought of it as being about events. I imagined the circumstances and the dialogue, but the play is very true. In the back of my mind, this is a visitation. This is what the theater allows: The theater allows you to do any [expletive] thing you want.Up to a point, since you were writing in character, based on a real person.Well, 95 percent of this play — the words, the language, the sayings — are totally my invention. So many lines emerge from the pudding of stuff in one’s brain from research. I know a joke that she told on the morning of 9/11 that was so dark. I said to the person who told me that, “Wow, that’s almost gothic.” And that person said, “Nothing was off-limits for her.” So I wrote a joke that was equally shocking. I know what she would say in given circumstances and my own ability to write funny stuff was in some way absolutely elevated. What I wrote for her is funnier than anything I could ever write for myself.Did you ever think about using more of her own words?What would be the point of that? It wasn’t like she was Abraham Lincoln. She was a very accessible speaker — even her greatest speeches are very conversational, and they’re tied to her kind of homespun, hardscrabble roots. There’s probably 10 sentences that I sliver in, like, for instance, “Why should your life be just about you?” How simple is that?How did you approach the Pasadena run?One of the reasons I did it was, I’ve always worn so many hats and had to work so hard during every production. With Broadway, the work I had to do was not onstage: There’s no one who can do press for the show but me. I’m the only actor, and also the creator behind the whole production in every way. And so on Broadway I barely had time to think, and I was executing the play at the highest level I could. Because I was not doing many other chores this time around, I thought, At last I will deal with this text as an actress. I really explored how she gets from this flagstone to the next flagstone to the lily pond to the bridge to the puddle to the stone — jumping from thing to thing. Because to have written a play is not to have prepared to perform it at all. Very different tasks.Has “Ann” changed the way you think about politics?This show is really not about politics at all.But at the end, for example, she talks about government and public service, which is — or should be — a key aspect of politics.I think it’s about participation. When you say “politics” in our culture today, it has kind of a negative tone to it. She had a practical sense of how things worked; she wanted people to be involved in their lives, where they had agency. You’re giving a [expletive] about what happens around you and to other people. So it’s all about participation: “If you don’t participate, you’re jus’ lettin’ other people make some big ol’ decisions for you.” That was political in that sense. Absolutely.What was it like to perform in front of masked audiences?It’s daunting at first but believe me, while I’m performing I have a lot of things on my mind. And I had been living for months in surgical wrapping: I was terrified of getting Covid, not for my own health but that I would shut down the production. So I had a lot of generalized anxiety and from the minute I agreed to do this, I lived behind a mask. Each day would go by and I’d say, “One more down.” We made it through and my relief was just immeasurable from not having that show close.How did the last performance go?I found the last day very stressful. Final performances have so much riding on them. I myself would never go to see an actor’s last performance, the same way I try to avoid going to opening nights, because I feel the actors’ anxiety. Openings and closings are so stressful, they’re just hard. But I think it went very, very well. People said so. I felt complete.So this was really the last rodeo for “Ann”?I could have a pang, I suppose, and maybe I will, but I don’t think I’ll ever say, “Gee, I wish I could do it again.” I am turning 80 this winter and what I do in this show is unquestionably the hardest thing I’ve ever done onstage. I don’t have that kind of confidence in my constitution any longer to say, “I’ll do another one of that.” Learning the text takes me two hours every day with someone on FaceTime, six days a week, for two months. To do this again means I have to carve five months out of my life, and there is no five months like that I can carve out of my life. A wonderful producer-director asked me on Instagram how I feel, and I said “satisfied.” I’ve achieved what I wanted to achieve. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Cost of Living’ Will Come to Broadway This Fall

      by

      Manhattan Theater Club will stage the Martyna Majok play, which explores disability and caregiving, at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Martyna Majok’s “Cost of Living,” a play that explores disability and caregiving and which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2018, will be staged on Broadway this fall.Manhattan Theater Club, one of the four nonprofits that operate Broadway houses, said it would stage a production of the play at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater this fall.The play has two parallel plots, one about a man with cerebral palsy and his hired caregiver, and the other about a double amputee and her estranged husband. The Pulitzer board described the play as “An honest, original work that invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection.”Manhattan Theater Club previously staged the play, in 2017, at its Off Broadway space at New York City Center, where it won praise from the New York Times critic Jesse Green, who wrote, “If you don’t find yourself in someone onstage in ‘Cost of Living,’ you’re not looking.”The Broadway production, like the Off Broadway production, will be directed by Jo Bonney, and it will feature two of the same performers, Gregg Mozgala and Katy Sullivan.In 2018, the Williamstown Theater Festival, which staged the first production of the play, said it had commissioned a musical adaptation from Michael John LaChiusa; a Williamstown spokesman said those plans are now “on hold.” More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Interview: Welcome To The Land of OSO

