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      Interview: Adding An Asian Touch to the Plastic Debate

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      Akademi’s Suba Subramaniam on Plastic Drastic Fantastic

      Plastic Drastic Fantastic is a brand new dance piece coming to the Polka Theatre this spring. It’s been created by South Asian company Akademi, in conjunction with the Polka’s PolkaLAB artistic development programme, and explores human relationships with plastic. We wanted to find out a bit more about it, so we asked Artistic Director Suba Subramaniam to fill us in. 

      Hi Suba. This sounds like an extraordinary combination of themes – exploring our interactions with plastic through South Asian dance. How did the idea come about? 

      Interestingly, I initially conceived Plastic Drastic Fantastic as a Polka Creative Lab artist and the initial R&D took place as part of The Place’s Choreodrome annual research residency.

      I have worked with arts and climate change projects for nearly two decades alongside my career as a dance artist and science teacher. All my experience has led to this project: plastics is an urgent, relevant subject capturing the imagination of young people in terms of activism. I think dance can play an important role in helping young audiences engage with important subjects.

      Tell us a bit about the dance styles you incorporate, and which countries they represent. 

      There are two South Asian dance forms in the choreography; Kathak and Bharatanatyam. Both classical dance forms originated in the Indian sub-continent. I have used the form of Bharatanatyam at the movement core with contemporary interpretation to create a bold aesthetic. This dance form lends itself perfectly for a communicable narrative with gestures to integrate simple elements of BSL for a D/ Deaf audience.

      We use plastic for so many things in our everyday lives, but the issue of plastic pollution is a global one: are you focussing on it from a South Asian perspective?  How did you research the content of the show? 

      Plastic Drastic Fantastic is a dance show exploring our cultural relationship with plastics – covering their harmful impact on the environment whilst also exploring what makes plastic so versatile, useful and ubiquitous. The show will be highly visual, drawing on some of the most familiar images of plastics in use and abuse, from plastic bottles to plastic bags. It will be relevant, fun, engaging and thought provoking to a young audience of any background or ability. This work will explore the beauty of plastics as a material, how they behave, their properties and also what happens when we misuse them.

      We have also been speaking to Professor Mark Miodownik and Dr Zoe Laughlin from UCL (University College London) about some of the current issues around plastics. Their valuable knowledge has shaped the way we communicate about plastic in the show. 

      How does dance help to interpret the issues? Can plastic be fun?

      Of course plastics can be fun! Using the medium of South Asian dance, intricate movements and play, Plastic Drastic Fantastic draws on stories and ideas from young people to disentangle the fantastic possibilities that plastics offer us.

      What age group is the production aimed at? Is it only for children, or a wider audience?

      The production is suitable for ages 7+ years and their families. It is designed and created with children at the heart of the process. We hope the work will create lots of interesting discussions within families and friends and instil a curiosity to find out more about our world of plastics. It is our passion through arts and science to engage and empower young people to believe that their voices and opinions are valued.

      So, you also have some workshops lined up – is that right?

      Yes, that’s right. We have family workshops in March at Polka that will combine science, art and dance. These workshops will explore our relationship with plastics, by exploring their properties and what makes them so unique through dance and art.

      Have you had fun working with the Polka Theatre? And is the show going to be seen anywhere else? 

      Polka Theatre has been such a delightful partner organisation to work with, they have a wonderful new theatre space that is perfect for young audiences to feel welcome and parents to feel safe. It is a joy to be making and showing Plastic Drastic Fantastic in a theatre dedicated to young audiences and their families and to engage with their communities and audiences. 

      Thanks to Suba for taking the time out of her busy schedule to chat with us.  

      Plastic Drastic Fantastic dances into the Polka Theatre from 6 April to 8 May. Further information and bookings here. More

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      Interview: It’s Chekhov, But Not Quite As You Know It!

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      Knuckle Down on reworking Chekhov’s Three Sisters for the modern world.

      As you may imagine, we receive a lot of emails with show invitations here at ET! So admittedly, some days we trawl through those invitations and press releases with only half an eye on them, and it can take something different to jump out and grab our attention. That is just what happened when we came across Knuckle Down’s press release for Three Sisters, with its clever use of simple crossing out to make it stand out from so many others we’d already seen that day.

      A modern man-free adaptation of the Chekhov classic.In a room tiny back garden in a house outside a terraced house in a provincial town Wigan, three sisters wait for their lives to begin.Olga, the eldest lonely workaholic. Masha, the middle child depressed womaniser. Irina, the youngest ukulele-playing dreamer.

      We were certainly interested enough to suggest they tell us a little more about the show. So we sat down with Chloe and Matt of Knuckle Down to find out more.

