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      Interview: I.D.S.T. What Does It All Mean?

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      Jack Condon on his play If. Destroyed. Still. True.

      This week’s guest on our Runn Radio show was Jawbone Theatre‘s Jack Condon. Jack is a writer and actor, and If. Destroyed. Still. True. will be his first full length play when it comes to the Hope Theatre between 26 April and 14 May.

      We hear about the play and its themes of what happens when the place you grew up is no longer a place you feel you can call home, and how that affects relationships. As Jack explains, it is a theme he feels is universal and something experienced by so many people.

      We also hear why the play was originally going to simply be called I.D.S.T. and what the phrase means, plus why the play is being filmed and how he hopes this will allow it to be seen by audiences in small towns and villages who may associate with its themes.

      If. Destroyed. Still. True. plays at The Hope Theatre from 26 April. Further information and bookings can be found here. More

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      Matthew Broderick, Starring in Broadway’s ‘Plaza Suite,’ Tests Positive

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      Matthew Broderick, who is now starring on Broadway in a revival of the Neil Simon comedy “Plaza Suite,” has tested positive for the coronavirus. He did not perform Tuesday night, and it is not clear when he will return to the show.Broderick’s co-star, Sarah Jessica Parker, who is also his wife, has tested negative, and went on Tuesday night opposite Michael McGrath, who is Broderick’s Tony Award-winning understudy. (McGrath won in 2012 for a production of “Nice Work if You Can Get It” that starred Broderick.)Broderick’s positive test result comes as coronavirus cases have once again been rising in New York City, and a number of Broadway shows have been affected.Last Saturday, the actor Daniel Craig was among several members of the company of a new Broadway production of “Macbeth” to test positive, and that show has since canceled all performances until Monday. More

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      Alan J. Hruska, a Founder of Soho Press, Dies at 88