      by

      Author: Everything Theatre

      in Features and Interviews, Podcasts, Runn Radio interview

      28 April 2022

      86 Views

      Ian McFarlane on new show Forever Oz

      We met Ian McFarlane back in 2020 when we spoke to him about Revellers Society. He is now back with Forever Oz, which, as the title suggests, is based on L. Frank Baum’s series of books from which The Wizard Of Oz came. But rest assured, this is not a new stage adaptation of the film we all know and love, but instead is based on the second and third books in the series, along with some adaptations by Ian himself.

      Ian’s love of not just the Oz books, but Peter Pan are clear to hear as he tells us about the show and why his theatre company is called Big Adventure Productions. Plus we discuss why he the show will be playing at Barnes OSO Arts Centre before hopefully a tour.

      Forever Oz plays at OSO Arts Centre 19 – 22 May. Further information and bookings here. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      The Carnage of War, in Punchdrunk’s New London Show

      by

      The immersive theater company’s production invites up to 600 spectators to roam freely around a loose re-creation of the siege of Troy’s aftermath.LONDON — It’s unusual in a live performance to construct your own narrative, shaping the event as you see fit. But that has long been part of the appeal of Punchdrunk, the ambitious immersive theater company whose latest show, “The Burnt City,” opened here last week.There are no assigned seats, or even spoken words, in the company’s first London project in nine years. Instead, the co-directors, Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle, encourage up to 600 spectators to roam two onetime munitions factories (and a new structure conjoining them) and make of the occasion what they will. In my case, that meant being enthralled more often than I was baffled; others may well have the opposite response.Taking as its topic the fall of the ancient city of Troy, the show includes in its cast of characters Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Cassandra, and it dramatizes the cycle of vengeance that follows Paris’s abduction of the famed beauty Helen.The characters, played by a hard-working company of 28 who perform their scenes in a loop, aren’t identified, so you’re left to work out who might be the Trojan queen, Hecuba, or her ill-fated son Polydorus, whose murder is one of several in a narrative full of grief. If you happen recently to have read “The Iliad” or the tragedies by Euripides and Aeschylus that underpin this venture, so much the better.Wearing masquerade masks, as is the Punchdrunk norm, we begin in a hall of display cases filled with artifacts from a 19th-century excavation of supposed Trojan ruins by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann — pottery, libation bowls, headgear and other items. They form what Barrett has described as a “decompression zone” to help us shake off the outside world and plunge us into a bygone civilization. (To that end, cellphones are placed in sealed bags during the performance.)Leaving the dimly lit gallery, we embark on our chosen journey: Turn one way for Troy, the other for Mycenae, the Greek military stronghold that vanquished the smaller city around 1250 B.C.“The Burnt City” is the first London project in nine years from Punchdrunk, which also created “Sleep No More.”Julian AbramsMost of the action plays out in the capacious, high-ceilinged rooms of the warehouse representing Mycenae, including Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia and his eventual murder — here graphically depicted in a shower. (Nudity is presumably one of several reasons that playgoers ages 16 and 17 are allowed entry only with “a responsible guardian.”) Stephen Dobbie’s mood-setting sound design thrums ominously throughout, and at several points we encounter some frenzied, furious dancing in which Doyle, a noted choreographer, lets her performers cut loose.Troy, by contrast, is a deliberate mash-up of eras and references, and the exemplary design team of Barrett, Livi Vaughan and Beatrice Minns get to have some macabre fun. This neon-lit labyrinth features a department store called Alighieri’s that evokes the underworld of Dante, and piles of bones to remind us of the siege of Troy’s carnage. An illuminated sign advertises “finest fake flowers,” for anyone who might want to pay respects.In contrast to previous Punchdrunk shows — like the company’s signature New York success, “Sleep No More” — there is little buttonholing of individual playgoers for one-on-one encounters (perhaps not so desirable in the age of social distancing), and the proceedings don’t build to the usual galvanic finale. You depart impressed by a concerted appeal to the imagination, though maybe another go-round is needed to fill in the gaps.Punchdrunk asks audiences to expect the unexpected, and so, in its way, does “Daddy: A Melodrama,” the Jeremy O. Harris play running through Saturday in its London premiere at the Almeida Theater. Directed, as in New York in 2019, by Danya Taymor, the production places an infinity swimming pool downstage — not the first thing you expect to see upon entering an auditorium.Terique Jarrett and Sharlene Whyte in Jeremy O. Harris’s “Daddy: A Melodrama,” directed by Danya Taymor at the Almeida Theater.Marc BrennerSpectators in the first few rows shield themselves as the actors splash about, with frontal nudity, as in “The Burnt City,” presented unselfconsciously. The frolics serve a story that grips across nearly three hours, even as it tilts after the intermission toward the melodrama of the title. Telling of a Black American male artist and the older white “daddy” who acts as the younger man’s patron and lover, Harris’s play is a parable of possession, in which people can be owned, just as art can.The charismatic Danish actor Claes Bang (now onscreen in “The Northman”) plays Andre, a European art collector based in Los Angeles, and the hugely gifted Terique Jarrett, handed the driving part, plays Franklin, the mid-20s boytoy who makes dolls of varying sizes — and who may represent a doll of sorts to Andre.Complications arise when Franklin’s deeply religious mother, Zora (Sharlene Whyte, commendably fierce), arrives for a visit only to voice displeasure with the lifestyle her boy has chosen. “What happened?” she demands to know of the Bible-quoting son who once sat on her lap in church. Franklin’s chums take their own poolside view of events: “So I guess since Mom’s a no-go,” says Max (the musical theater actor John McCrea, in waspish form), “Daddy has to suffice.”Whyte’s Zora faces down her son with an outsize grandeur worthy of Punchdrunk at its most heightened. The male leads, meanwhile, expertly chart the changing dynamics of a liaison at risk of burning itself out. Franklin, for all the fuss made over him, looks poignantly set on a path toward loneliness, left with not so much a burnt city as a scorched soul.The Burnt City. Directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle. One Cartridge Place, through Dec. 4.Daddy: A Melodrama. Directed by Danya Taymor. Almeida Theater, through April 30. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Billy Crystal Carries the Tune in ‘Mr. Saturday Night’