      So, what made you decide to tackle Chekhov?

      We’ve always loved a bit of Chekhov. Especially the dark comedy that runs through many of his plays. The relationships between his characters are often complex to say the least and we were interested in exploring the relationships between the sisters especially.

      But it’s Chekhov with a rather interesting twist, bringing the story to Wigan and ‘man-free’ – how easy was it to adapt the story this way?

      We initially focused on these three sisters but also the three sisters from Shakespeare’s King Lear. We were interested to find out more about their stories as they’re so side-lined in the original texts. Even as the eponymous characters of Chekhov’s play, it’s crazy how many men dominate so many scenes with their chatter! We got rid of them all in our version and renamed them Alan!

      We spent time improvising and devising scenes around ideas from the original and then went away and adapted it so it follows the original action of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.  Setting it in modern day Wigan enabled us to swap Moscow for Manchester, and basing it in lockdown allowed us to keep the real sense that the sisters are truly trapped.

      And you’re promising “TikTok dance routines”: for those who aren’t too familiar with the original Chekhov, can you confirm that he never devised scenes for TikTok?

      Yes! TikTok dance routines do make an appearance at points throughout the play and we can confirm that as far as we’re aware Chekhov never ventured into the realm of TikTok.

      But more seriously, do you think modernising stories in this way is a gateway to bringing old classics to a whole new audience?

      Definitely!  We’re all about declassing the classics and making an intimidating canon more accessible to people who aren’t steeped in theatre knowledge. We hope everyone will still get all the best bits of Chekhov’s original but with the clarity of an ultra-modern and suitably irreverent lens.

      There is a ukulele-playing sister in the play, are we really going to be treated to some songs then?

      There’s a ukulele death ballad you’ll be treated to!

      Who do you feel this reworking of an old classic will appeal to? Who should be coming to see the show?

      Everyone, we hope. Both Chekhov fans and those who don’t know his work alike! It’s about being stuck in life, feeling trapped by circumstance and struggling to reconcile everything that’s brought you to that point, which I think we can all identify with after the past couple of years. It’s about growing up, but not too quickly and also, inevitably, about what it means to be a woman, a sister and part of a family.

      And is there anything else you are throwing into your version that we should be looking out for?

      There’s a bit of metatextuality thrown in for good measure!

      Finally, you’ve got runs at both The Maltings Theatre and Canal Café Theatre, is this just the start? Are there other plans afoot?

      We don’t have any plans beyond these two runs as yet, but we shall see!  For now we’re chuffed to have a couple of runs coming up and are looking forward to sharing our adaptation with audiences!

      Thanks to Knuckle Down for their time to chat about Three Sisters. They will be playing at Maltings Theatre St Albans 22 – 26 March and Canal Cafe Theatre London 31 March -2 April. More

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      Review: In ‘What You Are Now,’ Memory Is a Dangerous Thing

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      In Sam Chanse’s affecting play, a daughter tries to understand her mother, who resists any reminder of her escape from the Khmer Rouge.Trying to understand our parents’ past lives can feel like fumbling through the dark, especially for the children of immigrants. Recollections are selective, and many people have lived through things they’d rather forget. The challenge — and heartbreak — of bridging that chasm is the subject of “What You Are Now,” an affecting study of memory and migration by the playwright Sam Chanse that opened on Thursday night at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan.Pia (Pisay Pao) knows hardly anything about her mother’s experience fleeing Cambodia in 1975, amid the country’s deadly takeover by the Khmer Rouge. But the pain of her mother’s experience has shaped Pia’s life, like an imprint, she says, seared into her cells. It’s why Pia is pursuing neurological research, looking for a scientific solution to her mother’s mental suffering.Pia’s mother (Sonnie Brown) carries herself like a ghost, looking lost behind the eyes and staunchly resisting any reminders of Cambodia. She’s also held herself at arm’s length from Pia and her brother Darany (Robert Lee Leng), whom she raised on her own in small-town Massachusetts. (The height of their mother’s physical affection is a stiff-elbowed pat on the shoulder.) If Pia can’t enter or soothe her mother’s mind, she channels that desire into studying the brain.Chanse’s play shifts back and forth over a 10-year span in Pia’s study of memory and its potential for manipulation. When she speaks to her mom on the phone from the lab, their conversations are limited to the mundane, like what’s for dinner and how Pia’s career is advancing. But when Darany’s ex-girlfriend (Emma Kikue) comes around gathering testimony for a nonprofit from survivors of the Khmer Rouge, Pia’s mother refuses to open up about the past.“What You Are Now” isn’t propelled by incidents or dramatic action, but ideas about how the mind works and the gradual revelation of personal histories. Pia dates and breaks up with a co-worker (Curran Connor) with whom she cleans rat cages. Darany and his girlfriend, who is half white, smoke pot and swap stories of how they relate to their shared Cambodian heritage. Pia’s mom loses her temper when she walks in on her kids dancing to Cambodian rock.As Pia, Pao is spiky and guarded, observing and responding to her mother’s behavior with the cool remove that a scientist might keep for her subject. As her chill (and way cooler) older brother, Leng makes for a loose and grounded contrast, all street-slang and curious heart. And Brown is quietly arresting as a woman both fragile and imperious, slouched like a comma but with a will of steel.Directed by the Civilians artistic director, Steve Cosson, the smartly minimal production unfolds against a cool-gray monochrome interior, like a slate wiped clean. Frames that might display family portraits hang empty, and what could be a wall clock has no markings of time (the set design is by Riw Rakkulchon). Characters appear isolated in the dark, as they connect at a distance on the phone or retreat into their own perspectives (the lighting design is by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew).Pia explores whether it’s possible to alter what we remember, and memory’s relationship to identity, by delving into empirical study rather than excavating and sorting through emotions. The play includes perhaps one too many descriptions of real-life experiments, which are limited in dramatic potential.But “What You Are Now” excels in unforced revelations about the human struggle to connect, and to share the messy and sometimes painful stories that make us who we are. Everything we hear and experience, and how we remember it, reshapes our brains, Pia says. It’s a scientific testament to the power of storytelling to change minds.What You Are NowThrough April 3 at the Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan; ensemblestudiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      With Its Future Uncertain, the Humana Festival Will Not Return in 2022

