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      In Salzburg, New Lives for Two Scandalous Plays

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      Works that once horrified European audiences are now centerpieces of the drama offerings at the tony Austrian festival.SALZBURG, Austria — The 1920 premiere of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Reigen” provoked a riot in a Berlin theater. A year later, in Vienna, the work was shut down by the police. Shortly afterward, the playwright, who was prosecuted for indecency, banned further performances in Germany and Austria. The play, a merry-go-round of love affairs with a cast of characters drawn from all echelons of society, was not performed again in German until 1982, over half a century after Schnitzler’s death. Instead, its fame spread in translation, including French film adaptations by Max Ophüls and Roger Vadim.Last week, a new play inspired by Schnitzler’s succès de scandale premiered at the Salzburg Festival, where it was one of two reworked classics during the event’s opening days. The Salzburg Festival is, of course, better known for its musical offerings, including the high-profile opera premieres it rolls out each summer, but drama is Salzburg’s oldest tradition, dating back to the production of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Jedermann” that opened the first festival, in 1920. Nowadays, the plays at the festival draw a more diverse crowd than the exorbitantly priced operas, but Salzburg remains a blue-chip event, and the audience is swankier (and generally older) than your typical theatergoers in Berlin or Hamburg.For her Salzburg debut, the Latvian American director Yana Ross asked European writers under 50 to devise new scenes using “Reigen,” a cycle of 10 pre- and postcoital dialogues, as a rough guide. The result is a 21st-century homage that bears little resemblance to the original. As an anthology of short dramatic texts by a diverse group of established and emerging writers, it is both varied and, perhaps inevitably, uneven.Ross strings them together in a handsome production set in an upscale restaurant. Throughout the evening, the constantly reshuffling couples meet to share the quiet intimacy of a meal, with the tables and their occupants reflected in a large tilted mirror. The seven main actors dance their way from scene to scene to the strains of Maurice Ravel’s “La Valse,” or electronic and pop music.It feels like a misstep to start the production with a difficult, experimental retelling of the original play’s opening scene: a rendezvous between an eager prostitute and a reluctant soldier. The poetic rewrite, by the Austrian Lydia Haider, mixing heightened and vulgar speech, is a confusing way into the piece. And the Swiss playwright Lukas Barfüss’s unsettling and surreal version of the closing scene, where the erotic carousel comes full circle, is similarly disorienting and cryptic.Foreground from left, Urs Peter Halter, Sibylle Canonica and Matthias Neukirch in “Reigen.” Lucie JanschIn between, however, the production is on more solid footing, starting with the Finnish author Sofi Oksanen’s thoroughly contemporary reworking of the play’s second dialogue, between a soldier and a chambermaid.In Oksanen’s version, a man flirts over the intercom with his food delivery courier and then panics when she accepts his invitation to come up and share his dinner. Face to face with her, he is painfully awkward. Eventually, she discovers that her customer is a far-right internet troll, a revelation that sours any attraction she might have felt. Tabita Johannes lends the courier a shy curiosity before lashing out at the creep who’s lured her into his living room. It is one of several dazzling turns by Johannes, who like much of the cast belongs to the acting ensemble of the Schauspielhaus Zurich, where the production will transfer in September. (The majority of “Reigen’s” authors are women, and the female characters are generally better written and more interesting than the men.)Johannes also appears as a woman who accuses her boss of forcing himself on her, in a #MeToo-era twist on Schnitzler’s dialogue between a young man and a chambermaid. In the scene, by the French Moroccan author Leïla Slimani, the woman takes her employer to court, where she recounts his serial abuse in painful detail. Elsewhere Johannes gets to show her seductive, manipulative side as the clandestine lover of an older female author, in a scene by the Berlin writer Hengameh Yaghoobifarah that is the only one approaching the sexiness of the original play.Several other episodes are awkward fits, including one by the Hungarian author Kata Weber, about an actress nearing 40 who is terrified that her career will evaporate in her middle age. Lena Schwarz’s flamboyant, scenery-chewing performance notwithstanding, the episode comes across as clichéd and seems off topic.The production’s biggest gamble is a Skype conversation between a mother and son, written by the Russian author Mikhail Durnenkov. (The split-screen video is projected onstage.)Durnenkov, who now lives in Finland, rewrote the segment after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. The opening dispute, about a family friend arrested for kissing a man at a protest, works better than the son’s subsequent revelation that he is going into exile. “As long as we live here, they’re making war in our names. I won’t give them that right,” he says, struggling to convince his conservative mother. I can understand Durnenkov’s desire to make an antiwar statement, but his ideas are poorly dramatized and it is unclear how his scene relates to the others.Dagna Litzenberger Vinet, standing, as Alma, with Lilith Hässle as Berta and the ensemble in “Ingolstadt,” directed by Ivo van Hove.Matthias HornSeveral years after the “Reigen” premiere, Berlin kicked up another legendary Weimar Republic theater scandal with a 1929 production of Marieluise Fleisser’s “Pioneers in Ingolstadt.” Set in Fleisser’s Bavarian hometown, the play follows the fortunes of a young woman, Berta, who falls in love with Korl, a callous soldier stationed in town to repair a broken bridge. Audiences were shocked by the play’s depiction of small-town sexism and military cruelty, embellished for the premiere by Bertolt Brecht, who co-directed the production and staged the scene where Berta loses her virginity to Korl in an onstage shed that shook during their lovemaking.In Ivo van Hove’s new Salzburg Festival production, that scene is far more explicit than anything Brecht could have gotten away with. The Belgian director stages it unambiguously as a rape scene, with Korl pinning Berta down as she screams and flails in the shallow water that covers most of the large stage. It is one of many violent acts — stoning, torture, drowning, you name it — enacted with much squirming and splashing during the unrelentingly grim production.Van Hove, making his festival debut with this coproduction with Vienna’s Burgtheater, where it will transfer in September, fused “Pioneers in Ingolstadt” with an earlier play by Fleisser, “Purgatory in Ingolstadt,” about a pregnant schoolgirl and a former classmate with a savior complex. A new script, by Koen Tachelet, weaves the two plays together in a seamless, but not entirely convincing, way. The actors bring Fleisser’s hard, cold dialogue to life in emotionally raw performances, but they are miserable company to spend two and a half hours with. All that water onstage can’t wash away the humiliation and suffering. Nor did all the staging’s violence and cruelty produce a tremor of outrage. In lieu of a riot, the festival audience responded with polite, generous applause.Reigen. Directed by Yana Ross. Salzburg Festival through Aug. 11.Ingolstadt. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Salzburg Festival through Aug. 7. More

