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      A Surprising First Live Show, in the Hometown I Once Fled

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      Back in Honduras for the first time in a decade, a critic finds hopefulness in a city’s cultural ferment — including an energetic theater troupe.On March 12, 2020, I went to an afternoon movie. I was struck by the heavy feeling in Midtown; people looked less determined, more afraid. There were interminable lines inside the drugstores, and at the IMAX theater that seats more than 4,000 people, there was me and a stranger who walked in during the previews.I was killing some time before an evening show off-Broadway. I still had to do my job, as a critic, and had the delusional hope that New York City would somehow be spared the arrival of the virus. Halfway through “Onward,” my Apple Watch vibrated, and I read the announcement that Broadway had been shut down. I abandoned the movie, bought enough cough syrup and chips to last me a century, and didn’t leave my Brooklyn apartment once for the next six weeks.I still don’t know how “Onward” ends.Two thousand miles south of New York, in my hometown, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, the reality of the pandemic also materialized for members of the Casa del Teatro Memorias. The local theater company had opened its doors in 2013 to satiate culture-hungry audience members living in a city where, because of crime, you’re told not to leave the house after dark.That evening they were celebrating the opening night of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” their most ambitious production yet. With the sudden announcement of a lockdown, the festivities turned funereal.“We were in mourning for weeks,” the actor Gabriel Ochoa, who played Puck, told me recently. His impish smile turned into a frown as he showed me two photographs that were salvaged from that single night, all that remained of their dream production.From left: the actors Gabriel Ochoa, Inma López and Jean Navarro outside the Casa de Teatro Memorias in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.Jose SolísMy visit with Ochoa, however, was tinged with optimism. We met at a rehearsal for the theater’s next production, the second to be staged in person since the company had resumed activities in March.The theater where, amazingly in so many ways, I saw my first live show in 409 days.Lonely and fearfulDuring lockdown, I learned how to adjust to digital performances, nonstop Zooms, and loneliness. I’d gone from seeing shows every matinee and evening to coming up with different voices for all the plants I’d bought. My UPS guy, (hello, Jose!) became the most consistent physical presence in my life, my quarantine BFF.When the loneliness became absolutely unbearable, I realized I needed to return home. I hadn’t seen my parents in nine years, my younger brothers had outgrown me in height, I’d never met my mom’s dogs. I just needed to be cared for.The pros of returning to the hometown I’d left as a queer teenager, and had been too afraid of visiting as an openly gay adult, outweighed the cons. Life in quarantine wouldn’t be so different, except there I’d be surrounded by the people I love.After getting my second vaccine in late March I started a process of reverse migration: I’d left my home for survival, and staying alive was bringing me back.I got used to being back faster than I had imagined. The benefits of digital performance meant I’d been able to carry what I love most about New York with me, and this time I could share it with my family. Laughing with Peter Michael Marino’s “Planet of the Grapes” along with my middle brother was perfection. My 32-year-old baby brother couldn’t believe a show like Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s “Black Feminist Video Game” existed. He never knew theater could cater to gamers.One evening shortly after my birthday, my mom asked me if I wanted to go to the theater. How did she know what I’d wished for when I blew out my candles?More important: theater in my hometown?“A lot has changed since you’ve been gone,” said Inma López, a producer and ensemble member at Memorias. She and her husband, the artistic director Tito Ochoa (Gabriel’s uncle), met in Colombia and moved to his native Tegucigalpa in 2007 where they worked to set up what has become the most vibrant theater in the city capital.Upon finding a landscape lacking a steady diet of cultural events, they set up shop in the historic Barrio La Plazuela, in a space that had previously housed a gym, an Evangelical church and a dojo.Steadily, Casa del Teatro Memorias gained traction with diverse groups in the city. Theater in Tegucigalpa went from the didacticism of political plays that toured colleges and high schools in the 1980s, to becoming an essential part of city life. “I never knew this could exist in my hometown,” the actor Jean Navarro explained.Like many other struggling companies around the world, Memorias became a streaming platform during the pandemic, and in March was able to resume in-person performances. Following strict Covid-19 safety protocols and cutting capacity from 150 to 30 socially distanced seats, the troupe premiered Tito