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

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

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

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

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      ‘Chains’ Review: Drab Lives, but Dreaming of More

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      A young boarder’s plan to make a new life in Australia unsettles a staid British family in Elizabeth Baker’s 1909 play, revived by the Mint Theater Company.On a Saturday afternoon in April, warm sunshine streams through the French doors of Lily and Charley Wilson’s rented London house, with its modest garden just outside. A comfortable home, it’s a bit of a stretch for their budget, so they have a boarder — Fred Tennant, a pleasant young clerk.And Fred, it turns out, has news that will send shock waves through the Wilsons’ peaceful marriage and the contented, conformist lives of their extended family. With two days’ notice, Fred is leaving England for Australia, trading the security of his office job for the risk of adventure in a new, wide-open country.“I’m going to chance it, you know,” he says. “There’s no fortune waiting for me.”To 21st-century American ears, that sounds like nothing to get flustered about. But in the early 20th-century England of Elizabeth Baker’s play “Chains,” which made a splash when it was first produced in London in 1909, Fred is nothing short of a social rebel, tossing away a sure thing to scratch the itch of his restlessness and — heaven forfend — pursue some happiness.“You don’t come into the world to have pleasure,” Lily’s mother says, scandalized.Baker argues otherwise in this well-constructed drama, which beneath its placid surface is as political as any play by George Bernard Shaw — one of her apparent inspirations — but without his dense, intrusive speechifying.In Jenn Thompson’s beautifully acted production for the Mint Theater Company, at Theater Row in Manhattan, the love between Lily (Laakan McHardy) and Charley (Jeremy Beck) is unambiguous. But Fred’s decision unleashes Charley’s anger at his drab, deskbound life, and his regret at having settled down before he saw the world.Trouble is, the country that Fred (Peterson Townsend) is headed to had, in 1909, a law called the Immigration Restriction Act, also known as the White Australia policy, which made it exponentially more difficult for nonwhite immigrants to be allowed into the country.There is no mention of the law in the text, but it would be a reality for any Black migrant. So with a Black actor as Fred — giving a perfectly lovely performance — we are seemingly meant to look past his race, in a way that makes the casting read as colorblind rather than color-conscious, the philosophy that the Mint says it had in mind. Unless we’re intended to think that Fred has done very minimal research before embarking?Peterson Townsend, at right, plans to find his fortune in Australia, which has a thrilling effect on Olivia Gilliatt (center, with Brian Owen), who is engaged to a man she doesn’t love.Todd CerverisOn a nimble set by John McDermott, flatteringly lit by Paul Miller, the action of the play unfolds in under 48 hours, which Baker gives a cheating urgency: When Charley is seized by the temptation to upend his own life and set out for Australia, leaving Lily behind, it’s as if the boat Fred is taking is Charley’s sole chance.They are not the only ones fed up with their jobs. Lily’s sister, Maggie (Olivia Gilliatt), is so tired of working in a shop that she’s gotten engaged to a man she does not love, whose comfortable income will let her stay at home and even have a servant.Her fiancé (Ned Noyes) dotes on her, which turns out not to be what she needs. Fred’s courage thrills and inspires Maggie. She wants a man brave enough to seek his fortune. And she wants to be brave enough herself not to do what society expects of her.Baker, an office worker turned playwright, had some of that daring herself, going into a line of work not known to be welcoming to women. When New York audiences first saw “Chains,” on Broadway in 1912 in an Americanized version, the script was credited in all capital letters to the adapter, Porter Emerson Browne. Baker’s name appeared “in very small type,” according to the review in The New York Times, which accused Browne of “the attempted stealing of her thunder.”Calling Baker’s play “exceedingly clever,” and praising the performances, that review deemed “Chains” nonetheless “something too familiar to create any great excitement with our playgoers.”That’s still true. It is diverting. It’s just not especially resonant in the here and now.ChainsThrough July 23 at Theater Row, Manhattan; minttheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      When an Abortion Story Is Told as a Caper, Thriller or Farce