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      George Bartenieff, Fixture of Downtown Theater, Dies at 89

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      A veteran actor, he was also a founder of Theater for the New City and Theater Three Collaborative, Manhattan groups known for experimental productions.George Bartenieff, an actor and producer who was a significant figure in the Off Off Broadway and experimental theater world as a founder of two theater groups, died on Saturday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 89.His wife, the playwright Karen Malpede, said the cause was the cumulative effects of several advanced illnesses.Mr. Bartenieff had credentials that might have led to a mainstream acting career. He was on Broadway before he was 15 and in the 1960s appeared there in plays by Edward Albee and John Guare. His smattering of film and television credits suggest that he could have made a character-actor’s career just out of playing a judge or a doctor on series like “Law & Order.”But he much preferred to be involved in the kinds of socially conscious, form-bending plays staged in downtown Manhattan and, sometimes, out on the street.When Judith Malina and Julian Beck of the Living Theater, the avant-garde repertory company they founded in the 1940s, presented Kenneth H. Brown’s scalding play about a Marine prison, “The Brig,” in 1963, Mr. Bartenieff was in the cast. He appeared in productions of the Judson Poets’ Theater, an experimental group in the same period. Later in the 1960s he worked with the director Andre Gregory at the Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. After he returned to New York, he and his wife at the time, Crystal Field, founded Theater for the New City in 1971.That group has been presenting adventurous theatrical works, many on social and political themes, ever since. After a divorce from Ms. Field, Mr. Bartenieff married Ms. Malpede in 1995, the year they and Lee Nagrin founded Theater Three Collective. It, too, has presented numerous plays since, many of them avant-garde, socially conscious works by Ms. Malpede, with Mr. Bartenieff in the casts.Mr. Bartenieff, left, and Ben Piazza in Edward Albee’s one-act play “The Zoo Story,” staged in 1965 at the Cherry Lane Theater in Manhattan. It was part of a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” in which Mr. Bartenieff also performed.The plays he was in or produced dealt with issues he was concerned about, like environmental degradation or the effects of war — generally not the kinds of themes that made for widespread commercial success. He worked occasionally in the mainstream world, taking small parts in “Law & Order,” “Rescue Me” and other television shows and movies like “Julie and Julia” (2009), but that wasn’t his comfort zone.“More than fame or fortune, he wanted to make a difference with his art,” Ms. Malpede said by email. “He knew that the vision(s) of ‘Law & Order’ and so much else were same old, and he wanted the world to change.”“For George,” she added, “the vision, the worldview, the poetics were the most important. We raided every savings account, pension, etc., we ever had to do the work we loved. As simple or as strange as that.”George Michael Bartenieff was born on Jan. 23, 1933, in Berlin to Michael and Irmgard (Prim) Bartenieff, who were dancers. His father was Jewish, and as the situation darkened in Nazi Germany the parents went to the United States to try to establish a life, leaving George and a brother, Igor, in the care of an aunt.“I’m half-Jewish, so I was hidden in the German half of my family,” Mr. Bartenieff explained in an oral history recorded in 2015 for the Primary Stages Off Broadway Oral History Project.He attended a school in the Bavarian mountains that was somewhat removed from the turmoil elsewhere in Germany, and he remembered it fondly, especially the pageants the school would stage on various holidays.“It made you aware that storytelling was as important as living,” he said of those spectacles.His parents had settled in Pittsfield, Mass., using their dance expertise to start a physiotherapy business, and in 1939 they brought the boys over to join them. It was a time when German immigrants in the United States faced suspicion, something that The Berkshire Eagle, the local newspaper, sought to dispel with a 1940 article about the young newcomers.“Neither child spoke a word of English when their parents met them at the pier in New York,” the newspaper said. “But in six months they’ve learned not only to speak English, but good, honest ‘United States.’ George is in the fourth grade at Mercer School; Igor, in the sixth. Either one can say ‘You bet’ and ‘OK’ quicker than you could yourself.”A few years later, Mr. Bartenieff’s parents split up and the boys relocated to New York City with their mother, a devotee of the dance theorist Rudolf Laban, who would go on to found an institute in New York devoted to his ideas.When he was 11, Mr. Bartenieff saw a friend perform in a play and determined that that was what he wanted to do. His mother enrolled him in a dramatic arts workshop.“One day,” he recalled in the oral history, “a Broadway stage manager spoke to one of our teachers and said, ‘Do you have a boy who’s around 14? — because we need an understudy for a show that’s just started rehearsal.’”He went in to read for the director, Harold Clurman, a famed figure in New York theater. During out-of-town tryouts, as Mr. Bartenieff told the story, his work as an understudy so impressed everyone that the boy in the part was let go and he was promoted to the main cast. The show was a comedy called “The Whole World Over,” and Mr. Bartenieff made his Broadway debut in it in 1947.He was in a second Broadway show while still a teenager, the Lillian Hellman play “Montserrat,” in 1949. After graduating from high school he was accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He spent four years in England before returning to New York in the mid-1950s, landing in the midst of the Beat era.Mr. Bartenieff with Lois Markle, left, and Judith Ivey in the Albee play “The American Dream” at the Cherry Lane Theater in 2008. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“One of the things about that moment in New York was that there were so many people who were half mad and half inspired by their own visions,” Mr. Bartenieff said in the oral history. It was, he added, “a moment when you were constantly being surprised by something you’d never seen before.”Soon he was among those creating surprises. One of the things that he and Ms. Field were known for once they started Theater for the New City was street theater, performed in unexpected places for unpredictable audiences. In 1985, Ms. Field recalled an early show performed at a playground in Brooklyn, in which Mr. Bartenieff played a purse snatcher and she portrayed a youngster who screams.“I had always shut my eyes when I screamed because it had to be loud and from a sitting position,” she said. “When I opened them, the entire au­dience was on its feet, chasing George.”In the mid-1970s, she and Mr. Bartenieff worked with the puppeteer Ralph Lee to turn his idea for a Greenwich Village Halloween parade into a major event that continues to this day.In addition to his wife, Mr. Bartenieff is survived by a son from his first marriage, Alexander; a stepdaughter, Carrie Sophia Ciminera; a granddaughter; and two step-grandchildren.Among his most ambitious projects with Ms. Malpede was “I Will Bear Witness,” a one-man play performed by Mr. Bartenieff that the two of them adapted from the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who documented Nazi cruelties from inside the Dresden ghetto. After the play had its premiere at Classic Stage Company in Manhattan in 2001, they took it on tour, including to Berlin, Mr. Bartenieff’s birthplace. The experience resonated deeply with him.“I don’t think Klemperer’s diary is your typical Holocaust literature, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have got past the first page,” he told The Irish Times in 2002, during the Berlin run. “So much love is in this diary, so much humanity, so much violence and poetry.” More