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      A litigator for 44 years, he was also a novelist; a writer, director and producer of plays and films; and helped establish the independent publishing house Soho Press.Alan J. Hruska, a corporate litigator who had a second, wide-ranging career as a founder of the independent publishing house Soho Press, which invests in serious fiction by unsung authors; as a novelist; and as a writer, director and producer of plays and films, died on March 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was lymphoma, his daughter, Bronwen Hruska, the publisher of Soho Press, said.Even before Mr. Hruska retired from his day job at Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York in 2001 after four decades there, he published his first novel, in 1985. The next year, with his wife, Laura Chapman Hruska, and Juris Jurjevics, a former editor in chief of Dial Press, he founded Soho Press.Soho Press made its reputation by welcoming unsolicited manuscripts from little-known writers. Its ambitions, Mr. Jurjevics said, were “not to have a certain percentage of growth a year and not to be bought by anybody.”Soho Press, based in Manhattan, has specialized in literary fiction and memoirs with a backlist that includes books by Jake Arnott, Edwidge Danticat, John L’Heureux, Delores Phillips, Sue Townsend and Jacqueline Winspear. The company also has a Soho Teen young adult imprint and a Soho Crime imprint that publishes mysteries in exotic locales by, among others, Cara Black, Colin Cotterill, Peter Lovesey and Stuart Neville.Mr. Hruska (pronounced RUH-ska) often said that there was less of a vocational disconnect between lawyering and literature than met the eye. Both, done successfully, he said, are about storytelling, whether arguing a case in a legal brief or writing a novel, script or screenplay.“I was a trial lawyer, and, while I would expect my actors to remember their lines better than my witnesses did, there is less disparity between the two professions than might be thought,” he said in an interview with a blogger in 2017.“A trial and a play are both productions,” he added. “Putting each together involves telling a story. So does writing a brief or making an oral argument to a panel of judges. If you don’t tell a story, you will very likely put them to sleep.”Mr. Hruska made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005.Joan MarcusAlan Jay Hruska was born on July 9, 1933, in the Bronx and was raised in Far Rockaway, Queens. His father, Harry Hruska, was in the textile business. His mother, Julia (Schwarz) Hruska, was a homemaker.While he was undecided on a profession, Alan had a penchant for filmmaking that took hold when he was 8. As a youth, he would ride the subway into Manhattan to attend double features at first-run movie theaters.After graduating from Lawrence High School on Long Island, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale in 1955 and was persuaded to apply to Yale Law School by a college professor who was impressed by his skills in logic and rationalization. He, in turn, found the law to be an ideal vehicle for his writing and reasoning.He graduated from the law school in 1958, the same year he married Laura Mae Chapman, one of three women in their law school class.She died in 2010. In addition to their daughter, he is survived by two sons, Andrew and Matthew; his wife, Julie Iovine, a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, whom he married in 2013; and six grandchildren.Mr. Hruska borrowed from his litigation experiences in major cases in writing a number of his novels, including “Wrong Man Running” (2011); “Pardon the Ravens” (2015); “It Happened at Two in the Morning” (2017), which The Wall Street Journal said showed the author “at his thriller-writing best”; and “The Inglorious Arts” (2019).Michael Cavadias as the cross-dressing character Wendy