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      The showcase of work by contemporary American playwrights will not take place this year, either in person or online — and after that, it’s up in the air.Opportunities for emerging playwrights to break into the industry are few — and now there’s one less.The Humana Festival of New American Plays, one of the premiere showcases for new work by contemporary American playwrights, will not take place this year, either in person or online, Actors Theater of Louisville confirmed in a statement this week. When the theater announced its fall and spring programming in September, it did not include the annual event, and the status of the 2022 festival had remained unclear.“In order to uplift, celebrate and expand the tremendous legacy of the festival, it is necessary to reimagine a 21st-century model that is sustainable, equitable and radically accessible,” Robert Barry Fleming, the theater’s executive artistic director, said in the statement. He did not specify what that might look like.The last in-person festival was held in 2019. Actors Theater, a regional company, canceled the 2020 festival because of the pandemic, scrapping five world premieres, though it pivoted to streaming some of the plays that had managed to open. In 2021, the theater hosted a virtual exhibition of digital plays, virtual reality productions and an interactive video game, with premieres scattered throughout the year. (A number of them are still available online.)Amelia Acosta Powell, the theater’s impact producer, whose focus is on outreach to donors and audiences, said a decision had not yet been made on whether the festival would return — or what form it would take — in future years.Instead, she said, the theater is focusing on developing work from the virtual exhibition held last year, including an in-person production of “Still Ready,” originally a musical docu-series celebrating Black artistry, that will have its premiere at Actors Theater in May.Fleming told WFPL, the Louisville NPR affiliate, in October that festival organizers believed it was less important to try to cram the development of new plays into “a six-week kind of window” than to be “contributing to the canon, and continuing to innovate.”The Humana Festival, which was founded in 1976, typically takes place over multiple weeks in March and April at the Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky. It attracts an international audience and has hosted the premieres of work by Anne Washburn, Will Eno and Sarah Ruhl.Since 1979, the festival has been sponsored by the Humana Foundation in Louisville and has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Powell declined to share the cost of producing the event, or to specify how much the foundation contributes, but she said it had been less than half of the overall cost, with the remainder coming from Actors Theater’s operating budget, as well as from other corporate, foundation and individual gifts.Mark Taylor, a spokesman for Humana, a health insurance company based in Louisville, said that the foundation’s most recent grant to the theater ended last year. “Humana and the Humana Foundation look forward to continuing to support the arts in Louisville and other communities in creative new ways,” he said in an email. Several of the more than 400 plays presented at the festival have gone on to win wider accolades — “The Gin Game” by D.L. Coburn, “Dinner With Friends” by Donald Margulies and “Crimes of the Heart” by Beth Henley, all won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama — and the event is often regarded as a milestone in the careers of emerging playwrights. Programming is a mix of short pieces, 10-minute plays, one-acts and full-length shows.Recent world premieres have included Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate,” Lucas Hnath’s “The Christians” and Eno’s “Gnit.”Washburn, the author of “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” has premiered work at the festival. She said that what was most beneficial about the event was the collegiality — the impromptu meetings with critics, directors, apprentices and fellow playwrights — in a setting outside New York.“You’d have playwrights from around the country, but it’s also super set in Louisville,” she said in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “You’d explore the city, have lots of bourbon and banana pudding, and the playwrights would get together and drink and despair about the world.”It was also one of the few places where an up-and-coming playwright could get work produced, she added.“New York was much less set up for new plays,” she said. “There were very few of these smaller, secondary stages or development production programs. A lot of playwrights started at Humana when they couldn’t get a production in New York. It’s a big deal, but it doesn’t have the same pressures as a singular opening.”Eno, whose play “Thom Pain (based on nothing)” was a finalist in 2005 for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, said in an email that it would be disappointing if the festival didn’t return as an in-person event.“Playwriting is almost impossible, and this just makes it a little harder, and a little less, I suppose, heralded, or communal,” he said. “It’s like the death of a hardware store or a coffee shop people liked.”Powell, the impact producer, said that it was unlikely that any future iteration of the event would be structured as it was prepandemic, but that the theater recognized the value of certain aspects of the annual gathering, which “we would hope to capture in new ways.”Among them: giving artists from around the country the opportunity to collaborate in the development of their works-in-progress, as well as to “engage in creative and intellectual discourse.”But the in-person aspect of the gathering, Eno said, can’t be replicated.“We all learned something over the last couple years about the importance of people, people gathering, physically assembling for some higher or greater or more mysterious purpose,” he said, “And it’s too bad it won’t happen anymore at Humana.” More