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      Interview: Joining some CUMTS for a Sleepover

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      Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society on new musical Sleepover

      Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2022

      Whilst most of us at ET are focusing on Camden Fringe this August, it’s impossible not to cast an eye the other side of the border to Edinburgh, the home of the fringe festival to top them all! Every year thousands of theatre makers head to the city to put on their shows and spend way too much on accommodation!

      Amongst those numbers are Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society (or CUMTS but you can probably see why we may avoid using that), who are taking their show Sleepover to Just the Tonic at The Caves from 4 to 28 August. Our last memory of those venues was watching a show during a torrential downpour in 2019 when the water was literally running down the walls! Fingers crossed CUMTS won’t have to put up with quite the same experience.

      Always keen to chat to the new creatives who we hope will go far, we grabbed a little time with Laura and Mia from the team before they packed their bags for Edinburgh.

      Shall we start with a quick summary of what we can expect if you come along to see Sleepover, what’s it all about then?

      Laura: SLEEPOVER tells the story of Jenny – that’s me! – who’s hosting her first ever sleepover on the last day of high school! (Her Jamaican Chinese mom never let her have one.) She’s prepared snacks, decorations, and a very special game filled with questions about sex! Come along to join her and her friends as they rap and sing about every inappropriate question you had growing up!

      You’re a musical society, so is it safe to assume Sleepover is going to be a musical? What’s the musical style for the show?

      Laura: You’re a quick one! The music is based on the heritage’s of the character – so everything from dancehall to traditional Chinese instruments! It’s a bit Hamilton, a bit Carnival, and a lot of love.

      You call it a coming-of-age show – as university students, can you all relate to the show then?

      Laura: I’ll be honest – I wrote the show so I could ask my own questions under the guise of acting. Why are there so many sex positions, and realistically, how many am I supposed to know?