in a scene from the romantic comedy “Nola,” a 2003 film written and directed by Mr. Hruska.Samuel Goldwyn FilmsHe also wrote and directed the film “Nola,” a romantic comedy starring Emmy Rossum which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.Other films of his include “The Warrior Class,” a comedy about a rookie lawyer that premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2005; and “The Man on Her Mind,” an existential comedy based on his play of the same name, which premiered at the Charing Cross Theatre in London in 2012.He made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005. Ten years later, when a surreal play of his about love, marriage and an impending hurricane opened, the critic Alexis Soloski wrote in The Times in 2015, “If an existentialist philosopher ever attempted a light romantic comedy, it might sound a little like ‘Laugh It Up, Stare It Down,’ Alan Hruska’s quaintly absurdist play at the Cherry Lane Theater.”Mr. Hruska oversaw a wide range of civil litigation at Cravath in the 44 years before he retired in 2001. He was named senior counsel in 2002. He also served as secretary of the New York City Bar Association.Asked by The American Lawyer in 2015 whether he ever felt that the law was not his true calling, he replied: “Not at all. I had a great experience. I did about 400 cases, won 200 and settled 200. I’m particularly proud of the settlements because they can put people in a much better position than winning a case.” More

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      Interview: Going Underground with Richard II

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      Quandary Collective on Bringing Shakespeare’s Richard II to The Vaults

      We never grow tired of seeing new companies find new unique ways to present Shakespeare to us. For plays that are centuries old, it’s amazing how easily they seem to still hold relevance for us today.

      Quandary Collective are the next to bring something new to the table with their Vault-bound Richard II. Taking Shakespeare’s words, they promise a fushion of muscular movement, bloody violence and electronic beats, to bring you a gut-wrenching rendition of Shakespeare’s classic that’s somewhere between Mad Max: Fury Road, an episode of Game of Thrones and what it might have been like to stand in the pit at The Globe in 1595. This young company’s fearless adaptation looks at what it means to lead a country, the insidious effects of toxic masculinity, and why gender continually seems to matter in positions of power.

      With such ambitious sounding plans, it seemed a good time to sit down to ask them more, especially whether we were going to see Mad Max style vehicles screeching through the Vault’s dark damp tunnels.

      What do you bring that’s new to this version of Richard II?

      A thorough investigation of the text, shining a light on current politics and a possible outcome of the direction our world is heading in right now. Throw in a good dollop of muscular movement, and a sprinkling of electronic beats and you have our adaptation of Richard II.

      The Vaults have hosted some great promenade shows, is this another that is going to walk you through the tunnels with the action?

      No, the play is staged end on in the Vault’s main theatre space. Though the lines between the real and imagined blur, we in no way intend to convince anyone that this isn’t a play. 

      You’re taking the show to The Vaults, are those damp tunnels a perfect location for such treacherous tales?

      Oh, they so are. The atmosphere neatly settles the audience in to the near future were we are setting the play, with the trains at Waterloo running over us and becoming part of the world. Think Mad-Max meets the 13th century in a strange combination of renaissance, chivalry and religious fanaticism clashing with raw brutality and cave-man violence.

