Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Cabaret,’ Starring Eddie Redmayne, Sweeps Olivier Awards

      by

      The musical won seven awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys. A puppet-filled adaptation of “Life of Pi” and a “Back to the Future” musical also won big.LONDON — A revival of “Cabaret” that has been the talk of London’s theater world since opening in December, on Sunday swept the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.Starring Eddie Redmayne in his first London role in a decade, “Cabaret” collected seven awards during a ceremony at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Its haul included best musical revival, best actor in a musical (Redmayne), best actress in a musical for Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles, and best director for Rebecca Frecknall.Britain’s newspaper reviewers sometimes struggled for superlatives to describe “Cabaret.” Nick Curtis, writing in The Evening Standard, summed it up with a simple: “Wow. Just wow.”Matt Wolf, reviewing the show for The New York Times, said that Frecknall had made a “remarkable entry into musical theater” after several lauded stage productions here, including of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke.” “Frecknall pulls us into a hedonistic milieu, only to send us out nearly three hours later reminded of life’s horrors,” he added.The musical has gained as much attention for its staging as its performances, with audiences made to enter the Playhouse Theater through a side door, only to discover the building has been transformed to look like a 1920s Berlin nightclub. Ticketholders — some of whom criticized sky-high ticket prices — have to work their way through a labyrinth of corridors filled with dancers and drinks to get to their seats.Redmayne, center, as Master of Ceremonies with the company of “Cabaret.”Marc BrennerOf the actors in its original cast, Redmayne won particular plaudits. Arifa Akbar, writing in The Guardian, said he was “electric,” adding: “He gives an immense, physicalized performance, both muscular and delicate, from his curled limbs to his tautly expressive fingertips.”The other big winner on Sunday was “Life of Pi” at Wyndham’s Theater, Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel about a zookeeper’s son who, after a shipping accident, is stuck on a lifeboat at sea with only animals for company. It took five awards including best new play and best actor for Hiran Abeysekera, as well as a crowd-pleasing best supporting actor award for the seven puppeteers who bring a 44-pound puppet tiger to life onstage. Hiran Abeysekera won best actor for “Life of Pi,” and a best supporting actor award went to the puppeteers who bring the tiger to life onstage.Jeff Spicer/Getty Images For SoltReviewers had often singled out those puppeteers for praise. Dominic Cavendish, writing in The Daily Telegraph, said they made the tiger exude “a watchful malevolence and innate magnificence,” as he “moves from brute prowling threat to personality in his own right.”Some other shows did manage to get prizes at the Oliviers. “Back to the Future: the Musical” at the Adelphi Theater, a show that has grabbed attention for its flying car as much as its songs, won best new musical, beating shows including “Get Up! Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical” and the London debut of “Frozen.”The best comedy play went to “Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of)” at the Criterion Theater, a fast and loose retelling of Jane Austen’s novel, which closed in February citing a lack of audiences returning to the West End.The other notable winner was a revival of “Constellations” by the Donmar Warehouse at the Vaudeville Theater, which took awards for best revival and best actress in a play for Sheila Atim. That 70-minute, one-act play, about a couple falling in and out of love, was a hit last summer as British theater came back to life after multiple lockdowns. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Penelope’ Review: Adrift Between Ithaca and Progress