Ochoa’s adaptation of “La Ciudad Oscura,” by the Spanish playwright Antonio Rojano.The play, inspired by Alex Proyas’s 1998 film “Dark City,” explores collective amnesia in the aftermath of the Franco regime. For the Honduran adaptation, Ochoa had plenty of material to draw from: three coups d’état and military dictatorships since 1963, the most recent in 2009.Human rights violations at home and the murders of L.G.B.T.Q.I. people led my parents to ask me not to return home after college in Costa Rica, out of fear for my life.Awestruck and gratefulOn April 25, I took a 15-minute walk from my mom’s house to the theater. I strolled past the colonial era churches that had ignited my imagination as a child. Several landmark stores I had loved were gone, replaced by fast food restaurants and parking lots.But a small line was forming outside the theater. We stood patiently as each of us had our temperatures checked, and our hands doused in sanitizer. Half an hour later the thought-provoking production of “La Ciudad Oscura” began.I had wondered how I’d react to seeing a curtain open again. I eased into the experience, just as I had with my other homecoming.I was annoyed at the young people who kept updating their Facebook status, shivered with delight whenever the fog machine was used during a scene transition and grinned like a fool when the curtain closed for intermission. My heart swelled every time my mom turned to me when I laughed. She’s been doing that for as long as I can remember when she knows I’m enjoying something. I didn’t need to see her mouth under her mask to know she was smiling.From left, Marey Álvarez, Jean Navarro and Gabriel Ochoa in “La Ciudad Oscura,” an adaptation of a play by Antonio Rojano, inspired by the 1998 movie “Dark City.”Ezequiel SánchezThe ensemble at Casa del Teatro Memorias held me spellbound for almost three hours. The play’s tonal shifts, from farcical to terrifying, were expertly handled by the troupe, who made us laugh, gasp and squeal in unison. As a lover of classic musicals, I felt like Judy Garland in “Meet Me in St. Louis,” grateful and in awe that such beauty existed in the place where I had grown up.“It’s a reminder of the resilience of theater,” said Tito Ochoa when I caught up with him a few days later. “It’s an art form incapable of being censured or annihilated. It will always remain a mirror of its time.”This time it reflected where I was: home. More

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      Come to the Cabaret, Old Chum. Or at Least Stream It.

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      New concerts from Sutton Foster, Jeremy Jordan and Marilyn Maye offer examples of what the most intimate art form can and can’t do.Cabaret is a magpie medium, plucking pieces from the world’s songbook and repurposing them to tell more-or-less personal stories.Whether the result is sublime or mortifying (or, more typically, in between) depends on how cleverly singers shape their material to fit the contours of the tales they’re telling. Vocal beauty is a secondary matter — as any number of old-school performers, like the swinging Sylvia Syms and the barking Elaine Stritch, proved by keeping the form alive even when they had almost no voice left.But the pandemic has nearly done the old bird in; the intimacy of most cabaret performance spaces, and the likelihood that a singer may spit in your chicken Kiev, have made live shows impossible. If there have nevertheless been some astounding virtual concerts in the tradition, including one Audra McDonald gave for a New York City Center gala, that doesn’t make the real thing any less valuable.Until live cabaret’s day, or rather its evening, returns, high-profile offerings from Sutton Foster, Jeremy Jordan and Marilyn Maye are here to entertain and instruct us. These three performers sing very well indeed, in very different styles and with very different material. But it’s their completely divergent uses of the form that make them stand out as examples of what cabaret can and can’t do best.One thing it can’t do at all is refuse to tell a story, even if that’s what a singer intends. Foster’s concert “Bring Me to Light,” also for City Center, tries hard anyway, deliberately defocusing its star and keeping psychology on a very short leash. The effect is so extreme that Foster seems more like the host of the occasion than the occasion itself, pushing her spotlight onto guests including Kelli O’Hara, Raúl Esparza and Joaquina Kalukango, who steals the show with “The Life of the Party,” from Andrew Lippa’s “The Wild Party.” Foster even gives a solo — “Here I Am,” from Disney’s “Camp Rock” — to Wren Rivera, a student of hers at Ball State University.In other words, despite having starred in seven Broadway shows and winning two Tony Awards, the first for “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 2002, Foster is a sharer, not a self-aggrandizer. Instead of filling gaps between songs with the de rigueur résumé-by-chitchat, she chipperly interviews her pals. And though the title of the show is taken from the finale of “Violet,” the Jeanine Tesori-Brian Crawley musical Foster led at City Center in 2013 and on Broadway in 2014, the tunestack of “Bring Me