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      As Roe falls, new works including a documentary, a feature film and a comedy show disrupt the taboos and clichés around abortion.In 1969, when abortion was illegal in Illinois, an underground operation arose in Chicago. Officially called the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, it became known as the Jane network, because women seeking abortions were told to call a number and “ask for Jane.” As I watched “The Janes,” an HBO documentary about the service, I was struck by the buoyancy of the story. Though the women behind Jane were working under stress to provide secretive abortions to desperate and terrified women, a kicky sensibility pervades the film. There are weed jokes and anti-surveillance shenanigans and a soundtrack fit for a mod spy movie. As the Janes evade the church, the Mafia and the police to facilitate around 11,000 clandestine abortions, they emerge from anonymity as the stars of a new genre: the abortion caper.“The Janes” ends with Roe v. Wade being handed down in 1973. Within weeks of the documentary’s release, the Supreme Court had overturned Roe, which makes the film feel even more essential — not just as a road map for modern civil disobedience but as a testament to the kind of complex, unruly abortion storytelling that also now feels at risk. Over the past few weeks, as I waited for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision to drop, I sought out such stories compulsively, as if the ruling might seize them too. In addition to “The Janes,” I watched the French film “Happening,” about a student seeking an illegal abortion in France in 1963, and “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” the comedian Alison Leiby’s one-woman show about terminating a pregnancy at Planned Parenthood at age 35.In “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” the comedian Alison Leiby talks about terminating a pregnancy at Planned Parenthood at age 35.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThe effort to control abortion has also had the effect of suppressing the stories we tell about it. Women seeking abortions are silenced by abortion bans, anonymized in court and moralized about onscreen. It is striking how often abortion has been obscured in films, presented as a quickly discarded option (as in “Juno”) or averted with a spontaneous miscarriage (“Citizen Ruth”) or deployed to facilitate another character’s arc (“Dirty Dancing”) or completely euphemized (“Knocked Up,” where it is referred to only as “rhymes with smashmorshion.”)When abortion stories are not stifled by shame, they might be celebrated as a brave act of speaking out — a tradition that has created its own clichés, as accounts of abortion are smoothed into politically palatable forms, in which the patient is fashioned as suitably desperate and her story is disclosed only reluctantly. Women have been made to barter their stories for their rights. In the documentary, a Jane member recalls women calling the service and listing their reasons for needing an abortion, but she would assure them this was unnecessary: “We would really try to make clear to them — they didn’t need to justify themselves.”What does an abortion story look like freed from justification? Abortion is a common procedure (one in four American women will have one, according to the Guttmacher Institute) that has been so flattened into an “issue” that it can feel revelatory to just recast abortion as an experience, one that can unlock unexpected insights into women’s private lives. If “The Janes” makes abortion into a caper, “Happening” turns it into a hero’s journey and “Oh God” renders it as a farce. Together, these works suggest that abortions are worth talking about because women’s lives are interesting in their own right.The French film “Happening” follows a university student’s search for an illegal abortion in the early 1960s.IFC Films, via Associated Press“Happening” follows Anne, a student of literature who becomes pregnant and seeks an illegal abortion while studying for final exams. As Anne is sabotaged by her doctors, shunned by her peers and preyed on by men, she watches her life’s potential narrow with each passing week. And as she pursues increasingly dangerous methods to end the pregnancy, she risks death to fight for her future as a writer. “I’d like a child one day, but not instead of a life,” she tells one useless doctor.The plot of “Happening” is driven not by Anne’s harrowing victimization but by her flinty resolve. When a doctor offers her sympathy instead of assistance, she refuses to leave his office. “So help me,” she demands. Like a great action hero, she endures physical trials while outwitting her adversaries. She works to compel her community to recognize her humanity through abortion’s veil of criminality and taboo.Anne finally makes her way to an underground abortionist, but the procedure doesn’t work, so she undergoes another, riskier operation that could kill her or else send her to the hospital, which could be her last stop before prison. She ends up convulsing over a dorm toilet, but the scene plays less like body-horror than a feat of strength. When one of her bullies comes upon her in the stall, Anne cannily implicates her in the event, instructing her to fetch a pair of scissors and sever the bloody tissue trailing from her body. The very existence of “Happening” confirms her triumph: It is based on a 2000 memoir by the writer Annie Ernaux.No such horrors await Alison Leiby in “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” whose self-described “simple and frictionless” abortion is worth examining mostly because it is a funny story. The 70-minute monologue begins with a startling joke — “My mom texted me, ‘Kill it tonight!’ and I’m like, I already did, that’s why the show exists!” — that feels crafted to immediately disarm the abortion taboo. Then the show rollicks through the experience itself, from the moment Leiby pees awkwardly into a glass tumbler in a Courtyard by Marriott to the first-trimester procedure she secures in a Planned Parenthood facility located across the street from a glaringly luxe maternity store. (“Who owns that?” she jokes. “Mike Pence?”)Within weeks of the release of “The Janes,” the film feels even more essential to our critic, as a testament to the kind of complex, unruly abortion storytelling that also now feels at risk.HBOEven before Roe’s reversal, Leiby recognized that she was lucky, and that most women seeking abortion “do not stroll into Planned Parenthood with a Lululemon outfit and then take an Uber home.” Near the end of the piece, when her mother tells her that she was forced to go to the Mafia for an illegal abortion in the 1960s, Leiby hesitates to share her own experience. “I didn’t want to come off as bragging, like, A doctor did mine,” she jokes.Leiby does not belabor her own privilege, and her story gains power from that choice. Her abortion decision is still met with plenty of patriarchal condescension and ambient shame. But she resists the pressure to feel sad about ending her pregnancy, and she refuses to apologize for her right to do it safely and legally. “I thought I’d spend the next few days or months staring out the window like I’m in a depression medication commercial,” she says. Instead, she walks out of the clinic feeling “a little underwhelmed.”I attended Leiby’s show this month in New York while visibly pregnant. Though my expanding body now inspires rote congratulations from strangers, my own feelings about my pregnancy have been tumultuous, and it was invigorating to step into an environment where the condition was not immediately culturally affirmed.Much of Leiby’s story concerns her choice not to raise children — there is an interlude about perineal tearing — and though her abortion is far easier to secure than Annie Ernaux’s, the stakes have not been lowered. Leiby wants to pursue her career and to avoid the “painful and exhausting and scary” aspects of parenting, but she also just wants to be recognized as a full adult human on her own terms, not as a problem that only a baby can fix.“The Janes,” too, is a story about women claiming their potential, though the members of the Jane network fulfill theirs not by receiving abortions but by providing them. When they discover that their abortionist, “Mike,” is not a doctor but just a guy who learned how to perform a dilation and curettage (a procedure known as a D and C), they refuse to shutter the service. Instead, they begin to perform abortions themselves, largely for free, no Mikes necessary. They learn to assume responsibility, not just for their own lives but for the lives of others. In turn, they are driven to “share that sense of personal power with women,” as one member puts it. “We wanted every woman who contacted us to be the hero of her own story.”Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, spoke publicly last fall for the first time about being raped at church camp when she was 17 and having an abortion at 18.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThese abortion stories represent just a slice of the experience (for one thing, they largely feature white women), and they have arrived at a time when abortion storytelling is at risk of being winnowed even further. Even if a patient does not disclose her abortion, digital surveillance threatens to tell the tale for her, through Google searches, menstruation app data and location tracking. (Such tools have already been used in criminal prosecutions).Stories that do emerge will often be shaped to withstand political pressure. Last fall, when Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, spoke publicly for the first time about being raped at church camp when she was 17 and having an abortion at 18, she did it in support of legislation codifying Roe. “It felt like something was pressing down on me,” she said about the demands on her testimony, adding: “Whatever I say, it has to produce.”The decision in Dobbs tells its own story about women considering abortion. The court’s imagined modern pregnant woman can achieve total self-actualization while carrying her pregnancy to term, with the help of anti-discrimination laws, state-mandated parental leave and health insurance. “Now you have the opportunity to be whatever you want to be,” Lynn Fitch, the Mississippi attorney general, said in an interview about the case. “You have the option in life to really achieve your dream and goals, and you can have those beautiful children as well.”This woman can have it all, except she cannot have an abortion, and she can’t have a story, either. She is a straw man — useful only after she has been stripped of her subjectivity and drained of all substance. More