      Mia: Oh absolutely! I remember having that moment of panic just before I went to university when I suddenly felt like I had to know everything about my friends, in some mad nihilistic rush of “how will we ever stay friends unless I know exactly what your preference in partner is in intimate detail?”. I think the show really captures this feeling and recognises that it’s an important part of this transition, but doesn’t need to be a negative thing – it can be fun to learn about your friends’ sex lives!

      It’s an original show, was it written with Edinburgh already in mind then?

      Laura: I applied to the opportunity from CUMTS, knowing that the end game was a show in Edinburgh. Knowing this, I made things slightly more inappropriate – I hear the Fringe crowd goes wild!

      Mia: Laura is a slightly confused Canadian who didn’t really know what an ‘Ed-in-berg’ was, but she’s very enthusiastic for the experience! I’m excited for the Fringe to welcome her with open arms!

      We assume it’s had a run already to iron out any kinks? How did that all go? What did you learn from its first public showing?

      Laura: Absolutely not. We’re a balls to the wall type production. If we fail, we promise to do it extraordinary.

      Mia: The only ironing I have done so far is that of Emoji peaches onto T-shirts (so do look out for us on the streets of Edinburgh)! But as Laura said, we are throwing ourselves in at the deep end and adapting as we go, which for me is equal parts intimidating and thrilling. Failure is just another good friend we may make along the way! On a completely unrelated note, I’ve heard the more people that buy a ticket, the closer I will get to having a normal heart-rate.

      CUMTS must have a long history of taking shows to Edinburgh, have any of you been to the festival previously then?

      Laura: No, I don’t think so! We’re all Edinburgh virgins (and some of us will also be virgins in Edinburgh!).

      Mia: This is true both in terms of Fringe, and for many of us, the city itself! Everything is new and exciting and that enthusiasm is really radiating from the cast as we approach opening day!

      And Six came from CUMTS as well, is that a burden around everyone’s neck trying to produce another show that might go on to such success?

      Laura: You’d think, but we’re a completely different type of show. SIX is the headliner, we’re the awkward local band opening. But we have something that SIX doesn’t have – a crocheted eggplant.

      Mia: SIX is kind of like our talented older sibling – they’ve done so well that whatever we achieve, Mum will never be proud of us. However, in many ways we’re grateful for this because it really takes the pressure off! We’re just here to create a piece of theatre that we’re really excited about, and I think this joy really comes across in the show!

      The shows on at 4.30, so leaving you all evening to explore. Have you got your eyes on any other shows we should try to see?

      Laura: I just discovered Lauren Lopez is coming to Fringe with Lottie Plachett Took a Hatchet. I will be queueing down the street every single night to meet my idol. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get a signed restraining order…

      Mia: As first student fringe-goers, we’re super excited to support other student shows, of which there are so many and it is always worth giving them a shot if you are looking for things to see! Evening shows include Cambridge’s own: Cicada’s Children, Real Mad World, and Blue and Pip. Also give Durham’s “Cottage” a go! As an all queer cast and crew we are very much drawn to it!

      And to wrap things up, tell us why we should all be coming to see Sleepover in August?

      Laura: I think sometimes we get lost in the busy of the everyday that we forget when the world was a lot bigger and confusing. SLEEPOVER is our cozy love letter to the late night conversations with our best friends, the times you share things that you never thought you’d ever tell another living soul. And it’s okay, because it’s your best friend. We want to be your best friend. 

      Sleepover plays at 4.30pm at Just The Tonic at The Caves from 4 – 28 August. Further information and bookings can be found here. More

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      Barrington Stage Company Names Alan Paul as Artistic Director

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      The nonprofit helped make the Berkshires a destination for culture lovers under Julianne Boyd, who is retiring.The Barrington Stage Company announced Wednesday that Alan Paul, the associate artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, will become its new artistic director, taking over the nonprofit theater company in Western Massachusetts known for producing notable new musicals and popular revivals and helping turn the Berkshires into a cultural oasis.Paul, who has worked at Shakespeare Theater Company since 2007, will succeed Julianne Boyd, the Barrington Stage Company’s co-founder, who is retiring at the end of the 2022 season after leading the company for 27 years.Paul’s programming for the theater company will begin with the 2023 season, officials said.“He is an enormous talent, a successful director, a collaborative leader, invested in community and a champion of diversity and inclusion,” Marita Glodt, the nonprofit’s board president, said in a statement. “He has demonstrated his love of classics, musicals and new works and his extensive knowledge of the theatrical canon. He will honor the past and develop new and exciting programming for our audiences.”In a telephone interview, Paul said he has been a fan and audience member of the Barrington for many summers. “It’s an incredible incubator for new plays and musicals by diverse voices,” he said. “I come from a classical theater, but musical theater has been what I’ve done the most — what I love.”Paul added that he was looking forward to the opportunity, as an artistic director, to both reimagine older musicals and continue developing new ones. “I’m most excited about musicals that can push the whole genre forward,” he said. “I want to be a part of that.”Asked to cite examples of such work, he pointed to a production of “Camelot” at the Shakespeare Theater Company in which he made some tweaks to the classic musical to focus more narrowly on the theme of democracy. In terms of new musicals, he said he had been inspired by “A Strange Loop,” a meta-musical about a Black queer man and his art that won the Tony Award for best musical this year.“One of my jobs at the theater is going to be to maintain the wonderful audience they have and bring some new people to the Berkshires,” he said.Under Boyd, the company expanded from what was once a modest nonprofit renting space at a high school in Sheffield, Mass., to what is now a five-building operation in Pittsfield, Mass. The company attracts more than 60,000 patrons each year, and it has staged a number of productions that have found success beyond the Berkshires, including “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” a revival of “On the Town” and “American Son,” all of which played on Broadway.Boyd, in her own statement, said she had “connected artistically” with Paul “from the moment I met him.”“I am so proud of the work we’ve done at B.S.C. in close to three decades,” she said, “but it is time for someone to lead the theater in exciting new directions.” More