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      ‘The Life’ Review: Turning More Than a Few New Tricks

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      Billy Porter brings a heavy-handed touch as the director and adapter of this 1997 musical about prostitutes and pimps in Manhattan’s bad old days.In case you have forgotten the premise behind Reaganomics, the musical “The Life” offers a primer right before a big number at the top of Act 2: It was based on “the proposition that taxes on businesses should be reduced as a means to stimulate business investment in the short term and benefit society at large in the long term.”And five, six, seven, eight!Not only is this dialogue leaden — especially coming from a young pimp — but it is not in “The Life” as we know it: The musical that opened last night as part of New York City Center’s Encores! series has been drastically reconfigured from the one that premiered on Broadway in 1997.Back then, the composer Cy Coleman and the lyricist Ira Gasman conceived “Mr. Greed” as a cynical showstopper — very much in a Kander and Ebb vein — in which ’80s-era pimps and scam artists playing three-card monte explain that their best ally is the cupidity that blinds marks to their own foolishness.Now Billy Porter — who adapted Coleman, Gasman and David Newman’s book, and directed this production — puts Trump and Reagan masks on the ensemble members and has them sing and dance their denunciation of an ideology. The number is of a stylistic and aesthetic piece with Porter’s take on the show, which emphasizes systemic oppression to the detriment of individual characterizations. Whether it’s of a piece with “The Life,” well, that is something else.There are many changes to the book, but the most structurally consequential is the decision to frame the story as a flashback narrated, decades after the events, by the shady operator Jojo. He is now, he informs us, a successful Los Angeles publicity agent, but in the ’80s he was an entrepreneurial minnow in Times Square at its seediest. (Anita Yavich’s costumes are colorfully period, even if they feel more anchored in a 1970s disco-funk vibe than in the colder Reaganite decade.)Members of the ensemble portray prostitutes in the seedy old days of early ’80s Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOld Jojo (Destan Owens) acts as our guide to the characters, who include the prostitutes Queen (Alexandra Grey) and Sonja (Ledisi), as well as their protectors and abusers, like the Vietnam veteran Fleetwood (Ken Robinson) and the brutal pimp Memphis (Antwayn Hopper).Jojo also regularly comments on the action, often casting a remorseful eye on the behavior of his younger self, portrayed by Mykal Kilgore. (Owens plays other characters, too, which leads to a rather confusing conversation with Queen that makes you wonder if Porter has scrambled the space-time continuum, on top of everything else.)Unfortunately the memory-musical format only takes us out of the plot and, most crucially, the emotional impact. Every time we get absorbed in the 1980s goings-on, the older Jojo pops up with explainy back stories, ham-handed editorializing and numbing lectures. The original show let us progressively discover the characters’ distinct personalities through actions, words and songs; now they are archetypal pawns in an op-ed. One can agree with a message and still find its form lacking.Changes abound throughout the evening. Moving Sonja’s “The Oldest Profession” to the second act transforms it into an 11 o’clock number for Ledisi, a Grammy-winning singer who runs with it and provides the show’s most thrilling moment.Others can feel dutiful. The original setup for the empowerment anthem “My Body,” which the company memorably performed at the 1997 Tony Awards (“The Life” had 12 nominations), was the working women’s answer to a group of sanctimonious Bible-thumpers.Now the song follows a visit to a Midtown clinic “founded by a group of ex-hookers who found some medical folks to partner with who actually lived by that Hippocratic oath situation,” as Old Jojo explains. There Sonja gets treated for throat thrush and Queen, who is now transgender, receives injections. The segue into “My Body” feels both literal and abrupt, and we miss the antagonists.Antwayn Hopper, left, and Alexandra Grey in the musical, which was adapted and directed by Billy Porter.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn a recent interview with The New York Times, Porter said he thought that “the comedy was doing the storytelling a disservice” in the original production, which was hatched by white creators and dealt largely with Black characters. But while he has added a lot of back stories, especially for Fleetwood, Sonja and Queen, his version also features quite a few new quips as well as some unfortunate broad funny business.Young Jojo is bad enough in that respect, but Memphis suffers the most. As portrayed by a Tony-winning Chuck Cooper in 1997, his calm amplified his menace: This was a Luciferian scary guy. Now Memphis is a Blaxploitation cartoon who can be distractingly flamboyant, as when he hijacks one of Queen’s key scenes by preening barechested. Hopper, who sings in a velvety bass-baritone, has such uncanny abs that for a moment I wondered whether the show was somehow using live CGI.Adding to the meta business, Memphis is also prone to winky fourth-wall-breaking asides, as when he complimented the guest conductor James Sampliner on his arrangements.Because those are new, too. Coleman, equally at ease delivering pop earworms in “Sweet Charity” and canny operetta pastiches in “On the Twentieth Century,” was one of Broadway’s most glorious melody writers, and “The Life,” orchestrated by Don Sebesky and Harold Wheeler (of “The Wiz” and “Dreamgirls” fame), was an interesting melding of brassy impulses rooted in a musical-theater idiom. But Sampliner’s formulaic R&B- and funk-inflected orchestrations and arrangements undermine the score’s idiosyncrasies.For better or for worse — mostly for worse here — Regietheater, the German practice of radically reinterpreting a play, musical or opera, has come to Encores. Whether that approach belongs in this series — which debuted in 1994 to offer brief runs of underappreciated musicals in concert style and has traditionally been about reconstruction rather than deconstruction — is an open question.Rethinks can be welcome, even necessary in musical theater — Daniel Fish’s production of “Oklahoma!,” now touring the country, is one especially successful example.The traditionally archival-minded Encores has broadened its mission statement to include that the artists are “reclaiming work for our time through their own personal lens.” It’s clear that the series is moving into a new phase, but for many of us longtime fans, it’s also a little sad to lose such a unique showcase.The LifeThrough March 20 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘The Medium’ Is Less a Message and More a Museum Piece