to Light” tends to avoid material strongly associated with its star. Mostly, it offers songs she is unlikely to be assigned onstage (“How to Handle a Woman”) or that come from other genres entirely. She and O’Hara make a lovely duet of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now.”This is all professionally rendered — as is the show itself. (The director is Leigh Silverman; the music director, Michael Rafter.) It looks fantastic in the plush if empty City Center auditorium. But at no point does it offer us the Sutton Foster who is so commanding when she plays a role that she can disappear into it before emerging transformed. Actually, at one point it does, when she bounces through the backstage hallways in jeans and then, in a nice jump cut, pops onto the stage in a sparkly gown. The song is the ambivalently titled “Hey, Look Me Over.”From Sutton Foster’s “Bring Me to Light,” at New York City Center.If Foster’s show tells the story of a star who avoids too much drama, “Jeremy Jordan: Carry On” heads in the opposite direction. It is bursting with drama, more than its little canoe of gorgeously sung songs can carry without tipping.The premise is both affecting and overwrought: that when he became a father in 2019, Jordan realized he had to unburden himself of unresolved conflicts from his own childhood before he could properly parent. Hence the pun in the show’s title, which is not just a command to keep going but also an actual piece of luggage filled with keepsakes that represent youthful traumas he must unpack.These are not the kind of traumas that are too piddling to earn a hearing; Jordan tells a brutal tale, involving abuse, drugs and a catastrophic car accident. The problem is that there aren’t many songs available to reflect and shape those traumas, so he must jury-rig existing ones (or, as in two cases, write new ones) to make a case for singing at all. Even so, as in a jukebox musical, they rarely fit, especially the ones associated with his own career, like “Broadway, Here I Come!” from “Smash,” and “Santa Fe” from “Newsies.”From Jeremy Jordan’s “Carry On,” at Feinstein’s/54 Below.Pop songs, including Billy Joel’s “Lullaby,” work better, but overall, the show is too heavy for a cabaret act and too skimpy and unvaried for a musical. (Aside from two medleys, there are only eight numbers.) Attempts to switch up the texture with asides, rueful jokes and painfully scripted banter with his pianist and music director, Benjamin Rauhala, only heighten the feeling that the material is as yet too raw for such a refined format.Perhaps “Carry On,” filmed without an audience at Feinstein’s/54 Below, would have been better off if Jordan hadn’t written, directed and performed it all himself. But learning to calibrate the emotional temperature of a room — and of one’s material — is a skill that comes only with experience. Jordan is 36; Foster, 46; together, they do not add up to Marilyn Maye’s 93 — an age that helps explain the distillation of her gifts and also her preference for classic material. “Broadway, the Maye Way,” another installment in the Feinstein’s/54 Below series that presented Jordan’s concert, consists mostly of show tunes, heavy on Jerry Herman, from musicals she’s been in, although never on Broadway itself.Maye, who started singing professionally in the 1940s, has run the gamut of outlets: radio, television, film, nightclubs, regional revivals, summer stock, concert halls and now cabaret. That is by no means a downward trajectory, but if anyone has the life experience to sing songs like “I’m Still Here,” from “Follies,” she does, with her “three cheers and dammit” verve. That would be enough in this repertoire, but Maye also brings to bear her wonderfully natural phrasing, her generous but not overstated swing and her big wallop of a voice in fantastic shape.From Marilyn Maye’s “Broadway, the Maye Way,” at Feinstein’s/54 Below.It’s hard to say whether she’s so good at singing optimistic Broadway barnburners like “I’m Still Here,” “Step to the Rear” and “Golden Rainbow” because they were written for voices like hers (she recorded the original hit version of “Cabaret” in 1966, and sings it again here) or because she has chosen them carefully to reflect what appears to be her actual personality.Probably, it’s both. The moto perpetuo arrangements by her musical director, Tedd Firth, certainly highlight her bubbliness and drive, but when she sings “Fifty Percent” from “Ballroom,” a number about a widow in love with a married man, the alteration in its effect is clearly coming from her. It’s no longer a torch song but a glass-half-full anthem.What Maye has mastered is the proportioning of restraint and release that allows the safe exchange of emotion between singer and audience. In a small room — and online, every room is small — that’s key. It’s how cabaret even under lockdown can remain an affecting art and not just a jukebox musical with sequins.Sutton Foster: Bring Me to LightThrough May 31; nycitycenter.orgJeremy Jordan: Carry OnThrough June 17; 54below.comMarilyn Maye: Broadway, the Maye WayThrough June 19; 54below.com More

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      Covid, the Musical? Jodi Picoult Is Giving It a Try.