      And how do you keep Shakespeare relevant and fresh for new audiences?

      For one, by not using what we like to call the “Shakespeare-voice“. Of course verse isn’t the way we speak to each other day to day, but we still look to talk to each other as human beings. Plus we love regional accents, which often brings such beautiful roundedness to Shakespeare’s poetic language. We also use other devices like the movement and music to really bring the world to life and hopefully excite and delight audiences.

      The play is considered very political, can we draw any parallels to modern day then?

      It’s all about politics, and the parallels are baffling. How did Shakespeare know?! Couldn’t be more relevant. First, the clash of old and young, different generations, and their miscommunications are one major theme of the play. Also, the current situation in Europe means the importance of peace which lives very deeply in some of the characters is something Europe is just relearning. 

      You’ve changed Richard to be “a woman presented as a man”; how does change the play then?

      In the bones of it, it doesn’t change anything. The original version talks about the historical Richard being seen as a bad king for not being enough of a warrior, as his father and grandfather were, for which there is historical evidence such as a letter preserved from his uncle Gloucester essentially slagging him off for the very reasonable political decisions Richard made, as they were seen as weak and soft. Effectively calling him a wet bag! So the idea of a woman playing the part presenting as a man feels like it just highlights those elements. Though there may be a surprise or two in store for the audience still.

      There is mention of Mad Max in the show blurb – you aren’t going to drive futuristic cars around the tunnels are you? Or is the reference more to do with overall style?

      It’s about the style for sure, and a useful shared cultural reference to get an idea of the kind of world we are setting the play in. Although if we had the budget for futuristic cars, this might be a different answer…

      And you’re promising electronic beats, which suggests it’s going to be loud? Should we bring ear plugs?

      Ear plugs won’t be needed, but there is pumping beats and a lot of high-energy movement. We hope you’ll be feeling the beats with us rather than wanting to stop your ears up.

      The play clocks in at a daunting 2 hours 45 minutes (including interval), how do you keep an audience’s attention for such a long show, especially given what we know of the Vault’s seating! Were you not tempted to start making a few cuts here and there?

      Oh, we have cut the play! We have cut about 35 pages and reduced the character number from around 36 characters to 11. Still though, we are not worried about keeping the audiences’ attention. Firstly, the play is really funny – which isn’t always obvious in such a dark story, but it truly is. Secondly, the music, movement, violence and feel of the word brings the language and world alive. So really time will fly!

      You are on for a month at The Vaults, will you see daylight at all in April then?

      Hahahahaha, luckily we are only on in the evenings so we won’t turn into strange underground tunnel creatures ourselves, just our characters…

      Thanks to Quandary Collective for heading above ground to chat with us.

      Richard II plays at The Vaults 6 April to 8 May. Further information and bookings can be found here. More

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      ‘Garbageman’ Review: Just a Couple of Straw Men