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      Interview: There’s No Getting Away from Kevin

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      Kevin P Gilday on his EdFringe show, Spam Valley

      Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2022

      When we were at Edinburgh in 2019 we couldn’t seem to avoid Kevin P Gilday. He first cropped up as a guest in Loud Poets, then a few days later he accosted us coming out of a venue flyering for his own show, Suffering From Scottishness. Luckily, he is also a lovely man and we did enjoy both shows, so we didn’t mind being accosted all that much! In fact, he was so charming we found ourselves buying one of his poetry books as well.

      So, when Kevin dropped us a line to let us know he is back in Edinburgh this year with his latest show, Spam Valley, we felt almost compelled to find the time to chat to him to discuss not just the show, but where else he might be popping up this year.

      Spam Valley plays at The Stand’s New Town Theatre 4 – 14 August, 10pm. Tickets and info here.

      We really should start with the obvious, what can you tell us about Spam Valley, what’s it all about then?

      Spam Valley is a show all about class. Specifically, about feeling like you don’t belong in your own class. It’s about that negotiation between the individual and society. Of seeing tribalism and feeling left out. It’s also my story – how I grew up poor but still didn’t get to stake my claim to being working class, how I ended up being surrounded by middle class people when I became a poet, how that’s left me feeling like I’m floating in my own space sometimes.

      It’s also supposed to be funny.

      And what/ where is Spam Valley?

      Spam Valley is a mythical land. It’s used to refer to neighbourhoods all over Scotland. Places that are seen as a wee bit posh. Crucially, the inference is that the people living in these neighbourhoods are doing it to look posh and can’t actually afford to live there which means they have a big house but have to eat spam for their dinner. Hence, Spam Valley – a very specific class-based insult up here.

      You certainly dip your toe into many genres, spoken word, stand up and a little acting, what can we expect to see you up to in Spam Valley?

      It’s a theatrical monologue at its heart but – as always – that spoken word sneaks in, it’s such a massive part of my work that it had to find a place amongst the drama. I also do something approaching stand-up comedy during the show, which is very scary and entirely exciting.

      Suffering From Scottishness was a very (mostly anyway) tongue in cheek and charming look at what it means to be Scottish, are you taking the same liberties with how you portray working class in Spam Valley?

      I think so. I don’t like people to know if I’m being serious or not. It entertains me to sit in that space and make people feel uncomfortable. As so much of it is coming from an autobiographical place there’s no need to take any liberties – this is my lived experience and the fact is often stranger than fiction. It’s a show all about eschewing stereotypes so don’t expect any working class bashing comedy.

      So you’re being yourself this time around rather than playing a role?

      I am very much myself. Or at least the version of myself that stands on a stage and talks to strangers. It’s felt really liberating to stand on stage and be me, to tell my story and be my authentic weird self.

      The show is a 10pm start, is that a sign it’s a little more risqué or simply that you don’t have to get up early to get in to the venue? And does it mean you get a different type of audience with a later start time?

      I think there’s an intensity that can come into the work with a later show. A feeling of things being a bit unpredictable. That what is said next might not have come from a script. And that absolutely suits the vibe of this show. It’s conversational and open and has an emotional heft to it that I think will take people by surprise.

      Are you going to be popping up anywhere else during August then?

      I’ll be appearing at the Book Festival on the 23rd as part of their Scottish spoken word showcase then back with the Loud Poets on the 27th. I’ll also be seeing loads of great shows.

      Who else would you recommend seeing at the festival then?

      Darren McGarvey will be doing a freewheeling Q&A at the same venue as me, the New Town Theatre, which is sure to be amazing. The brilliant Annie George has a double bill of shows on at Summerhall. Salamander by Mhairi McCall looks stunning. If you’re into comedy then get over to the Monkey Barrel who have an unbelievable array of Scotland’s best comedians in their line-up: Stephen Buchanan, Amelia Bayler, Stuart McPherson, Christopher Macarthur-Boyd, Elaine Malcolmson, Rosco McClelland, Marc Jennings, Liam Withnail, Richard Brown, Krystal Evans, Amy Matthews, Susan Riddell and probably more that I’ve missed out. I really wish I was a comedian, they’re all so cool and effortless.