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      Ralph Fiennes to Star in Play About Robert Moses at the Shed

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      The production of “Straight Line Crazy,” by David Hare, will begin preview performances Oct. 18 and have a nine-week run.“Straight Line Crazy,” the play by David Hare about the contentious urban planner Robert Moses, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage, is coming to New York this fall.Following a buzzy spring run at the Bridge Theater in London, the play about Moses’s legacy of power and divisive creations of highways, parks and bridges will premiere at the Shed’s Griffin Theater for a nine-week run with preview performances starting Oct. 18 and an opening night slated for Oct. 26.“Straight Line Crazy” follows Moses’s rise to influence in the late 1920s as one of New York’s most powerful men, and then his devolution in the late 1950s, when grass-roots organizers and public transportation advocates decried his public works for displacing residents and disenfranchising communities who stood (or lived) in the way of his vision.“I think what this play evokes for us, and evokes here in New York, is who gets to shape our city spaces, who gets to shape our public spaces? What voices are engaged in these processes that affect so many?” Madani Younis, chief executive producer at the Shed, said in an interview.Moses will be played by the Tony Award-winning and Oscar-nominated actor Ralph Fiennes (also known for playing Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies), returning to New York theater for the first time since 2006, when he starred as the gaunt miracle worker (and possible charlatan) in Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer.”The theater critic Matt Wolf wrote in The New York Times that in the London run of “Straight Line Crazy,” Fiennes had “enough barrel-chested authority to sustain interest in what might otherwise seem arcane,” adding that he almost wished the play were longer.Younis, of the Shed, said, “This is the rise and fall story of a very divisive figure and it stirs up questions for our present about civic responsibility, about values and who shapes cities.”“This is what great art should always do,” he said.The production will run through Dec. 18. More

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      ‘Bodies They Ritual’ Review: Plush Robes and Cults