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      In Keith Huff’s new play, two friends head to the Jan. 6 insurrection, but this production substitutes unfunny cartoonishness for the characters’ humanity.The title of Keith Huff’s new play, “Garbageman,” shouldn’t be taken at face value, even though Huff pretty much asks you to.The garbageman in question isn’t Buddy Maple, a 30-something white guy who has spent his career in sanitation: first right out of high school, working for his unnamed American city; then, hooked on OxyContin, managing a recycling plant where he found — and kept — a preserved human head that seems to speak to him. After that, he started driving a garbage truck in another town, where he, oops, ran over someone.Nor is the garbageman Dan Bandana, Buddy’s poisonous, well-armed old pal — also addicted to OxyContin, by the way — to whom he relates this series of events the way a person might to a stranger in a bar. Still, Dan is such an obnoxious creep that the surprise in his back story isn’t that his wife has left him. It’s that he was able to persuade anyone to be with him in the first place.The true title character in this dark, meandering sociopolitical comedy is both unseen and unnamed, at least formally. Dan and Buddy call him “The Guy.” They voted for him. And when “Garbageman” takes them on a road trip with Dan’s guns, it’s to Washington, D.C., for the Jan. 6 insurrection. The leathery human head, its mouth permanently agape, is stashed in the trunk.Over the top though the play is, it wants to get at something urgent about a spreading rot in American culture, fed by festering resentments around class, race and gender. But Greg Cicchino’s world premiere production for the Chain Theater in Manhattan has mostly omitted the characters’ human elements in favor of aggressively unfunny cartoonishness that makes “Garbageman” easy to dismiss.The tone isn’t quite one-note, but maybe one and a half. Kirk Gostkowski, the theater’s artistic director, is so relentlessly belligerent as Dan, and Deven Anderson is so blandly flat as Buddy, that it’s hard to believe in them as people, let alone swallow the idea of these two guys as friends. Even when they make a murder pact, nothing seems at stake.Huff, best known as the author of the Broadway play “A Steady Rain,” a box-office hit in 2009 that starred Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman as Chicago cops, has spent his stage career telling Chicago stories. He deliberately leaves the city in “Garbageman” unspecified, but the nearby town where Buddy works is called Gurnee — which in real-world Illinois is home to a Six Flags amusement park called Great America. Huff doesn’t mention that detail, but there’s mordancy in it; this is a play about the state of the nation.The desire to make a broader statement may be why he doesn’t call Dan and Buddy’s hometown Chicago, but it’s a mistake to blur the geography. It leaves productions free not to bother being rooted in particularity, accents and all. The rhythms of Huff’s dialogue are the rhythms of Chicago. Take them away and three dimensions collapse into two, as they have in this production.I could not tell, after seeing it, whether the play might work as written. So I read it in a Chicago accent — with Bill Murray, circa “Stripes,” playing Dan in my head, and John Candy (Canadian, true, but he did Chicago movies, and his accent passed easily for Upper Midwestern) as Buddy. Fantasy casting did the trick: Outrageous comedy suddenly coexisted with pathos. These two extreme screw-ups were still dangerous, even more so now because they had personal appeal.Dan and Buddy are broken American Everymen, but they’re broken Chicago-style.GarbagemanThrough April 16 at the Chain Theater, Manhattan; chaintheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      ‘Downstate’ and ‘Catch as Catch Can’ in Playwrights Horizons New Season

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      The company has announced five works for its 2022-23 lineup, which will include Agnes Borinsky’s “The Trees,” directed by Tina Satter.“Downstate,” a Bruce Norris play that The New York Times’s chief theater critic, Jesse Green, has called a “squirmy moral-thrill-ride,” will make its New York premiere in October as part of Playwrights Horizons’s new season, the company announced on Monday.As Adam Greenfield, the artistic director for Playwrights Horizons, put it: “If theater is here to catch us off guard, to shake our foundations, to make us rethink our values and realize the ways in which we’re hypocrites,” Norris can really point that all out.“I sometimes think he’s like the Molière of our time,” Greenfield said in a recent Zoom interview.The 2022-23 season will be Greenfield’s first full, in-person season since assuming the role of artistic director in 2020. And the five-show lineup, which features coproductions with Page 73 Productions, MCC Theater and WP Theater, is packed with themes emerging from the pandemic lockdown, including a variety of perspectives on “normalcy.”The lineup includes Mia Chung’s “Catch as Catch Can,” a drama in which two white, working-class New England families examine what Greenfield called “the slipperiness of identity and the way identity can fall apart or collapse,” and the debut of Agnes Borinsky’s “The Trees,” a parable of two siblings who fall asleep in the park and wake up literally rooted to the landscape.“Catch as Catch Can,” which, in 2018, The Times called a “tender horror story,” returns in October. This time, it is being staged with an all Asian cast playing the Irish and Italian working class — with actors also playing double roles of father and daughter, mothers and sons.“The Trees,” which will premiere in February 2023, is special to Greenfield. He knew this Borinsky play was the first work he wanted to program when he became artistic director.“She sees the world sweetly despite seeing all of the reasons not to,” he said. The play, which, Greenfield described as involving two people who turn into trees and the community that forms around them, will be co-produced with the incubator theater company Page 73 Productions (the company’s latest work was the spooky political drama, “Man Cave”).The earthy Off Broadway production will have plenty of shine from Broadway visionaries. “The Trees” will be directed by Tina Satter, whose fall 2021 Broadway docudrama “Is This a Room” received critical acclaim. And the last time Playwrights Horizons and Page 73 teamed up, it was to debut “A Strange Loop,” which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for drama and opens on April 26 for its own Broadway run.The other shows, slated to debut in March 2023, are the world premiere of Julia Izumi’s “Regretfully, So the Birds Are,” (a coproduction with WP Theater), described by Greenfield as a surprise-filled “Swiss Army knife of a play” with “a delicious sense of goofy comedy” centered on three siblings making sense of unreliable parents.Also in March is John J. Caswell Jr.’s “Wet Brain” (co-produced with MCC Theater), a candid drama that follows siblings (also a set of three) struggling to find language for closure and grief — in outer space. It’s a science fiction version of the American family play that, Greenfield said, “explodes open.” More