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      This early 1990s play, based on the life of Marshall McLuhan, is being revived by the company that created it.“You can’t go home again.”Variations on that line are uttered eight times in “The Medium,” which the director Anne Bogart is reviving this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. So it’s likely that she and her venerable experimental ensemble, SITI Company, were aware of the hazards of revisiting a play they created together and first performed in 1993.It makes utter sense that SITI would choose “The Medium” for this, its final season, as it prepares to wrap up three decades of theater-making. “Based on the life and predictions of Marshall McLuhan,” as the program puts it, the show is a cracked and heightened remix of that 20th-century communications theorist’s trenchant thoughts on technology — the ways it shapes us, and the world.The company’s first devised work, it is crammed with ear-catching observations far beyond McLuhan’s famous maxim “The medium is the message.” What better time than now — after two years in which so many of us have had to keep a corner of our homes camera-ready for work meetings — to stage a piece that helps us think about our inseparability from our devices and what that does to our interactions with other human beings?So it’s slightly puzzling that this smartly designed production, at BAM Fisher, feels labored. Starring Will Bond as a winningly hokey McLuhan in brown suit and bow tie, it is missing that ineffable ingredient that would grab us by the collar and pull us in. Intelligent though the show is, it isn’t fun, and it wants to be.Its genial McLuhan is in for a frantic evening, clicking through television channels as he has a stroke. Fragments of pop culture jostle with his own ideas in hallucinatory scenes that take the form of small-screen programming. There’s a talk show and a cooking show, a detective drama and a televangelist’s broadcast. In interstitial moments, characters move as if zombified.They are all peopled with a much-doubling, four-actor ensemble: Gian-Murray Gianino, Violeta Picayo, Stephen Duff Webber and Ellen Lauren — who, like Bond, is a founding member of the company and was part of the ensemble in the play’s 1994 production at New York Theater Workshop. (Gabriel Berry, the show’s original designer, has updated her costumes for the revival, but they’re still delightfully midcentury mod.)The McLuhan of this play does not want to be portrayed as an enemy of technology, merely someone aware of its dangers. “I feel a bit like the man who turns on a fire alarm only to be charged with arson,” he says.Yet “The Medium” is more interested in the harms of technology than in its formidable democratic powers, which President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and ordinary people there and in Russia have harnessed recently with such savvy through social media. A month ago, before the war, the play might have landed slightly differently.Still, we are by now so long steeped in technology, and in talk of it, that the play may be most useful for thinking about how we arrived at this point. As McLuhan says here, “Only by understanding change can you ease the burden of experiencing it.”The same may apply to “The Medium” as a means of understanding SITI Company. In 1994, Bogart told The New York Times that plays from the recent past are “memory capsules of who we are.”For Bogart and her ensemble, surely, that is what “The Medium” has become: a reminder of their origins and who they used to be. It’s instructive to see it now in the light of their subsequent influence as collective creators of brainy, physical, contemporary theater. But there is a stubborn sense of watching it from an archival distance, as if it were a live tableau in a museum and we were behind a velvet rope.The MediumThrough March 20 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Comedy Undercut ‘The Life.’ Billy Porter Looks for Its Humanity.