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      Angela Hanks’s new comedy is set in Santa Fe, N.M., where five women of color have traveled for some fancy R&R laced with New Age spirituality.The tapas party had not gone over well: “The food was so tiny,” the guest of honor, Faye, recalled. “And I was so hungry.”So for Faye’s 65th birthday, her daughter, Marie, has invited her mother and three friends for a relaxing stay at a fancy sweat lodge. The cantankerous Faye is not crazy about that, either. And that’s even before the cult members turn up.Angela Hanks’s bittersweet new comedy, “Bodies They Ritual,” is set in Santa Fe, N.M., where the five women (four are African American and one is Bengali American) have traveled from Dallas for some fancy R&R laced with New Age spirituality. There are hot stones and plush white robes, chats by the fire pit and periods of zoning out. There are also the uncomfortable revelations and colorful encounters that pop up whenever Americans’ fictional characters go on retreats (see: Bess Wohl’s play “Small Mouth Sounds,” which takes place at a silent retreat, or the book and series “Nine Perfect Strangers”).“Bodies They Ritual” — the third and final play in this year’s edition of the Clubbed Thumb company’s Summerworks series — revolves around a series of meetings between the visitors and assorted locals. Naturally, the locals help excavate a few truths, but somehow there don’t seem to be any earth-shattering changes for anybody. Whatever metaphorical splinter was lodged under a character’s skin at the start is pretty much still there at the end, a constant reminder of past choices and roads taken, or not.Marie (Ebony Marshall-Oliver), for example, prefers to keep her relationships free from romantic entanglements. Faye (Lizan Mitchell), a retired hairdresser, picks at what she sees as her daughter’s idiosyncrasies, like her taste in music as a kid, or Marie’s decision to focus on her career as the manager for a professional sports team and forgo children. While the relationship between the two women feels commonplace, Hanks adorns it with offbeat details that often materialize almost out of the blue, like Faye’s spur-of-the-moment rendition of the Sublime song “Santeria.”Similarly, when Faye’s friend Toni (Denise Burse) fantasizes about seeing her late husband again just so she can tell him how much she still loathes him, Hanks seeds her angry monologue with surreal specificity — “I want to hit him in the head with a candelabra.”Turquoise Sunshine (Keilly McQuail) and Dawn (Kai Heath) are acolytes in “Bodies They Ritual.”Marcus MiddletonThis technique applies to the locals, like a teenage barista (Bianca Norwood) who tells Toni that she was named for her mother’s “third favorite thrash metal band,” Sepultura. “I consider myself lucky my name isn’t Anthrax,” she tells Toni.Best, or at least strangest of all are Queen Harvest (Emily Cass McDonnell), the Galadriel of New Mexico, and her acolytes Dawn (Kai Heath) and Turquoise Sunshine (Keilly McQuail, coming up with some strikingly kooky line readings).Hanks, whose “Wilder Gone” was in the 2018 edition of Summerworks, has a dry, tart tone that is well served by the director Knud Adams. He wrings finely tuned performances from the excellent cast and never oversells the comedy, letting a raised eyebrow, a side glance or a throwaway line do a lot of work. This is especially effective since Hanks, to her credit, refrains from open conflicts and cathartic resolutions — Santa Fe may peddle enlightenment, but this playwright does not take the bait. Admittedly, “Bodies They Ritual” does not quite cohere into a whole, but its parts are wonderful. They may be tiny, but they add up to a full meal.Bodies They RitualThrough July 2 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. More

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      Interview: There’s Always Room on Our Broom

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      Tall Stories’ Olivia Jacobs on producing Room On The Broom

      Fans of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s fabulous children’s books will be delighted that acclaimed theatre company Tall Stories are bringing their adaptation of Room on the Broom to the West End this summer. We asked company co-founder Olivia Jacobs to land the broom for a minute and magic up a bit of information about the show.

      Olivia, Room on the Broom is an absolute favourite picture book for children worldwide; you must feel such a responsibility to adapt it well? How do you go about bringing it to life, from page to stage?

      When Room on the Broom was first published, we were hooked immediately, and asked the authors and publishers for the rights. It’s such a brilliant adventure story – with just enough danger, a whole heap of fabulous characters and a hugely positive message about working together. Thankfully both Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler had enjoyed our previous stage production of The Gruffalo and felt that there was room on the broom for us!

      I was definitely nervous to start work on the show and I still feel that same sense of nervousness and responsibility every time I go into the rehearsal room with a new company. I want to ensure it’s always full of life on stage and that audiences leave the theatre happy and grinning.

      It was hard to know where to start developing this beautiful but complex story. We needed to create seven characters: a witch, a cat, a dog, a bird, a frog, a dragon and a mud monster, with a cast of four… We also had the tricky task of flying all of our characters, as well as creating magic spells and appearing a magnificent broom from thin air. No small challenge! We tested ideas in a rehearsal room with some very talented performers and a highly imaginative creative team – which is how we devise all our shows – trying to find the best and most entertaining way to tell the story.