      by

      In a mishmash new musical based on his 1992 movie, he charms the audience as a has-been comic reconnecting with family.On the heels of “City Slickers,” just a few years after “When Harry Met Sally,” Billy Crystal was at the apex of his film stardom when he made the 1992 movie “Mr. Saturday Night.” If you watch it now, you can see why it flopped, not least because Crystal was playing against type as Buddy Young Jr., a ruthlessly selfish has-been comic with a vicious streak.At the time, Crystal was in his 40s; for much of the film, Buddy is in his 70s. And Crystal embodied him with a middle-aged comedian’s idea of that later phase of life: under old-guy makeup so egregious that viewers couldn’t possibly suspend disbelief, and with the physical mannerisms of an ancient — like Miracle Max, Crystal’s indelible elder from “The Princess Bride,” but without the charm.Three decades later, Crystal too is in his 70s, and in the new musical comedy “Mr. Saturday Night,” which opened on Wednesday night, he slips much more naturally into Buddy’s skin. As a piece of theater, the show is a bit of a mess; the jokes, even some of the hoary ones, work better than the storytelling, and the acting styles are all over the place. Still, it makes for a diverting evening — because it will almost surely make you laugh, and because of how acutely tuned into the audience Crystal is.Ad-libbing his way through the script, fine-tuning the funniness, he feeds off the energy of the crowd at the Nederlander Theater. Like Buddy, who mopes around his New York apartment in a tragic cardigan, lamenting the gigs he’s been reduced to taking — the morning slot at a retirement center is, after all, no comedian’s dream — Crystal is utterly in his element performing live. 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 musical, though, is an ungainly beast, by turns zany and sentimental. Directed by John Rando, with a mood-setting score by Jason Robert Brown (music) and Amanda Green (lyrics) that goes vocally easy on its star, it has a book by the film’s screenwriters, Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. Less cynical and more hopeful than the movie, it gives us a Buddy who is still cruel but not so callous, and thus a better candidate for our sympathy.That’s despite the myriad ways in which he has failed his brother, Stan (the immensely likable David Paymer, an Academy Award nominee for the same role in the film), who has sacrificed his own ambitions to be Buddy’s manager; his wife, Elaine (Randy Graff, stymied by an almost total lack of chemistry with Crystal), who has put Buddy first for half a century; and their daughter, Susan (Shoshana Bean, in a beautifully calibrated performance), who at 40 has been justifiably angry with her father since she was 5.David Paymer, left, as Buddy’s brother and Randy Graff, right, as his wife.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Mr. Saturday Night” traces Buddy’s second chance at life and fame, set creakily in motion one night in 1994, when he catches the in memoriam montage on the Emmy Awards broadcast and sees his own face and name appear right after John Candy’s. Buddy gets booked on the “Today” show to crack wise about the error.As his career wobbles toward possible resuscitation, he gradually notices that he’s been a schmuck to the people who love him. “Hurt them” is the command he has always used to psych himself up before he goes onstage, but however many audiences he’s killed, he’s done lasting harm at home.In the film, the brothers’ relationship is paramount. In the musical, the father-daughter fracture comes to the fore, while Elaine — whose only solo, a fantasy about going to Tahiti, is the show’s most cuttable song — is again strikingly under-imagined. (The six-piece orchestra, which sounds terrific, is conducted by David O.)