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      The actor is directing an Encores! revival of the 1997 musical, updating it to confront hard truths about racism, poverty and carceral injustice.When “The Life” opened on Broadway in 1997, the sex trade in Times Square that it depicts was no longer a prominent feature of the area. Like an increasingly polished Midtown Manhattan, the musical, about the women and men who once made it a prostitution capital, was sufficiently family-friendly for my parents to take me to see it, at the age of 15, as my first Broadway show.We came to New York to see “Rent,” Jonathan Larson’s portrait of la vie bohème, which had opened the previous year. After reading newspaper listings, my father chose “The Life” as another show for us to catch while in town. And despite its ostensibly R-rated subject matter (which we assume he somehow overlooked), it was perhaps no more adult in theme than “Rent.” Set circa 1980, “The Life” is also about lovers and strivers doing their best to survive a harsh and unforgiving city.But the Broadway production of “The Life” shared more DNA with droll Gotham fables like “Guys and Dolls” and “Sweet Charity,” another musical about dreams of escaping the sex trade composed, some 30 years earlier, by Cy Coleman, whose score for “The Life” is filled with magnetic melodies and brassy hooks. A hybrid comedy-drama, “The Life” was jazzy and jaunty, with a touch of vaudeville and the blues.Porter with Ledisi, the soul and jazz singer who is taking on the role played by Lillias White in the original 1997 production.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesWith lyrics by Ira Gasman, and a book by Coleman, Gasman and David Newman, “The Life” imagined the sex workers who populated Times Square as showbiz types with verve and moxie. (Vincent Canby’s critic’s essay in The New York Times praised the production’s “go-for-broke pizazz.”) Propelled by electric performances, “The Life” was nominated for 12 Tony Awards and won two, for best featured actor in a musical (Chuck Cooper) and for best featured actress in a musical (Lillias White, whose volcanic rendition of “The Oldest Profession” was the first time I’d witnessed a show-stopping ovation).Though my life could not have been further from “The Life,” there was a restlessness and defiance to the characters that I recognized in my own, as the gay son of immigrants growing up in a mostly white Michigan suburb. Listening to the cast recording, I channeled my angst and alienation into songs like “My Body” and “Why Don’t They Leave Us Alone,” anthems of autonomy and self-determination.Lillias White received a Tony Award for her portrayal of a sex worker in the Broadway production of “The Life.”Associated PressAnd while I could easily relate to yearning for love and escape, “The Life” was not the lesson in hard truths — about racism, poverty and carceral injustice — that it might have been. Though the musical ended in tragedy, comedy kept the so-called hookers and pimps, and their dire straits, at a wry remove. The characters seemed designed for the purposes of entertainment, not to inspire understanding of their interiority and circumstances.“The comedy was doing the storytelling a disservice,” said Billy Porter, who has reconceived a new production of “The Life” for New York City Center’s Encores! series. The show, which begins performances on Wednesday, will be his Encores! directorial debut.The ensemble members Tanairi Vazquez and Jeff Gorti during a recent rehearsal.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesLike most writers working on Broadway at the time, the creators of “The Life” were white men; their story didn’t ask audiences to consider why its mostly Black characters, many of whom are women, were trapped to begin with — only that they wanted out. With his revision, Porter, 52, said he intended to make “The Life” a darker and more clear-eyed drama, humanizing its characters and foregrounding their social disadvantages.Porter, who last year concluded his run as Pray Tell on the FX series “Pose,” played a principal role in early developmental workshops of “The Life” but was not ultimately cast when the show moved to Broadway. He says he believes in the purity of its creators’ intentions. “They wanted to be allies, and they were,” he told me during a lunch break at a recent rehearsal. “The music is extraordinary, that’s why we’re doing it at all.” Still, he noted that this story was problematic in the absence of more context.In reimagining the show, Porter said the humor would come from the characters’ often painful truths. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesEncores! first approached Porter about directing “The Life” in early 2020; inequalities exposed by the pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement have only fueled the urgency behind his vision for the show. “We have to make sure everybody understands that there are systems of oppression and erasure and caste in place, where if you’re born in a system, you stay in that system,” he said. “We can’t unsee it anymore.”The plot remains largely intact, but characters stuck in “The Life” are presented in more fleshed-out detail — not only with back stories and more vivid inner lives, but with fates beyond the action onstage. Much of this information comes from the narrator, Jojo, originally played by the white actor Sam Harris. In Porter’s iteration, the role has been expanded and will be played by Destan Owens, who is Black. “I wanted the narration to be told through our eyes and our voice,” Porter said.Reflecting on the summer of 1980, when New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, Jojo tells the audience, “We were all like crabs in a barrel,” scratching and clawing to get out. (Jojo made it to Los Angeles, he says, where he now runs his own P.R. firm.)Porter’s revision has the support of Cy Coleman’s estate, as the musical isn’t often produced because of its mature content. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThere’s Fleetwood (Ken Robinson), a Vietnam veteran succumbing to the city’s crack epidemic, and his lover Queen (Alexandra Grey), who learns that her cash from turning tricks has not been going to their escape fund. There’s Memphis (Antwayn Hopper), the fly, ruthless kingpin who drives a wedge between them for his own gain. And there’s the worn out and weary Sonja (Ledisi, in the role originated by White), whose character has been deepened from soulful comic relief into a tragic harbinger of what’s to come.Where the original subtly hinted that Sonja is suffering from H.I.V., the first cases of which were diagnosed around the time “The Life” is set, Porter foregrounds her declining health, adding a scene in which the women receive supportive services at a community clinic. That’s where Queen, who is transgender in Porter’s revision, also receives hormone treatments. To Porter, these aspects of the characters’ lives come with the clarity of hindsight.The music of “The Life” also aims to be more reflective of post-disco New York, in new orchestrations and arrangements by James Sampliner. While honoring Coleman’s original melodies, Sampliner said the revival’s sound, which he called “down and funky,” would be far from the original’s big-band jazz, citing sonic influences like Earth, Wind & Fire, the O’Jays, Chaka Khan and Isaac Hayes. “It’s just got stank all over it,” he said.“It’s going to be a full gag,” Porter said of the production. “Even when it’s dark, that’s our job.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Encores! series, which began its first season under new leadership last month with “The Tap Dance Kid,” has long welcomed substantial revisions to its short-running revivals of American musicals (as the book is often the problem with those rarely seen). But preserving original orchestrations and arrangements has also been part of its mission, so “The Life” represents an artistic departure.It is also the first of what the artistic director, Lear DeBessonet, and the producing creative director, Clint Ramos, call an auteur slot, giving artists like Porter the encouragement to reimagine works from their personal perspective. Porter’s revision has the support of Coleman’s estate, as the musical isn’t often produced because of its mature content.Will “The Life” still have laughs? “It’s going to be a full gag,” Porter said, adding that he considers himself a hopeful entertainer. “Even when it’s dark, that’s our job.” The humor won’t be put on to make anyone feel more comfortable, he added. Rather, it will come from the often painful truths of the situation (like Sonja asking for a doctor’s note to show her pimp).The grit and perseverance that women like Sonja and Queen taught me at a young age remains as well — lessons perhaps rendered more poignant by a fuller picture of the odds stacked against them. And “The Life” may also speak with hard-fought wisdom for troubled times, to a city emerging from another difficult chapter.“We choose hope, not because things are joyful or hopeful,” Porter said. “But in order to live.” More