      We finally settled on beginning with a camping trip; four campers setting off for a night under the stars. But nothing goes to plan when they see a witch on a broomstick flying down towards them at full pelt…This opening defines the way in which we tell the rest of the story. If audiences watch carefully, there are lots of things in the campsite scene which later find their way into the tale of the witch, the cat and their adventure.

      Tell us a bit about the music and puppetry involved.

      Puppets have a huge role in this production, and it was so important that we got them right. We had lots of questions to resolve. Which characters would be puppets? What type of puppets should we create? How big should they be? What do they need to be able to do? How many people would operate each puppet? And, of course, what happens when all seven characters are on stage with only four actors – would it be possible to operate more than one puppet at a time? Our puppet designer Yvonne Stone created prototypes for us and we played with these in a rehearsal room to discover exactly what looked best.

      Eventually we decided that Dog, Bird and Frog – all the creatures that Witch picks up on her journey – would become puppets in the show, but we determined that the design of Cat’s costume would link her to the puppet animals too.

      As the characters emerged in the devising room, the design of the puppets developed too. Bird developed long eyelashes, Frog’s leg length increased, and we finally found a way of operating Dog’s tail so he could wag it as enthusiastically as he wanted to. Whilst the puppeteers make it look easy, the puppetry in the show is really difficult. The actors develop very big muscles!

      The music followed logically as the characters became more defined. We wanted a song for everyone who joined Witch and Cat on the broom, so played with ideas of what they might sing about, and why they might want to travel by broom – especially Bird, who has her own wings!

      The show is aimed at ages 3+, but do you find older children enjoy it too?

      We’ve always tried to make shows that work for all ages. Over 60% of our attendees are grown-ups, so it seems absurd not to try to ensure that all of your audience have fun: the show needs to appeal to everyone. Families come in all shapes and sizes, and we often have older children watching alongside younger siblings. My favourite thing is actually when I hear parents talking afterwards: they often seem surprised to have laughed and had a good time, the expectation being that if it’s for their children it couldn’t possibly also be for them! We hope our shows work on different levels and remain a place where three or even four generations can enjoy being entertained together.

      Which is your favourite character in this story?

      This is an impossible question to answer. I love Dog’s enthusiasm for life, Bird’s desire to be loved, Frog’s endless charm, Witch’s scattiness and Cat’s ability to succinctly sum up and deal with any situation. And I’m pretty fond of Dragon too, for all his posturing and pretending to be brave – he’s a big softie really. I can’t pick one character – I have a soft spot for them all!

      It’s twenty-five years since Tall Stories was founded. Have things changed much since you started, and how did you get through the Covid pandemic in the last couple of years?

      When we first started Tall Stories, there were very few companies making work for a family audience, and fewer making cross-generational work. The advent of Harry Potter and Northern Lights (etc) made ‘crossover work’ a genre in itself, with new shows for family audiences springing up countrywide. I hope that we have been even a small part of improving the theatre landscape for family audiences and encouraging others to create great work for this brilliant, imaginative sector.

      Tall Stories itself has grown and developed as a company too. Twenty-five years ago it was just my co-founder Toby and I working from a spare room in a small flat in north London; now there’s a team of seven full-time staff based in the Tall Stories Studio in Highbury and Islington.

      Of course, the last few years have been hard for everyone in the entertainment industry. Our UK tour of Room on the Broom was cut short, and we rushed actors home from Hong Kong, Australia and America during the pandemic. But audiences have been very supportive and have returned to theatres to provide their children with the opportunity to see high quality performance. It feels very fitting that Room on the Broom, a story about pulling together in times of adversity, is back this year.

      Tell us a bit about your charity work, and the Tall Stories Studio.

      We’re hugely proud of the new Tall Stories Studio, which opened its doors last year after three years of searching and building. We now have our own beautiful, light, bright, ground floor accessible rehearsal space, with an office, meeting room and costume store all on site. I love that we are based within Islington’s Central Library, surrounded by stories.