“Mr. Saturday Night” means to be a valentine to both the bonds of family and the comedians of a bygone age — pros like Buddy, who got his big break in the 1940s at a Catskills resort and hosted a hit TV show on Saturday nights in the ’50s, before he blew a hole in his career with his loose-cannon arrogance.The costume designers, Paul Tazewell and Sky Switser, have their silliest fun dressing Buddy’s wacky sidekicks — Joey (Jordan Gelber), Bobby (Brian Gonzales) and Lorraine (Mylinda Hull) — for the musical’s ’50s flashbacks. A singing, dancing pack of cigarettes, anyone? (The choreography is by Ellenore Scott.)As for Crystal’s singing, he doesn’t have the range to play Fanny Brice, but he doesn’t need to. He does OK. Paymer, in Stan’s one emotional outburst set to music, kind of, sort of, almost approaches singing but doesn’t have those chops. Which works on a meta level, because Buddy is the brother who’s at ease onstage.What’s surprising is how unpersuasive the show is when the principals play decades-younger versions of their characters — a transformation that in theater, so much less literal a medium than film, can require no more than an altered demeanor. Bean is the only one to tap into that simplicity.Shoshana Bean as Susan, Buddy’s estranged daughter, in the musical, which is based on a 1992 film.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut most of the show unfolds in 1994. By then, Buddy’s old sidekicks are fixtures at the Friars Club, and so is he. Though if Lorraine is a member, she must be a relatively recent one; in the real world, the Friars Club of New York admitted its first female member, Liza Minnelli, in 1988.This is where nostalgia gets tricky. That boys’ club territoriality is the backdrop to an encounter at the Friars that the authors have kept largely, and unwisely, unchanged from the movie: when Buddy, expecting a powerful male agent to join him for lunch, is met instead by a smart young female agent, Annie (a sunny Chasten Harmon, who has a fizzy chemistry with Crystal).Annie, who will prove to be a godsend for Buddy, handles comics for a major agency. Yet she has never heard of any of the comedy greats whose names he fires off at her in a bullying pop quiz, or even, apparently, of the Friars Club — implausible for an industry professional, and almost impossible so soon after the Friars’ infamous 1993 roast of Whoopi Goldberg. Annie is written as ignorant just so that Buddy can school her, which carries a strong whiff of dinosaur on the authors’ part.Of course, Buddy himself is a caveman. When his old pals called him and Elaine “Fred and Wilma” — as they did, affectionately, at the performance I saw, Crystal not being the only one enlivening the script with variations — it was funny because it’s true.But Buddy does want to evolve, at least a little. If his epiphany about his need to change seems to arrive out of nowhere, buoyed by piano and brass in a lovely, impassioned solo, we root for his redemption anyway.This is a musical that wants its guy to get a happy ending. Despite all of the show’s faults, and all of Buddy’s, it turns out that so do we.Mr. Saturday NightAt the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; mrsaturdaynightonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘POTUS,’ White House Enablers Gone Wild