      by

      A new musical-comedy retelling of “The Odyssey” from the York Theater Company tries to center a powerful woman but feels like a show about and for men.For 20 long years, Penelope has waited for her husband, Odysseus, to sail home to Ithaca from the Trojan War. He was forced to go in the first place, but now the fighting has been finished for a decade and still he stays away — a king seemingly forsaking his kingdom and his queen.The mob of creeps who began sniffing around seven years ago, salivating at the prospect of the cushy life that marriage to Penelope would bring, think it is well past time for her to choose one of them as her new husband. And, hey, who wouldn’t be drawn to these guys, really, what with their demonstrated ability to show up where they aren’t wanted, become live-in guests and spend lazy days consuming copious amounts of their hostess’s food and drink.Also, they sing a cappella harmonies together. Relentlessly.Penelope would like them gone, but in the meantime, she has to stave off any trip to the altar. And in “Penelope, or How the Odyssey Was Really Written,” Peter Kellogg and Stephen Weiner’s new musical-comedy retelling of the epic poem traditionally credited to Homer, she does so by concocting letters from her husband.In them, Odysseus recounts the misadventures that delay him: a Cyclops, a shipwreck, the wrath of Poseidon — the usual spousal excuses. She reads these gripping inventions aloud to her freeloading suitors as proof that her king is en route.“Hope to see you soon,” she has him sign off, affectionately. “Your Odysseus.”Directed by Emily Maltby for the York Theater Company, with music direction and orchestrations by David Hancock Turner, “Penelope” paints its title character as the author of “The Odyssey.” It’s a promising twist, and it builds on an established idea that “The Odyssey,” a work abundant with substantial female characters — Penelope, Athena, Calypso, Circe, even the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis — is not a male creation.The novelist and critic Samuel Butler, in the 1890s, theorized that a woman must have written it. The classicist Robert Graves — whose Butler-inspired 1955 novel, “Homer’s Daughter,” imagines a Sicilian princess as the author of “The Odyssey” — called it “a poem about and for women,” its hero notwithstanding.“Penelope,” at the Theater at St. Jean’s on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, feels like a musical about and for men. In its cast of 10, there are just three women, including Britney Nicole Simpson, who makes a lovely Off Broadway debut in the title role. It is not through any shortcoming of hers that this ostensibly “female-centric” show, as a program note puts it, is so enamored of its male characters: the five tiresome suitors; Penelope and Odysseus’s son, Telemachus; and especially Odysseus. “Penelope” snaps into focus only in Act 2, when the wandering king returns and takes over a plot that had always been about his absence anyway.If you are looking for a vividly written Penelope, you would do better with Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel “Circe,” in which Penelope is indelible, and surprising, in a small supporting role. Here, though, the story that Kellogg (book and lyrics) and Weiner (music) tell suffers from a failure of imagination, as if making her a weaver of tales rather than of cloth gives her definition enough. (In “The Odyssey,” she promises to wed as soon as she finishes a weaving project, then unravels her work each night.) She does have Odysseus’s nurse, Eurycleia (an expert Leah Hocking), to conspire with, but where’s the rest of her orbit?If, on the other hand, you are looking for an old-fashioned, comfort-food kind of musical with goofball humor, unpretentious songs and a heroine who is just fine with the world never knowing that she wrote one of its classics (I, for one, had trouble swallowing that concession), “Penelope” may be a good fit.Ben Jacoby makes a likable Odysseus, who enjoys a sweet reunion with Telemachus (a charming Philippe Arroyo, in his Off Broadway debut), and has instant sexual chemistry with Penelope — a shock to her chaste system that Simpson conveys with tender, comic nuance. Maria Wirries is also funny as Daphne, Telemachus’s cleareyed, pig-slaughtering love interest.This is the kind of show, though, that gestures toward open-mindedness by having the women explain to the men that they must abandon some of their entitled ways.“I’ll adapt,” Odysseus vows.But “Penelope” itself? It’s a bit of a throwback, in the guise of change.Penelope, or How the Odyssey Was Really WrittenThrough April 24 at the Theater at St. Jean’s, Manhattan; yorktheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Chasing Andy Warhol,’ Street Theater Goes Pop

      by

      From Bated Breath Theater Company, the antics of this show, which winds through the East Village, offer little insight into Andy Warhol or his work.It’s so easy. A Breton shirt, a silver wig, sunglasses with acetate frames — and there, suddenly, is Andy Warhol. There on a Citi Bike and there again on roller skates. Playing chess, striking a ballet pose, scooting through the drizzle. In “Chasing Andy Warhol,” a slapdash work of street performance by Bated Breath Theater Company, the pop artist, who died in 1987, has repopulated select blocks of Manhattan’s East Village.Bated Breath’s previous show, “Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec,” a louche tribute to the French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, made its flâneur’s way through the West Village in the pandemic’s first winter, earning mostly favorable reviews. So maybe blame pandemic fatigue, the wet spring weather or Warhol’s distinct ability — in life, in art — to elude attempts to pin him down, but the antics of “Chasing Andy Warhol” register as mostly empty space, blank canvases that offer little insight into the man or his work.Created and directed by Mara Lieberman, the show, which lasts just an hour, begins in Astor Place. A jean-jacketed tour guide (Fé Torres at the performance I attended) buckles himself into a daffodil-yellow airplane seat. From behind his seat emerges Andy Warhol (Kyle Starling, one of many Warhols). Warhol then leads the guide — and ticketed spectators — across streets, through plazas, into the window of a gym. Throughout, Torres offers tidbits of biography, which are almost entirely obscure if you are unfamiliar with Warhol’s history (“Was that Charles? Was that before you went to Hawaii? I thought you didn’t fall in love until later.”) and unilluminating if you are.The text would matter less if the visuals were more dynamic. But, despite a few witty touches, like the framing of the Empire State Building, in homage to Warhol’s durational film “Empire,” the staging and the design feel shambolic and the choreography, by Rachel Leigh Dolan, rarely inspired. The vibe is cheerful, unrigorous and pointedly amateur, as in one scene when the actress playing Edie Sedgwick falls to the sidewalk. Edie has just died of an overdose; the actress is very clearly still breathing.Just a moment later, an older man walking by noticed the commotion. “I knew Andy,” he said, sounding bemused. “I mean it.” Then he walked on.“Chasing Andy Warhol” joins recent works, like the immersive Van Gogh exhibits, which reimagine modern art into contemporary experience. It’s the refrigerator magnetization of genius, which Warhol, who had a hearty appreciation and talent for the commercial, would have perhaps enjoyed. There’s a reason Warhol’s work is again in vogue (though, arguably, it never fell out of vogue) in a moment in which the categories of art, entertainment and business feel particularly confused. The show could be in conversation with these ideas. Mostly, it seems in conversation with itself.Just about everyone knows Warhol’s adage, which today reads a lot more like a prophecy, that “in the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” Watching “Chasing Andy Warhol,” I was reminded of another axiom, from Warhol’s friend Marshall McLuhan: “Art is anything you can get away with.”Chasing Andy WarholThrough June 12 at Bated Breath Theater Company, Manhattan; batedbreaththeatre.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Kinky Boots’ Sets Summer Return Off Broadway