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      Working with a playwright, the best-selling author has turned the symptoms of illness into songwriting prompts for a new musical called “Breathe.”About halfway through “Breathe,” a new musical created by the best-selling novelist Jodi Picoult and the veteran playwright Timothy Allen McDonald, a fed-up, locked-down father of three sums up the challenges of the pandemic in a two-word refrain: “It’s brutal!”Adam, played by Colin Donnell, is lamenting the challenge of shoehorning virtual kindergarten alongside two demanding careers — Donnell’s partner-in-exhaustion is his real-life wife, Patti Murin — but he speaks for all of us who have been crowded and alone, enraged and bereft, at various points this year.Before we get to the logistics of writing, staging and filming a musical in the midst of a pandemic, let’s address the elephant in the Zoom: Why would anyone want to watch a 90-minute theatrical production about Covid-19 — especially one with scenes named after symptoms many of us have experienced firsthand? (They are: Fever, Aches, Swelling & Irritation, Fatigue and Shortness of Breath.)“I know there are going to be people who aren’t ready for this and maybe never will be,” said Picoult in a phone interview from her home in New Hampshire. “That said, I think there are some very funny moments in ‘Breathe.’ You laugh more than you might expect to.”The prolific author — who has a novel, “Wish You Were Here,” out on Nov. 30 — said she was inspired to create “Breathe” because she wasn’t ready to tackle Covid-19 between the covers of a book. Fiction writing can be a lonely slog, and Picoult enjoys the spirit of collaboration that comes with writing for the stage, which has long played a role in her life.“You don’t want to hear me sing,” she laughed. “But my kids were involved in theater and I run a teen theater group in my copious amounts of free time.” (Trumbull Hall Troupe was established in 2004 and donates its net proceeds to local charities.)Denée Benton performing the “Fever” section of the show in an empty theater.Jenny AndersonPicoult and McDonald have collaborated before, beginning with a stage adaptation of “Between the Lines,” the young adult novel she wrote with her daughter, Samantha van Leer. The musical was set to open Off Broadway in April 2020; but, of course, the ghost of Thespis had other plans and the production has been postponed until the 2021-22 season.Over the weekend of March 7, 2020, the pair — who referred to one another in separate conversations as “the other half of my brain” — attended the wedding of the “Between the Lines” actor Arielle Jacobs in Tulum, Mexico. “When we came back, everyone at our table got Covid except me,” Picoult recalled.“I started getting a sore throat and I knew something was wrong,” McDonald said. “The thing I felt first was shame. I was 13 when the AIDS crisis started; I knew I was gay and I remember how people said the epidemic was God’s way of correcting a wrong. When you experience something like that at such a young age, it sticks with you.”Inspired by Jonathan Larson’s memorialization of the AIDS epidemic in “Rent” — and also by the interconnectedness of characters in “Love Actually” — Picoult and McDonald got to work on a series of stories about the impact of the pandemic on the lives of four pairs of people: strangers who meet at a wedding, a gay couple at a crossroads, the aforementioned overwhelmed parents and a married pair who have stopped communicating.Then George Floyd was murdered. “Tim and I both felt that the protests that arose were intimately tied to the pandemic, and we knew we weren’t the right ones to write about it since we’re two white writers,” Picoult said. “So we made a call to Douglas Lyons, who is an incredibly talented book writer as well as a lyricist and an actor. We said ‘This is what we’re doing and we would love for you to be part of our family.’ I think within 10 seconds he said yes.”From left: Daniel Yearwood, Josh Davis and T. Oliver Reid filming the “Fatigue” section of “Breathe.”Jenny AndersonWith Ethan Pakchar, Lyons wrote “Fatigue,” about a Black police officer whose son is arrested at a protest and badly mistreated by his father’s colleague. “I didn’t put my own face into the gravel. He did,” says the son, who is played by Daniel Yearwood.The “Breathe” team consists of five songwriting teams (one for each vignette), four directors plus supervising director Jeff Calhoun and a fleet of actors, including the Tony Award winners Kelli O’Hara and Brian Stokes Mitchell, as well as Denée Benton, Matt Doyle and Max Clayton, among others. Some of its members have never met in person.“It felt like every two weeks when we would have a meeting, the Zoom would double exponentially,” Picoult said.McDonald and Picoult funded the project. “It was a couple of hundred thousand to get it filmed. That was the biggest cost,” Picoult said.“We do not expect to become stinking rich off this,” she added. “The point was, it’s our job to chronicle stories and this is one that needs telling.”In March 2021, the cast and crew met in New York at the 92nd Street Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall to record over a period of three days. There was no audience or set; actors wore lockdown-appropriate clothing (fuzzy slippers, a waffle-weave shirt) and were accompanied by a lone piano. Later, the orchestra would be recorded in separate rooms in Nashville.