      And lastly, why then, with everything else we could be seeing, should we come along to see Spam Valley then?

      Because it has something to say – and that’s rarer than you think. It’s not a big, fancy production or a wee student play – this is proper political theatre told through a personal story. It’s bold. It’s unique. It’s a show for everyone who feels they’ve been left behind by their class. Who feels they didn’t fit in with the stereotype. It’s a show for everyone who moved away to become someone new but ended up back where they started. It’s a show that kicks back against the policing of class and reclaims it for everyone who wants it.

      My theory is that my story isn’t unique, it just hasn’t been portrayed on stage because it isn’t seen as dramatic enough. Well, here’s our chance. If this sounds like your story too, then come and see it.

      Our thanks to Kevin for taking time of what we are sure is the usual chaotic lead up to the festival! You can catch Spam Valley at The Stand’s New Town Theatre 4 – 14 August, 10pm. Tickets and info here. More

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      Review: In ‘The Butcher Boy,’ an Anti-Coming of Age Story

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      The new musical, based on the novel by Patrick McCabe, follows a boy in 1960s Ireland as he recounts a tale of childhood mischief and alienation.They creep in from the shadows, snorting and snickering. The singing pigs that skulk and shimmy through “The Butcher Boy,” which opened on Monday at the Irish Repertory Theater, are silly but also half menacing. Below the neck, they’re dressed like townspeople in 1960s Ireland, where the new musical, written and composed by Asher Muldoon, is set. From the jowls up, however, their snout-nosed masks are eerily impassive.The swine chorus appears to be a totem of indecency, embodying the dark and unknown depths of the show’s narrator, Francie (Nicholas Barasch), a jaunty lad with flame-colored hair and an implacably sunny disposition. In his upbeat brogue, Francie recounts a tale of boyhood mischief and alienation with a zeal that belies what seems to be the threat of promised violence. If there’s danger lurking beneath his gleaming grin, Francie may be a bit too good at hiding the knife.Based on the 1992 novel by Patrick McCabe, “The Butcher Boy” presents a myopic view of a troubled upbringing — call it an anti-coming of age tale. Francie claims that his adolescence was idyllic, though scenes in the musical plainly prove otherwise. He and his best friend (Christian Strange) fish and carouse and steal comic books from a nerdy classmate (Daniel Marconi), whose mother (Michele Ragusa) fatefully derides Francie and his parents on the basis of social class, calling them pigs.Barasch with, from left, Teddy Trice, David Baida, Carey Rebecca Brown and Polly McKie in “The Butcher Boy,” a new musical based on the 1992 novel by Patrick McCabe.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“It was a sweet and simple time,” Francie sings as his father (Scott Stangland) belts him across the butt. “We were happy,” he says before walking in on his mother (Andrea Lynn Green) about to hang herself from a fuse wire. The motormouthed Francie turns to the audience with asides and misdirections that dissemble as much as they reveal.In the novel, McCabe’s prose is propulsive and unpredictable, bordering on stream of consciousness and bubbling with proto-punk sensibility, not unlike Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting,” published in Scotland a year later.But putting a narrator as unreliable as Francie at the helm of a stage musical is a tricky business. Should an audience believe what they hear or what they see? That depends on which is more convincing, and the results here are tough to decipher. Is Francie fooling only himself, or is he trying to fool everyone else? The answer often seems to be both, and it’s a difficult deception for a performer to pull off, particularly while recounting and participating in two and a half hours’ worth of action.“The Butcher Boy” might have been finessed into a sharper, more forceful black comedy if the score from Muldoon, who is not yet a senior in college, had developed a more distinctive point of view. Its dutiful tour through Broadway-style pop, vaudeville and Irish influences is largely referential.The production, directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, uses graphic shorthand to suggest the tension between Francie’s insular mind and the outside world. The wood-slatted walls of the set by Charlie Corcoran resemble a treehouse, while an oversize rendering of a turn-dial TV serves as a backdrop for Dan Scully’s projections. The screen looms large over the compact stage, nodding briefly to the turmoil of the 1960s and to Francie’s taste for “The Twilight Zone,” but the significance of mass media to Francie’s tortured descent is either overstated or underplayed.“The Butcher Boy” centers Francie’s perspective to a fault, so that the convictions of other characters are mediated through his own. It’s a powerful concept but requires a delicate physics that staging a story in three dimensions tends to defy. When characters who are without emotional agency express themselves in song, whose heartstrings can they claim to be pulling? Francie seems determined to prove that he himself has none.There are promising moments of affecting sentiment at the conclusion of Muldoon’s score, in ballads that seem to offer unlikely resolution, before Francie yanks it away with a still indeterminate rage. But by the time Francie’s own mask finally falls, the revelation feels oddly bloodless.The Butcher BoyThrough Sept. 11 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Michael R. Jackson, in a Place All His Own in Washington Heights