      by

      Seven female farceurs bring Selina Fillinger’s new Broadway comedy about the president’s protectors to life.Keep your eye on the bust of Alice Paul.You remember Paul, the suffragist who helped secure the vote for women in 1920 and then went on to write the still-unratified Equal Rights Amendment? If not, you could head downtown to the Public Theater to see “Suffs,” the musical about Paul and her colleagues.But uptown, Paul is a projectile. Or rather, in “POTUS,” the snappy and intermittently hilarious farce that opened on Wednesday at the Shubert, a plaster sculpture of her face is. It’s Paul who brings down the first act curtain of Selina Fillinger’s rough-and-tumble feminist comedy — and with it, in a way, the patriarchy itself.I’d be giving away too much to say exactly how a sculpture undoes Fillinger’s nameless and unseen president, who may remind you of someone who in real life recently held the position and still thinks he does. The play, in any case, is happy to be rid of him. Its lumbering subtitle — “Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” — makes clear that “POTUS” is less interested in the incompetent man than in his hypercompetent enablers.“POTUS” is in fact an encyclopedia of enabling, a natural field guide to the various poses that women who subcontract their souls get into. The classic cases are Harriet, the president’s beleaguered chief of staff, and Jean, his constantly blindsided press secretary. What Jean (Suzy Nakamura) tells Harriet (Julie White) applies to them both: “You stand in for him every single day, you’ve done it for years. You clean up his messes, you make excuses, you do his job, and then you wake up and do it all over again.”Rachel Dratch, left, and White in Selina Fillinger’s rough-and-tumble feminist comedy, directed by Susan Stroman.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn the day “POTUS” is set, that means trying to keep the president on track as he faces a series of public engagements, including a nuclear nonproliferation conference, a political endorsement, a photo op with disabled veterans and a gala honoring a women’s leadership council with the apt acronym FML. By 9 a.m. he is already disastrously off course, having referred to the first lady, at his first appearance, with a word that should have been unspeakable and is at any rate unprintable here.Though there appears to be no love lost between the two, Margaret, the first lady, is no Melania Trump, except for the catlike smugness that’s the top note of Vanessa Williams’s sleek performance. Margaret is spectacularly accomplished: a graduate of Stanford and Harvard, a lawyer, an author, a gallerist and a taekwondo practitioner. She must nevertheless put up with and cover for her husband’s tawdry affairs, including one with a “woke powderpuff” named Dusty (Julianne Hough), who shows up at the White House vomiting “blue raz” slushies.How Dusty enables the president with her own spectacular accomplishments, which include both adventurous sex play and flax farming, I leave for Hough — who, like the play, is gleefully filthy — to reveal.In any case, Dusty introduces a new note to the proceedings, which until her arrival seem, in Susan Stroman’s prestissimo production, at least loosely tied to reality. You can imagine how a woman like Stephanie, the president’s secretary, who speaks five languages and has a photographic memory, might still be disdained as a loser in this environment, because she’s fainthearted and has no polish. The first lady calls her “a menopausal toddler” — a description that Rachel Dratch, with her repertoire of cringes and moues, fully inhabits.And Lilli Cooper, winning even when whining, makes it easy to imagine how a woman like Chris, a Time magazine journalist and a newly divorced mother, might be worried about her job despite her experience and expertise. There are always, Jean warns her, younger male colleagues who “can out-tweet you, out-text you, chug a Red Bull and work three days straight.” Whereas Chris, on hand to interview the first lady, spends most of the play multitasking just to keep afloat — coordinating with her babysitter, her ex, her editors and her subjects while either pumping breast milk or leaking it.Still, you would readily include her as one of the women about whom the play asks, in frustration and shock, “Why aren’t you president?”Dusty does not fit that bill, gifted though she may be. Nor does the seventh character, Bernadette (Lea DeLaria), the president’s exuberantly butch and frankly criminal sister. The only country you could imagine her as president of would be a despotic narcostate, the kind that DeLaria, having a ball in the role, suggests is not much different than ours.From left: Cooper, White, Dratch and Vanessa Williams on Beowulf Boritt’s turntable set.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf Dusty and Bernadette, as outside forces, are necessary for forwarding the farce, they gnaw at its underpinnings. The point of the satire, so perfectly sharp in the initial confrontations — with White and Nakamura making a terrific comedy team — begins to dull as the emphasis shifts from verbal to physical humor.That physical humor is not always expertly rendered. (Dratch does it wonderfully, but the fight choreography is unconvincing.) And the turntable set (by Beowulf Boritt) that efficiently rotates the early action from room to room, like a White House Lazy Susan, seems by the second act to be spinning of its own accord, signifying hysteria but not giving us much chance to absorb it. (The sitcom bright lighting is by Sonoyo Nishikawa.) As the women move from cleaning up men’s messes to making messes of their own, you may feel some of the air, or perhaps the milk, leaking out of the comedy.In a way, that’s a faithful expression of Fillinger’s belief, as she told Amanda Hess in The Times, that “if you take the man out of the room, patriarchy still exists and we still play by its rules.”But in extending that idea to comedy, Fillinger, like a politician, is trying to have it both ways. In this, her Broadway debut, the ways aren’t always working together. As a farce, “POTUS” still plays by old and almost definitionally male rules; farce is built on tropes of domination and violence. On the other hand, and more happily, “POTUS” lets us experience the double-bind of exceptional women unmediated by the men who depend on their complicity. “He’s the pyromaniac, but you gave him kindling,” Chris, the journalist, tells the others.Or as Harriet, the chief of staff, puts it in a line that Alice Paul might have appreciated: “He can’t last if you stop saving him.” Maybe that’s true of male-dominated farces as well.POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him AliveThrough Aug. 14 at the Shubert Theater, Manhattan; potusbway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      ‘A Strange Loop’ Review: A Dazzling Ride on a Mental Merry-Go-Round