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      in Theater

      Stars Battle It Out on London Stages

      by

      In West End productions, Jonathan Bailey and Taron Egerton play a fighting couple, and Kit Harington from “Game of Thrones” plays the warrior king in “Henry V.”LONDON — There’s no nudity in “Cock,” the 2009 Mike Bartlett play that opened Tuesday in a starry revival at the Ambassadors Theater here. But by the time its 105 minutes, no intermission, have come to an end, you’ve seen its characters stripped emotionally bare.The play has had quite a trajectory, from its London origins in the Royal Court’s 80-seat studio space to a run in New York (where it had the longer, less provocative title “The Cockfight Play”) and now to a commercial West End perch where tickets are going for three figures — prices you might find for a big musical like “Cabaret.”The show’s director, Marianne Elliott, is a significant force in London theater, and the cast is led by Jonathan Bailey and Taron Egerton, two theater-trained actors more widely known these days onscreen. Bailey came to prominence in the Netflix series “Bridgerton,” while Egerton was a hugely charismatic Elton John in the biopic “Rocketman” and has starred in several of the “Kingsman” films.The play’s author has enjoyed his own ascent. He won acclaim in London and on Broadway for “King Charles III,” which predicts how England’s monarchy might evolve after the queen dies, and has two new plays due in London this spring, one of which, “The 47th,” imagines Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for the presidency. (That one opens next month at the Old Vic.)“Cock,” by contrast, features no real-life characters. Only one of them gets an actual name: John (Bailey), a young man in crisis as he pivots between the affections of his male partner of seven years, a broker known simply as M (Egerton), and a female teaching assistant, W. After John and W have sex, he begins contemplating a new life.Jade Anouka acquits herself beautifully as the outsider to a gay relationship on the ropes: a woman who asks for courtesy from M and is met with condescension and worse. He dismisses her job in the classroom as “babysitting,” and some of his euphemisms for the female anatomy will raise an eyebrow or two.Bailey and Jade Anouka in “Cock.”Brinkhoff-MoegenburgThis defining trio widens in a climactic dinner party scene to include M’s father, F (a feisty Phil Daniels), who arrives in time for his son’s home-cooked beef and a “goopy” cheesecake that hasn’t gone quite according to plan. Not that we ever see food or, indeed, props of any kind. In keeping with the stripped-back demands of the writing, the action plays out on a curved bare set, designed by Merle Hensel and illuminated from above by the tubular rods of Paule Constable’s lighting.The playbill credits a gender and sexuality consultant to the production, John Mercer, and includes a glossary of “LGBTQ+ terms,” such as “asexual” and “polyamory.” Some of those weren’t much in use when the play was written, but John would probably have rejected them, anyway: Asked repeatedly to decide who, or what, he is, he simply cannot answer, preferring an identity beyond labels.I must confess to wondering midway through whether John was worth all this fuss. If this production is less moving than the Royal Court original, that may owe something to a different emphasis in the casting. In that show, the wraithlike Ben Whishaw fit perfectly with John’s pencil-drawing wiriness as described in the text. A vigorous, muscular Bailey, by contrast, looks more than able to take care of himself, and he brings to the part the same manic energy that distinguished his bravura performance in Elliott’s 2018 West End production of “Company,” for which he won an Olivier.Egerton made headlines early in the show’s run when he fainted during the first preview, but he recovered quickly enough to joke about it on social media. Inheriting a part originated by Andrew Scott, Egerton brings a sad-eyed defensiveness to his role, reminding us that, in British parlance, to make a mess of things is “to cock things up.”Kit Harington in “Henry V,” directed by Max Webster at the Donmar Warehouse.Helen MurrayAnd things get really messy in the play’s final scene. “Off we go into battle,” remarks F as the episode begins. His readiness would be equally at home on the battlefield of “Henry V,” currently lit up by some star wattage of its own through April 9 at the Donmar Warehouse, where the “Game of Thrones” star Kit Harington is in firm command of the challenging title role.Presented in modern dress and with multiple gender flips (as is the Shakespeare norm in London these days), the production charts a neat path between the potential jingoism of a play celebrating England’s military prowess and the dubious aspects of its martial conquests. England’s success comes at sizable cost to France, whose princess, Katherine (Anoushka Lucas), is more or less ordered to be Henry’s bride, without much say in the matter.The play is from the same director, Max Webster, whose show “Life of Pi” received nine Olivier award nominations last week; that adaptation of the Yann Martel novel, still running in London, features inventive puppetry and stagecraft. In “Henry V,” however, the impact comes from the characters, particularly Henry, who abandons his drunken, carousing ways to become a man of war. If Harington finds a compelling ambivalence in the role, that’s because Henry, rather like John in “Cock,” discovers he is a man divided: a sensitive soul whose legacy, he comes to realize, is forever linked to slaughter.Cock. Directed by Marianne Elliott. Ambassadors Theater, through June 4.Henry V. Directed by Max Webster. Donmar Warehouse, through April 9. More