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      The Tony- and Pulitzer-winning author of ‘A Strange Loop’ finally has an apartment to himself in Manhattan.It had to be around here someplace, but Michael R. Jackson could not readily locate his Pulitzer Prize certificate when an importuning visitor asked for a look. He rummaged through piles of paper on a closet shelf. Not there. He inventoried the plastic storage boxes in that same closet, but came up empty again.“It was, like, in a cardboard folder. What did I do with it? What did I actually do with it?” Mr. Jackson said, casting about his two-bedroom condo sublet in Washington Heights and looking stricken. “I could not have thrown it away. This is now going to torture me for the rest of my life.”Do not judge. Do not “tsk-tsk” about carelessness. Of late, it has been a wild loop-the-loop ride for Mr. Jackson, 41, the author and composer of “A Strange Loop,” the hit Broadway show. The metafictional chronicle of an overweight, gay Black man writing a musical about an overweight, gay Black man, “Loop” won the 2022 Tony Award for best book of a musical and the Tony for best musical, to say nothing of the 2020 Pulitzer for drama. (The errant document eventually turned up atop a bookcase in the second bedroom, near photographs taken by Jill Krementz of Mr. Jackson’s proud parents at the opening-night performance of “A Strange Loop” and of the playwright himself during the opening-night curtain call.)“I’ve been traveling so much. I’ve been doing press and running in and out for the last two months,” Mr. Jackson said. “It was, ‘Throw this suit on! Take that suit off!’ It was like a cartoon, clothes flying left and right, and me running out the door.”“It just doesn’t feel like you’re in the city,” said Michael R. Jackson of his Washington Heights neighborhood.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesMichael R. Jackson, 41Occupation: Playwright and composerDesignated designer: “I hated every second of choosing furniture. This is the kind of thing I’m just not interested in. I want it to be done. I just want to be at a point where I can appoint a person who knows me really well and knows my taste to do their thing.”“The apartment was starting to look like a crack den, and I had to bring my attention to cleaning,” he continued. “I got the housekeeper to come yesterday, and we sort of tag-teamed, but there was still a lot to do.”Mr. Jackson moved into his current quarters in May 2021. For the preceding 16 years, he lived around the corner, in a crepuscular three-bedroom rental with a rotating cast of apartment mates, minimal furniture and — for the first few months of the pandemic, thanks to an issue with a gas line — an out-of-commission stove.“It was cheaper to live there, but it just got sort of painful to me personally. I’m not as young as I once was,” Mr. Jackson said. “I was like, ‘I want to live alone.’”Mr. Jackson enlisted the set designer of “A Strange Loop,” Arnulfo Maldonado, to help furnish the apartment.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesHe was determined to stay in the neighborhood — “I find this to be a peaceful space” — but seemed uncertain about the process of securing new housing or, more likely, was just too busy to engage. Accordingly, the lead producer of “A Strange Loop,” Barbara Whitman, recommended Bohemia Realty Group, a niche agency that caters to the New York theater community and specializes in rentals and sales in the northern precincts of Manhattan.The floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room and the views of the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge from the compact balcony were all that a certain prospective tenant could desire. The roof deck was value added.“I’m a big fan of sunlight and windows, which I did not have in my old place, which for 16 years was so distressing to me,” said Mr. Jackson, who was also impressed with the primary bathroom. “It’s the nicest I’ve ever had, and I don’t have to share it with anyone.”The weighted blanket — lots of loops — has proved a favorite.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesThe décor is a crucial step up from Ikea — anodyne good taste, in shades of sienna and blue-gray, with a pop of burnt orange. The weighted Afghan on the ottoman, a true security blanket, adds texture.“I’ve always sort of lived like a college student,” Mr. Jackson said. “And so when I was able to upgrade a bit, I needed some help to figure out some basic things.”Arnulfo Maldonado, the set designer for “A Strange Loop,” became the furniture whisperer, presenting various options to his decidedly low-maintenance client.“I said, ‘I need a couch,’ and Arnulfo said, ‘You need a rug under the couch,’” Mr. Jackson recalled. “It would never have occurred to me to put a rug underneath the couch.”Perhaps more to the point, it would not have occurred to him to buy a rug.Mr. Jackson borrowed the soap opera magazines from his neighbor, Florencia Lozano, who was, for a time, part of the cast of the daytime drama “One Life to Live.”Desiree Rios/The New York Times“I do not have an interior-design bone in my body,” said Mr. Jackson, who vows to raise his game when he buys a house — something he hopes will happen in the next few years. “I couldn’t tell you whether I prefer neo-Classical to neo-non-Classical. I don’t know any of that. It isn’t something I’ve ever had to think about.”Of course, he has his discrete spheres of expertise. He waxes Talmudic on what he calls his trifecta of “Inner White Girl Inspirations.” Said trifecta comprises a framed poster of Joni Mitchell’s “Dog Eat Dog” album, which hangs over the sofa; a signed vinyl copy of Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville,” an opening-night gift from his agent (“This put Liz Phair on the map,” he said. “It blew the roof off the indie rock scene at the time — it’s a really iconic album”); and a vinyl copy of Tori Amos’s “Under the Pink.”“The first song on the album is ‘Pretty Good Year,’ and when I sat down to listen to it in high school, it really changed the game for me in terms of the kind of art I wanted to be making as a writer,” Mr. Jackson said. “She opened up a whole world of thought for me.”He is similarly steeped in the fine points of daytime dramas. “I was a huge soap person,” he said. “I watched all of them, or most of them. I had a subscription to Soap Opera Digest. I came to New York initially to become a soap opera writer. I interned at ‘All My Children’; I interned at ABC Daytime.”During lockdown, Mr. Jackson was able to rewatch many of the sin-and-suffering-in-the-afternoon episodes he had recorded years earlier, courtesy of the still-functioning TV-VCR combo his father bought him just before his freshman year in college.“I’m trying to wrap my mind around the idea that I have more money and time now, and I should put my attention to developing home-décor taste,” he said.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesWithout fanfare, he sat down at the Yamaha keyboard in the second bedroom and played a lovely stretch of melody from “White Girl in Danger,” a musical in development that is drawn in part from his love of soaps.“I do think having a nice setup does make me feel less stressed when I’m working, which is good,” Mr. Jackson said. But he insisted that his previous apartment, gloomy though it may have been, did not impede the progress of “A Strange Loop.”“It didn’t matter,” he said. “My whole life was writing all the time and working on the piece. I had to write. I had to get it done.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      ‘Paradise Square’ Faces New Complaints Over Payments