      by

      Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning meta musical arrives on Broadway with its uproarious dialogue, complex psychology and eclectic score intact.When the homophobic, God-fearing, Tyler Perry-loving mother of Usher, the protagonist of the remarkable musical “A Strange Loop,” describes her son’s art, she uses the word “radical.” She doesn’t mean it as a compliment.But “A Strange Loop,” Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning meta musical about a Black queer man’s self-perception in relation to his art, is radical. And I definitely mean that as a compliment.This musical, a production of Page 73, Playwrights Horizons and Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, forgoes the commercial niceties and digestible narratives of many Broadway shows, delivering a story that’s searing and softhearted, uproarious and disquieting.“A Strange Loop,” which opened Tuesday night, isn’t just the musical I saw in the packed Lyceum Theater a few evenings ago; it’s also the musical Usher (Jaquel Spivey), a 25-year-old usher at the Broadway production of “The Lion King,” is writing right in front of us.He’s facing a few hurdles, namely his intrusive thoughts, embodied by the same six actors who originated the roles in the 2019 Off Broadway premiere: L Morgan Lee, James Jackson Jr., John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey and Antwayn Hopper. They give voice to his anxieties of being a plus-size Black queer man, his alcoholic father’s constant denigration and his mother’s pleas to stop running “up there in the homosexsh’alities” and produce a wholesome gospel play instead.Through scenes that move between Usher’s interactions with the outside world, like a phone conversation with his mother or a hookup, and a constant congress with his most devastating notions of himself, “A Strange Loop” pulls off an amazing feat: condensing a complex idea, full of paradoxes and abstractions, into the form of a Broadway musical.Jackson’s script for what Usher calls a “big, Black and queer-ass American Broadway” show and Stephen Brackett’s lively direction both cleverly find comedy, critique and pathos in contradictions. “A Strange Loop” shrewdly negates itself at every turn: Usher may resent the shallow pageantry of commercial theater, poking fun at such tourist bait as “The Lion King,” but he also steals the names of Disney’s favorite wildcats for his family, calling his father Mufasa and his mother Sarabi. (It’s satisfying to note that “A Strange Loop” is playing just down the street from the Minskoff Theater, which has housed the Broadway goliath since 2006.)There’s something almost naughty about the show’s subversions. “I’m sorry, but you can’t say N-word in a musical,” says one of Usher’s thoughts, imagined as the “chair of the Second Coming of Sondheim Award.” But the 100-minute show is comfortably potty-mouthed, containing repeat utterances of that very N-word, as in the catchy yet malevolent chorus to “Tyler Perry Writes Real Life.”The six actors surrounding Spivey, seated in jeans, embody his competing thoughts, from left: James Jackson Jr., L Morgan Lee, Antwayn Hopper, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey and John-Michael Lyles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe paradox at the center of it all, of course, is Usher himself, whose brazen theatricality and caustic wit lies beneath his meek exterior. Though a newcomer — this is not only his Broadway debut but also his first professional gig after graduating from college last May — Spivey gives an earnest, lived-in performance. He shrinks away, tucks his chin, rounds his back into the concave silhouette of a turtle shell and gives bashful sideways glances so tender they could melt an ice cream cone in winter.But there’s also a thorny underside to