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      ‘Balkan Bordello’ Review: A Tragic Tale Reborn for a Time of War

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      In this international production, you can check into the Balkan Express Motel, if you dare, and fulfill an ancient generational curse.To Orestes, the discord between his parents is part of “the family dysfunction.” That’s true as far as it goes, but it does gloss over some gruesome details: his military commander father, Agamemnon, sacrificing Orestes’s sister, Iphigenia; and his mother, Clytemnestra, avenging her favorite child’s death by killing Agamemnon when he returns home from war.It’s the sort of history that might leave a person haunted, and so it does in the angry and eloquent “Balkan Bordello,” a contemporary retelling of Aeschylus’ “The Oresteia” by the Kosovan playwright Jeton Neziraj. When Agamemnon’s ghost steps out of the fog one night, like Hamlet’s restless father come to sic his son on the one who wronged him, more bloodshed quickly follows.Harm begets harm in this cursed cycle of violence and retribution, with one generation’s grievances handed down to the next in a society devastated by war and living in its long, ugly aftermath. In theory, then, “Balkan Bordello” is unusually well suited to this moment, when so many anxious eyes are on the myriad blossoming horrors of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Directed by Blerta Neziraj, the playwright’s wife, at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater, this show does look splendid, on a set the color of blood and rage, lust and heat. The production’s very provenance — as a collaboration involving La MaMa; Qendra Multimedia in Pristina, Kosovo; Theater Atelje 212 in Belgrade, Serbia; and the international group My Balkans — is emblematic of hope.And its cast of 10 includes two Serbian actors who deliver performances of thrilling magnetism — Svetozar Cvetkovic as Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s pompous, prolific poet lover, and Ivan Mihailovic as a war veteran who returns alongside Agamemnon, with the captured Cassandra (Verona Koxha, a Kosovan actor) slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain.But there is a chaos to the production that has nothing to do with the disorder of the little world it depicts, inside Clytemnestra’s Balkan Express Motel, where she and Agamemnon raised their children. On Thursday night, the show felt under-rehearsed and underconfident, with spotty sound and some American actors seemingly uncertain of their lines.The greater frustration, less likely to resolve itself, is that the set (by Marija Kalabic and Nico de Rooij), so flatteringly lit (by Yann Perregaux and de Rooij), is too far-flung for the play’s intimate, intricate machinations. In its vast space, the staging muddies the storytelling.Audience members sit at either end, a few at cafe tables — an unwise choice for people who don’t want to become part of the show, particularly those who would cringe at being urged to get up and dance. Wherever you sit, some of the action is likely to be lost on you because of sightlines and distance and occasional onstage tumult.Smoothly translated by Alexandra Channer and performed in English, with much of the dialogue projected (also in English) on an upstage backdrop, the play is nonetheless a smart and striking take on “The Oresteia.” Its surreal qualities are amped up by Gabriel Berry‘s madcap costumes — Aegisthus, in jacquard jacket and velvet pants, is an absolute dandy; Clytemnestra wears golden shoes — and Gjergj Prevazi’s choreography, into which characters erupt, sometimes while still seated at cafe tables.But there is a kind of abstraction to the performances by the members of La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company, in contrast to the immediacy of the Balkan actors’ work. George Drance’s Agamemnon exudes a hail-fellow-well-met energy, without any of the smoothed-over barbarity you might expect. Even with Cassandra, his human war prize, he lacks menace.Admittedly, the charismatic, fully realized performances by Cvetkovic and Mihailovic put the scales of the production out of whack. Kushtrim Hoxha, a Kosovan actor, is also strangely compelling as Pylades, Orestes’s choreographer friend from Berlin — a representative of the non-Balkan Western world and its condescension toward the region.While Clytemnestra (Onni Johnson) and Orestes (Eugene the Poogene) both end up with blood on their hands here, Mihailovic is the one who brings a sense of simmering violence and physical danger into the room. When he makes a furious, stomping exit up the risers on one end of the stage, the threat of savagery reverberates in his every footfall. When Pylades asks him about his experiences in the war, his answers are unnerving, but the slow smile on his face is even more so.It is left to Aegisthus, the poet, to rail against the war and what it has wrought. “Oh my people,” he writes. “Beware the warlords, my people.”Not that he is innocent, of course. Before Clytemnestra does away with Agamemnon, her lover has his own thirst for blood.“I like to imagine his body cut into pieces, his eyes staring out like a dead fish,” Aegisthus says, with an even-tempered hatred that makes him entirely terrifying. “But all that matters is that he’ll be over with. He’ll be done, and we’ll live happily ever after.”That’s the eternal fantasy, isn’t it — that just one more act of violence will even the score, and retribution will cease. Spoiler/not spoiler: Aegisthus ends up murdered, too.“They’ve sent me to hell by mistake,” his ghost says. “I have filed a complaint.” More