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      The shuttered show is facing legal action from the actors, stage managers and designers who worked on the production.A union representing the director and choreographers who worked on the recently closed Broadway musical “Paradise Square” is asking a federal court to enforce an arbitration award that was agreed upon in May, according to a lawsuit filed late last month.The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society asked the Federal District Court in Manhattan to confirm and compel payment of nearly $150,000 that is owed to the union; the show’s director, Moisés Kaufman; the choreographer Bill T. Jones; and a few others who worked on the production.The suit, filed on July 22, said the production company still had not “satisfied its obligations under the award.”The lawsuit names as defendants the limited partnership that produced “Paradise Square,” a musical set amid the racial strife of Civil War-era New York City, as well as Bernard Abrams, a producer who is a member of the Broadway League.The show, however, has been most closely associated with the producer Garth H. Drabinsky, who had a successful run as a theatrical impresario in the 1990s until he was charged with misconduct and fraud in the United States and in his native Canada, where he eventually served prison time.Drabinsky had hoped that “Paradise Square,” which ran at the Ethel Barrymore Theater from mid-March until July 17, would be his comeback. The show originated a decade ago as a musical called “Hard Times,” written by Larry Kirwan of the band Black 47 and leaning on the music of Stephen Foster, who wrote “Oh! Susanna” among other American standards. Delayed two years because of the coronavirus pandemic, it made its way to Broadway after out-of-town productions in Berkeley, Calif., and Chicago. The show received 10 Tony nominations but took home only one award, for the actress Joaquina Kalukango, whose performance was a signature of this year’s Tony Awards ceremony. The show struggled at the box office throughout its run, and it did not recover the $15 million for which it was capitalized.Richard Roth, a lawyer for the “Paradise Square” partnership, said on Monday, “My understanding is that everyone is going to be fully paid.”Abrams did not respond to requests for comment Monday.Through Roth — who pointed out that Drabinsky is not a member of the limited partnership — Drabinsky released a lengthy statement arguing that Covid had proved an insurmountable roadblock to the show’s sales and finances. He added that bonds worth nearly $450,000 that were put up by the producers should cover most of what the actors were owed.“Equity holds this bond security,” Drabinsky said, and “the lawsuits that have been filed by unions are simply to evidence the collection of amounts for which the partnership has previously consented. In this regard, I have never been a signing officer of the production, nor do I have any authority with respect to the signing of any bank instruments. Any delay in benefit payments was simply a function of available cash flow.”The Hollywood Reporter first reported the existence of the legal filing Monday.The unions representing actors and designers who appeared in or worked on the musical have also received arbitration awards for hundreds of thousands of dollars. In July, the United Scenic Artists’ local also went to federal court to seek confirmation and enforcement of its award. In the spring, the Actors’ Equity fund trustees went to court to enforce an arbitration award.The unions have also placed Drabinsky on their “do not work” lists. The directors and choreographers union automatically placed the producers on a similar list until the outstanding arbitration award is paid, according to a union official.The president of the local union of the American Federation of Musicians, Tino Gagliardi, said through a spokesman that “Local 802 and the musicians’ benefit funds are taking every legal action needed to recover wages and benefits that are due to the musicians.”Al Vincent Jr., the executive director of Equity, added in an email statement that the dispute was not over, saying, “Our process of getting our members appropriately paid for ‘Paradise Square’ continues with a number of outstanding grievances moving into arbitration.”Local 829, the scenic artists’ union, put Drabinsky on its “boycott list” because of “continued inaction and lack of communication regarding the significant payments and benefits,” said Carl Mulert, the local’s national business agent. “It is unfortunate that the legacy of this Broadway production, which includes the indelible contributions of our colleagues and kin on and off the stage, has been marred by a story of exploitation of and injustice for the many artists that have brought ‘Paradise Square’ to life.” More