Spivey’s Usher; he spits out phrases, pops his hip and snaps his head in a scathing display of Black stereotypes. His most searing jokes leave a satisfyingly sour aftertaste, like the bitters at the bottom of an unmixed drink. When a cute guy on the train asks him, “Did you see ‘Hamilton’?” Usher responds with an offhand sneer, “I’m poor.”Usher’s thoughts are vibrant foils, each confidently strutting the stage in Montana Levi Blanco’s wide-ranging costume designs (coordinated ensembles in neutral colors, neon and glitter-speckled accessories, fishnets and latex fetish gear) and twerking and thrusting in Raja Feather Kelly’s uninhibited choreography.A whirligig of worries, memories and concerns, Usher’s thoughts spin daily in his head. Jackson nails his comic beats in a piquant performance, full of withering looks and haughty snickers, while Veasey is suitably horrifying when he embodies Usher’s father, drunkenly questioning his son about his sexuality.Hopper, who most recently appeared as the monstrous pimp in the New York City Center’s production of “The Life,” and has a bass voice with the richness of hot honey, is downright viperous in the musical’s most harrowing scene, set ironically to an upbeat country rhythm. It’s is one of the best examples of the score’s incongruous approach.From left: Jackson, Lyles, Veasey, Spivey, Hopper, Morrison and Lee in the show, with choreography by Raja Feather Kelly.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Exile in Gayville,” in which Usher hesitantly logs into a flurry of dating apps only to be flooded with rejections, is buoyant pop-rock. And when Usher encounters a slew of disapproving Black ancestors like James Baldwin and Harriet Tubman, the song (“Tyler Perry Writes Real Life”) is a slow, steady creep. The whimsical woodwinds and skippy beat of “Second Wave” undercut its lyrics about loneliness and, well, ejaculation.In one instance, however, the production strikes a simple note. In one scene, Lee portrays a “Wicked”-loving tourist who gives Usher a pep talk, urging him to tell his truth in a sincere, optimistic song that recalls that show’s “Defying Gravity.” Given the calculated sharpness of the rest of the musical, especially regarding the commercialism of Broadway, such a carpe diem song feels out of place. The balance is sometimes off in other respects too: On the night I attended, the cast was ever so slightly off-tempo, and some lyrics were muffled by the bombast of the orchestra.Arnulfo Maldonado’s set design aptly captures the many entryways “A Strange Loop” opens into its protagonist’s — and playwright’s — mind. Throughout most of the show Usher stands before a simple brick backdrop with six doorways through which his thoughts pass in and out. That is, until the stage transforms speedily into a grim spectacle of neon lights and exaggerated embellishments, reflecting everything Usher refuses to produce in his own art. The lighting (design by Jen Schriever) — which frames the stage in concentric rectangles — is a nod toward the show’s nested conceit, and the gradual fade-outs and the blitz of radiant hues complement the sections.The tricky task I face as a critic is figuring out how to write about a work whose brilliance has already been noted. The New York Times named the show a critic’s pick in 2019, and I wrote briefly about the show’s Broadway tryout in Washington, D.C., this fall. It’s already won the Pulitzer.And yet, it seems as if there is no measure of praise that could be too much; after all, this is a show that allows a Black gay man to be vulnerable onstage without dismissing or fetishizing his trauma, desires and creative ambitions. Now that’s some radical theater.A Strange LoopAt the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; strangeloopmusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More