      by

      A revival of the Tony-winning Cyndi Lauper-Harvey Fierstein collaboration will begin performances at Stage 42 in July.The sex is back in the heel.The producers Daryl Roth and Hal Luftig announced on Thursday that an Off Broadway revival of “Kinky Boots,” the Cyndi Lauper-Harvey Fierstein collaboration that won the Tony Award for best new musical in 2013, would begin performances at the theater in July.The revival at the 499-seat Shubert theater is set to be directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell (“La Cage Aux Folles,” “Legally Blonde”), who directed and choreographed the original Broadway production, which won him his second Tony for choreography.The feel-good musical tells the story of a young Englishman, Charlie Price, who attempts to save his family’s shoe factory by making boots for drag performers. The Broadway production — which starred Stark Sands as Price and Billy Porter as the drag queen Lola, a performance for which Porter won a Tony — closed in April 2019 after 34 preview and 2,505 regular performances.In his critic’s pick review, the New York Times critic Ben Brantley called the musical, which features music and lyrics by Lauper and a book by Fierstein, “a shameless emotional button pusher.” He described its pulsing, earworm-y score as performing “like a pop star on Ecstasy.” (The cast recording won a Grammy for best musical theater album.)“Kinky Boots” has been a significant hit in the nine years since it opened on Broadway, where it grossed $297 million and won six Tony Awards. The show has toured North America and Britain, and productions have been staged in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Poland and Spain.The Off Broadway production is scheduled to begin performances July 26 and open Aug. 25 at Stage 42 in Hell’s Kitchen. No casting has been announced. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      At the FIND Festival, Different Ways of Staging the Real