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      Review: In ‘Paradise Square,’ Racial Harmony Turns to Discord

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      In a new musical starring Joaquina Kalukango, the love between Black and Irish New Yorkers in a Manhattan bar is threatened by Civil War riots.Everything in “Paradise Square” is true. Nothing in “Paradise Square” is true.Yes, history shows that in 1863, after Abraham Lincoln extended the Civil War draft to include all white men between the ages of 25 and 45 — Black men being excepted because they were not considered citizens — mobs of disgruntled Irish Americans rose up against Black people in New York, burning buildings and killing many in their path.And it’s true that in the impoverished, piano-shaped district of downtown Manhattan called Five Points, some Black and Irish neighbors who had been living together in relative harmony joined forces to resist the mobs.But in hammering these large-scale events into individual stories, and in manipulating them so performers have reason to sing at top volume and dance nearly nonstop, the uplifting, star-making, overwrought new musical, which opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, turns history on its head. Racism becomes an individual character flaw instead of a systemic evil; resistance, the solitary moral genius of a hero.Chloe Davis, foreground center left, and Sidney DuPont in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn this case, the hero is Nelly O’Brien, or really Joaquina Kalukango, who plays her with enough guts, stamina and vocal bravura to make you believe in a character glued together from the shavings of history. Nelly is the proprietor of a (fictional) Five Points bar and brothel called Paradise Square: “a little Eden” where, as one of the bald lyrics by Nathan Tysen and Masi Asare puts it in the title song, “We love who we want to love/with no apology.”Indeed, Nelly is married to the Irish American Willie O’Brien (Matt Bogart, suitably strapping). His sister (and Nelly’s best friend), Annie Lewis (Chilina Kennedy, absurdly fierce), is married to a Black minister, the Rev. Samuel Jacob Lewis (Nathaniel Stampley). When Annie’s nephew Owen (A.J. Shively) arrives from Ireland, around the same time that Samuel, a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad, brings Washington Henry (Sidney DuPont) to Paradise Square en route from Tennessee to Canada, the joint begins to seem like a rooming house for incendiary plot points.The cast of “Paradise Square” includes, foreground from left: Gabrielle McClinton, DuPont, Kalukango, Chilina Kennedy, Nathaniel Stampley and Davis.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMost of the characters — and there are 10 major roles — seem less like people than ideas with human masks. Willie’s war buddy Mike Quinlan (Kevin Dennis) represents the unemployed Irish workers easily swayed by demagogic politicians. A white pianist and composer who turns plantation tunes into uptown hits (Jacob Fishel) represents, somewhat anachronistically, the problem of cultural appropriation — though it’s a nice touch that some Stephen Foster songs, like “Camptown Races,” are reappropriated in Jason Howland’s music.Another Foster song — “Oh! Susanna” — gets an even more interesting overhaul, insidiously connecting the show’s all-purpose villain, Frederic Tiggens, as he fans the Irish rebellion, to racist Southern tropes. (Foster’s melody is reset with the lyric “You were true to a country that wasn’t true to you.”) Alas, none of Tiggens’s dialogue is as subtle; a vaguely defined “uptown party boss” set on shutting down the “depravity” of places like Paradise Square, he leaves the performer John Dossett little to do but metaphorically twirl his mustaches.If most of the score suffers from a mild case of overstatement — whipping up a series of generic rock ballads and throat-shredding anthems — the book and staging suffer from full-blown emphasitis. The book, credited to Christina Anderson, Craig Lucas and Larry Kirwan, is especially problematic. Based on Kirwan’s musical play “Hard Times,” and apparently rewritten heavily in nine years of development, it strips everything down to the naked basics as it tries to accommodate so many characters along with a checklist of sensitivities.Kevin Dennis, far left, and A.J. Shively, top right, rise up against the draft in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’m a sucker as much as the next critic for liberal pieties, and I appreciate the stance of a musical centered on Black lives that has its heroine say, near the end, “We pass on to you this story on our own terms.” But strong stances do not make up for weak characterization or suggest why such strength is necessary. That the position of the Irish and other white immigrants is not nearly as effectively dramatized as that of the Black characters is morally good but theatrically dull.In that combination, I feel the meaty hand of the producer Garth H. Drabinsky, who seems to have used his influence to shape “Paradise Square” into a likeness of his previous hits. Like “Ragtime” in 1998 and the 1994 revival of “Show Boat,” it frames social unrest as the product of a few representative individuals and tries to fill the inevitable gaps with big sound and stagecraft. It also borrows a famous plot device from “Show Boat” — which is effective here even if the debt goes otherwise unpaid.But unlike those musicals, which were built on the frames of strongly written novels by authors with singular voices, “Paradise Square” feels almost authorless despite its many contributors, and the direction of Moisés Kaufman, known for a strong hand and conceptual coherence, does little to erase the impression of anonymity. (The design elements are likewise merely efficient.) Contingent and anxious, the show seems more interested in saying the right things than in telling a coherent story.DuPont, left, and Shively in the show, which has choreography by Bill T. Jones.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWait — I take that back: It does tell a coherent story, in two ways. One is in the dancing, which employs a kaleidoscopic crash of contextual styles, including step dance for the Irish characters and Juba for the Black ones, to explore, far more subtly than the book, the place where appropriation and joyful sharing meet. (If unlikely as a plot point, the dance-off between Owen and Washington is a high point emotionally.) Again, many hands are at work here, with Bill T. Jones heading a musical staging team of at least five other choreographers, but the result scores its points effectively.The other source of coherence in “Paradise Square” is Kalukango, who somehow alchemizes the remarkable difficulties of the role into her characterization, making it incredible in the good way instead of the bad. Having seen her previously as Cleopatra in “Antony and Cleopatra,” Nettie in “The Color Purple” and Kaneisha in “Slave Play,” I am not exactly surprised, but they were more successful pieces of writing. Nothing really prepares you for the moment when an actor brings everything she has to the stage and essentially writes what needs to be said while you watch. It makes you believe in making history.Paradise SquareAt the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; paradisesquaremusical.com. Running time: 2 hours and 40 minutes. More