      From our new home we work closely with the surrounding community, providing free accessible performances of our shows for local families who may not otherwise have access to touring work. As an example, we worked recently with local organisations The Hibiscus Centre, The Parent House and Homestart to welcome single parent families, families who have been victims of domestic abuse and refugees who are new to the community to free performances of The Gruffalo.

      Working alongside Islington council, we provide free productions for local school children, who also get to meet and greet the cast after the show and ask any burning questions that they might have.

      Within the Studio space we work with, support and nurture new and emerging storytelling artists and companies through our ‘Studio Share’ programme. We offer artists free rehearsal space to develop and share work, as well as opportunities for mentoring sessions with Tall Stories’ professional team.

      Outside of the Studio we collaborate with a variety of organisations and schemes, such as The Garden Classroom, with whom we’ve provided a unique drama and forest school experience for children aged 7-11, and Hackney Empire’s ‘Pay It Forward’ scheme which encouraged audiences when booking tickets to purchase extras for families who wouldn’t ordinarily visit the theatre. We continue to be amazed by our audience’s generosity: this year we were able to provide a free trip to Hackney Empire for over 100 under-privileged children and their families.

      As a charity, any income Tall Stories receive from our larger scale shows is routed straight back into the company. In this way, we can tour further afield, reach new audiences, offer free performances, accessible performances and develop creative work with young people, families, artists and those who don’t initially see theatre as a possible option for them.

      I may be a bit biased, but I think Tall Stories is an amazing company to be part of.

      You have a background of touring productions, so how does it feel to be settling in to a West End venue for a big long stretch?

      It’s wonderful that we’re flying into the West End for the summer with Room on the Broom and lovely to be working with Nimax and their fabulous team at the gorgeous Lyric Theatre, but we never rest on our laurels. The show will tour the length and breadth of the country between now and April 2023 – visit our website for details about the venues we’re touring to! www.roomonthebroomlive.com

      Room on the Broom runs from Thursday 21 July to Sunday 4 September at the Lyric Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue, London. Further information and bookings can be found here. More

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      in Theater

      Guest Post: Quest for The Bed Sitting Room

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      John Hewer tells us about The Bed Sitting Room

      On Sunday 3 July, Hambledon Productions, my theatre company, is holding a Spike Milligan Gala Night. A brilliant cast, fantastic guest speaker Jane Milligan, a pop-up Milligan Exhibition, plus more. The headline event of the evening will be a rehearsed reading of an updated version of John Antrobus and Spike Milligan’s post-apocalyptic dark comedy The Bed Sitting Room. But what exactly is The Bed Sitting Room? And why is it overdue a fresh appraisal?   

      2017, and I was looking for a new, big project for 2018 when a friend flagged up that it would be the centenary of the Mighty Milligan… Bingo! The Bed Sitting Room! Rather than trot out episodes of The Goon Show, it was Spike’s irreverent playscript that most tantalised me…

      The Bed Sitting Room seemed just too good to be true. In the early days of the internet (in our house, at any rate, about 2000) an IMDB search threw up this title. Directed by Richard Lester, it was the cast list that made my eyes stand out on stalks! Michael Hordern, Sir Ralph Richardson, Harry Secombe, Marty Feldman, Cook and Moore, Jimmy Edwards, Rita Tushingham… the list just went on. It was practically mythical. No TV broadcast since the 1980s, no VHS release… it seemed fated to remain ‘legendary’ without even being witnessed.

      Then I discovered eBay!

      The film instantly became a perennial favourite of mine. It’s a 60’s smorgasbord, not so much psychedelic, but bleak, garish, topsy-turvy and visually stunning. Yet incredibly, growing up through this nightmarish landscape, cutting through the grim and the absurd, were jokes. Good jokes. Bad jokes. So bad, they’re good jokes. Some jokes which haven’t aged well, true, but also some jokes which are still yet to come of age.