      by

      At Berlin’s FIND festival of new international drama, several productions use transcripts to explore questions of state power and identity.BERLIN — Outside a small stage at the Schaubühne theater here on Tuesday evening, a sign cautioned that the Chilean production “Oasis de la Impunidad” (“Oasis of Impunity”) featured strobe lights and onstage nudity.In retrospect, that caveat seemed comical, a bit like warning viewers that a Tarantino film might be somewhat bloody. Over the play’s 90-minute run time, the audience sat in stunned silence as a band of eight performers enacted a macabre and ritualistically precise examination of violence’s corrosive effect on the individual and the social body. Scenes of torture and violence, including sexual violence, tumbled forth with balletic elegance. The production’s delicacy of feeling and theatrical finesse were disturbingly at odds with the horrors it depicted.Created by the director Marco Layera and his company La Re-Sentida, “Oasis de la Impunidad” is a harrowing artistic response to Chile’s recent wave of social unrest, which has been described as the country’s worst since the end of the Pinochet regime. Like the other standout productions at the Schaubühne’s Festival International for New Drama, or FIND, “Oasis” takes nightmarish and surreal contemporary events as starting points for provocative theatrical explorations.In late 2019, Chile was convulsed by social unrest after a fare hike on the Santiago subway inspired mass demonstrations and riots against rising inequality. The government declared a state of emergency and deployed the army to restore law and order. In the first weeks of unrest, 18 people were killed and nearly 3,000 detained, including hundreds of women and children, according to a report issued by the National Institute for Human Rights. Since then, there have been numerous reports of security forces torturing and raping protesters.To develop “Oasis,” Layera held a series of theater labs and workshops in Chile. Two hundred people participated, including many survivors of state-sponsored repression and brutality. The resulting show, described as “an investigation into the origins and mechanisms of violence,” is a series of sinister and menacing episodes laced with dark comedy.At the Schaubühne, the actors, a mix of professionals and nonprofessionals, pulled on their genitalia, pinched their teeth and flesh with tools, erupted into paroxysms of hysteria and grief, and lovingly exhibited broken, bloodied bodies in a fun house of horrors. After its world premiere in Berlin, the show will travel to Santiago, Chile, in late May.Toward the end of the performance, an actor pushed through a row of spectators with an apparently passed-out, naked woman limply dangling from his shoulder and slumped her down on an empty seat. She remained there motionless until well after the curtain call. Several audience members stayed with her, cradling her head, until she revived once the theater had emptied out. It was a measure of the production’s success that it was far from clear what was real and what was simulated. By forcing the audience to confront aestheticized violence at such close range, “Oasis de la Impunidad” raised uncomfortable questions about power, art and ethics.Katherine Romans in “Is This A Room,” directed by Tina Satter.Gianmarco BresadolaThe struggle between the individual and the repressive force of the state was also at the center of “Is This a Room” by the American director Tina Satter, also showing at FIND. The play’s text is the verbatim, unedited transcript of an F.B.I. interrogation: In 2017, Reality Winner, a 25-year-old Air Force veteran, linguist and intelligence specialist, was arrested for leaking a classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the news website The Intercept. She was sentenced to more than five years in prison. Satter’s production dramatizes the hour on June 3, 2017, when F.B.I. agents surprised Winner at her home in Augusta, Ga., with a search warrant.This short, absorbing production was one of the most daring and adventurous plays on Broadway last year (it had earlier runs both Off and Off Off Broadway), and it arrived at FIND as part of its international tour, with its small cast intact from Broadway, with the exception of Katherine Romans stepping in as Winner. (Emily Davis originated the role.) Itchy footed and garrulous, Romans is convincing as the whistle-blower, who seems more worried about the well-being of her pets and the fate of her Yoga music playlist on her phone than spending years behind bars. She chitchats with the F.B.I. agents, who, like her, seem to be sizing up the situation second by second, about her professional ambitions, the languages she knows and her enthusiasm for CrossFit.At the Schaubühne, the actors performed from Parker Lutz’s simple, unfurnished set with the audience seated on either side of the oblong stage. Watching as Winner’s life comes crashing down around her in the space of an hour, one marvels at how perfect the dramatic timing is and how the revelations generated by the twists and turns of the interrogation build to something like catharsis. Even the non sequiturs, including the title question, uttered by a character identified by the transcript as “unknown male,” are beautifully timed and add a note of mystery as well as comic relief to this clammy production.Another FIND offering, Marcus Lindeen’s “L’Aventure invisible” (“The Invisible Adventure”), was also based on verbatim sources. That production — taking its dialogue from interviews, rather than an interrogation transcript — was more immersive than “Is This a Room,” but less convincing as a work of drama.From left, Isabelle Girard, Tom Menanteau and Franky Gogo in “L’Aventure Invisible.”Gianmarco BresadolaThe most immediately striking aspect of “L’Aventure invisible” was its physical format. The audience and performers sat together in a small wooden arena. The round seating area suggested an anatomical theater or amphitheater. The actors, facing one another, were easy to spot even before the performance began because they were the only three people not wearing medical masks.Once the house lights went down, they assumed the personas of people whose experiences suggest that identity is an unstable notion subject to profound and unexpected transformations: Jérôme Hamon, the first person to get two full face transplants; Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who suffered a massive stroke and had to completely reinvent herself at 37; and Sarah Pucill, who made a film about the French Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun, a gender-nonconforming pioneer.The dialogue is drawn from interviews Lindeen conducted with the trio, and in “L’Aventure invisible,” the three actors take turns questioning one another. While much of what they recount is fascinating, the format felt contrived and was occasionally awkward, with cookie-cutter interview prompts (“How did that make you feel?” or “And then what happened?”) that broke up the lengthy monologues.The actors brought the French text to life in serious, mostly understated performances (the audience could view subtitles in English or German on their smartphones). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hamon’s testimony is the most riveting. Tom Menanteau, the young actor playing Hamon, calmly described the degenerative disease that used to disfigure him, and how he now lives with the face of a dead man, 21 years his junior.When fact is stranger — and more frightening — than fiction, how can theatermakers stage the contemporary in artistically sensitive and politically urgent ways? That is the question this year’s FIND invites us to consider.FIND 2022 continues at the Schaubühne through April 10. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

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

      by

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

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

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

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

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

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

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

      by

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

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

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

      by

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