      The playscript and the film adaptation are very similar (John Antrobus, who co-wrote the play and adapted the screenplay, did a remarkable job at translating it to a different medium). However, by the sheer nature of live theatre, it is more stark (more Graham Stark!) while also being more ribald and surreal. The playscript, published to tie-in with the film in 1969, tries its best to ‘keep up’ with Milligan’s frequent liberal attitude towards the original script. However, Antrobus, the brainchild, had the ability to harness Spike’s creativity, while also maintaining his own distinctive style. Putting it simply, when working on The Bed Sitting Room, they were interchangeable and worked as one. Imagine my delight, then, to discover, that not only was Mr. Antrobus happy, and keen, to discuss a revival, but also he wanted to work on a fresh revision of his text alongside me.

      Spike’s rare but always tantalising dalliances with theatre are legendary; likewise, Antrobus’ theatre work is astounding. Arguably, however, their crowning achievement, for stage at least, is the co-creation of The Bedsitting Room. It’s a timeless text. The overall message I take from it is that, if civilisation as we know it were to end, we’d probably begin, in earnest, to restore it to what we already had; without seriously questioning what we were going back to. And there are elements of that as we continue to emerge from the pandemic, and there are certainly tensions revolving around that with the outbreak of war in Europe. And on this blank canvas of a new, theatrical world, Antrobus’ and Milligan’s writing, their surreal characters and their anti-establishment messages flourish.

      This was an amazing time. John, an extremely gracious, and also extremely busy chap, and I spent three months working on The Bed Sitting Room for a 21st century audience (the play had not been performed on stage since the 1980s). John’s enthusiasm matched mine, and Jane Milligan, who took time out from her own busy schedule appearing in the West End in a production of the musical Kinky Boots, put me in touch with Norma Farnes, Spike’s former secretary and now custodian, manager and promoter for Spike Milligan Productions for nearly forty years. Norma was now settled in Spike’s former office at No. 9 Orme Court (known colloquially as The Fun Factory); a roomy, ornate, bay-windowed Georgian terrace. Accolades and personal keepsakes were everywhere. I struggled to focus on our meeting, I was so in awe of my surroundings and the ongoing situation. It felt as otherworldly as Spike’s own Goon Shows.

      Norma ultimately had to decline the project; she was already co-producing another centenary tour; a bold and excellently executed recreation of The Goon Show as a live radio recording, co-produced by Spike Milligan Productions and Apollo Theatre Company (who, incidentally, we’ve teamed up with to co-produce a UK tour of Steptoe and Son Radio Show. Shameless plug!) This meant that, not only could she not afford the time to ensure that the show would be a fair recreation of Spike’s seminal work, but she was also concerned that there would be a conflict of interest when it came to tour booking. Like so many projects, the idea was postponed until parties were free… Never an easy task. For Norma, it sadly proved to be an impossible task; she passed away at the age of 82 in 2019.

      As we began to emerge from the pandemic, in early 2022, with the fifteenth anniversary of Hambledon Productions looming ahead, my thoughts were ‘go for gold’; ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained.’ And so I approached Jane Milligan, now a director of Spike Milligan Productions, and John Antrobus. They were both happy for us to revisit the possibility of staging The Bed Sitting Room. Result! Coincidentally, 2022 marks sixty years since the play premiered, and also twenty years since Spike’s passing.

      The evening will star Jeremy Stockwell giving his quite dazzling interpretation of Milligan. I first saw him become Spike in his stage show A Sockful of Custard at the Edinburgh Fringe with Chris Larner, and, together with all the critics, I was amazed by his mimicry and sheer Milligan energy. Jane Milligan, having performed recently in the West End in Magic Goes Wrong, will also be joining us, in a live Q&A session as we salute the Might Milligan.

      Spike Milligan Gala Night will take place at Riverhead Theatre in Louth on Sunday 3 July. Further information and tickets can be found here. More