“The whole thing was reverse engineered,” said Picoult.She joined remotely, watching the action from a “very weird camera angle on the side of the stage” and listening through the music director’s feed.Picoult, outside her New Hampshire home, has a longtime interest in theater, which encourages collaboration, compared to the largely solitary act of writing fiction. Kieran Kesner for The New York TimesMcDonald had the pleasure of greeting participants as they arrived at the Y: “To see them three-dimensionally! To see them wearing pants and shoes! That was just so cool.” The 54-year-old has been involved with dramatic productions since he was 11; the pandemic brought a bittersweet milestone: the longest he’s ever been away from a stage.“When we walked into this beautiful theater in the middle of a technical rehearsal, with that buzz and chaos we all love as theater people, everyone just broke into tears,” said McDonald, who lost his father-in-law to Covid-19 in July. “But we were smiling at the same time, with full body chills. I don’t know what that emotion is but it was truly a sense of magic.”On May 14, “Breathe” will premiere on Overture+, a streaming service for the performing arts, and the original cast recording will be released by Broadway Records. The show will be available through July 2.Viewers will see rows of empty green seats behind the actors, whose scripts and music stands lend a behind-the-scenes intimacy. In a peculiar way, those flipped-up seats are more striking than the backdrops and razzle dazzle you might expect from an in-person production in ordinary time.So are the typewritten interstitials at the beginning of each chapter, announcing the ever-increasing number of Covid-19 deaths worldwide between March and June of 2020. Just as “Come From Away” captured the sense of global citizenship that flickered briefly after 9/11, “Breathe” aims to connect the dots between people living in isolation.“When you go to see a show, you’re sitting in your own individual chair and, whether you’re in the balcony or the front row, you’re feeling a unified emotion,” Picoult said. “To me, that was a metaphor for what was going on during lockdown. We were all in our isolated pods and we were all feeling the same thing. There was something transformative about that that made me think, we should try to make sense of this through musical theater.” More

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      ‘Scott and Andy and All the Boys’ Review: Ripped From the Headlines

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      Mike Daisey takes sluggish aim at juicy targets: the disgraced Broadway producer Scott Rudin and the New York governor, Andrew M. Cuomo.A lot of us have gotten rusty at talking face to face — at stringing our thoughts together in a coherent and entertaining way. Desperate to commune as we slowly emerge from our pandemic hibernation, we’re a little woozy still from all the isolation.It could be that the monologuist Mike Daisey is, too. That would go some way toward explaining why his enticingly titled new solo show, “Scott and Andy and All the Boys,” often feels more like barroom blather than sharp-minded storytelling, and why it takes such sluggish aim at its juicy targets: the disgraced Broadway producer Scott Rudin and the scandal-tarnished governor of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo.Daisey means to spin the recent allegations of workplace bullying by Rudin and allegations of sexual harassment by Cuomo into a wider critique of the patriarchy, indicting us collectively for rewarding both men’s behavior through the years, enabling their success. Ripped from the headlines, and involving two of Daisey’s areas of consuming interest — theater and politics — the material seems ripe for his comically lacerating provocations.Yet watching this directorless show’s single live performance on Friday night at the Kraine Theater, with a fully vaccinated, mask-muffled, socially distanced audience in attendance and a virtual crowd tuning in to the livestream, I kept wishing that Daisey actually was holding forth in a bar — as a regular person, not a monologuist on a stage. Then his listeners might have been able to interject, pushing back on the weak spots in his argument, querying the bits that were puzzling.For instance, the distractingly opaque story of a quarrel with his girlfriend over the sheets on their guest bed. Daisey sees this interaction as gendered and uses it to frame the show, but I still have no idea what was so wrong with the sheets, how it turned into a giant fight between them and what was so gendered about it. He deploys this anecdote to implicate himself as a member of the patriarchy, but surely he could find a less baffling example.It made a rickety opening, the first stretch of tedium in a not quite 90-minute evening that never did alchemize — partly, perhaps, because Daisey underestimated his audience. Presented by Daisey and Frigid New York, “Scott and Andy” isn’t a niche-knowledge monologue like “The Last Cargo Cult,” his show about money and financial systems; it doesn’t rely on extensive research like “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” It’s based on news that’s fresh in our memories, and if we race to watch a performance about Rudin and Cuomo, chances are high that we don’t need much of a recap.Daisey was on the Kraine stage just last month with a different show, which was also performed for both live and streaming audiences — a bifurcation that is still an awkward experiment. The setup demands that he talk straight to the crowd in the theater and simultaneously connect with people online.The pulsating humans in the theater were essentially put on hold for minutes at a time while Daisey provided back story on Cuomo for the remote-viewing out-of-staters. Speaking past the people right in front of you is not a great way to tend to the energy in the room.More problematically, while Daisey spent a lot of the show repeating reported details of Rudin and Cuomo’s alleged transgressions, he never wove them into something more textured and insightful, which is what we come to him for.He was eager to say that everyone in theater knew about Rudin, but he didn’t mention having experienced or passively witnessed any other bad behavior by men in his industry, the silence about which is ingrained in its culture. That kind of acknowledgment would have helped to make his case both more rooted in insider knowledge and reflective of male behavior that goes beyond the pair of titans in his show’s title.And when Daisey suggested, twice, that Cuomo has been lately “gelded” by legislators, there was no sign that he thought the term might smack of machismo.There were moments in “Scott and Andy” when the performance went taut and Daisey found his rhythm, as with his funny-serious point about workaholic men needing to cultivate hobbies. But those were rare.In the program — an actual paper program! — Daisey prints a quote, attributed to the canonical second-wave feminist Andrea Dworkin, on the necessary death of manhood.Daisey himself, though, seems rather new at thinking about the patriarchy. This inchoate show is a baby step taken by one of the boys.Scott and Andy and All the BoysOn May 7 at the Kraine Theater, Manhattan. More

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      ‘Mary Stuart’ Review: A Battle Royal in a Brooklyn Apartment

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      With four actors and a contemporary setting, Bedlam offers an audacious, if half-baked, take on the Schiller play about the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots.Two queens, a gaggle of self-serving politicians, a murder plot, a rivalry for regal dominance: George R.R. Martin has nothing on the annals of English history. That’s why the stories appeal to so many, from the writer and historian Philippa Gregory to the 18th-century German poet-playwright Friedrich Schiller, whose verse play “Mary Stuart,” about the imprisonment and final days of the famous Queen of Scots, has proved a steady stage draw, especially for zealous actresses.Sixteenth century England comes to 21st-century America in Bedlam’s new adaptation of Schiller’s play, a fleet though unkempt production performed by a trim cast of four and filmed inside a Brooklyn fourth-floor walk-up.Perhaps you already know the story from European history class, or one of the many fictionalized accounts of the tale. (I have Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie to thank for my most recent refresher, in 2018’s “Mary Queen of Scots.”)Mary Stuart (Violeta Picayo), who is accused of murdering her husband, is imprisoned in England for also claiming a right to the throne. Her cousin, Queen Elizabeth (Shirine Babb), is conflicted about how to handle Mary, who poses a threat to her power while she’s alive, but whose execution would weigh on her conscience.Then there’s the sway of public opinion and the perspectives of her various advisers to take into account — as they say, “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”This “Mary Stuart,” adapted by Rachel Vail from the translation by Joseph Mellish, works a bold contrast between the aureate language and the home-cooked D.I.Y. vibe of the production, which has the same playful quality the scrappy and always inventive Bedlam is known for — albeit with a touch less polish.Mary is held captive beneath a kitchen island; a suicide happens behind a shower curtain in a bathtub; a queenly meeting takes place not in a forest, as we’re told, but on a rooftop overlooking the city.Such jarring contradictions occasionally feel compelling, but often read as kitschy, even amateurish. A French ambassador, for example, appears in the form of a blue sock puppet: Adorable, but — Mon Dieu! — dangerously close to something you’d find in a high school homework assignment.That also goes for the camerawork, which is as shaky and abrupt as a scene from “Cloverfield.” The sound, too, cuts in and out, leaving some of the dialogue behind.The four actors give generous performances, directed by Zachary Elkind with a snappiness that allows for each to contain multitudes: speedy, minute costume changes (a scarf, a pair of glasses, a blazer, a baseball cap) create the illusion of a whole English court without even the briefest interruption of a scene.However, Elkind’s direction also sits unsteadily between cartoony humor and stately drama. So Simon Schaitkin’s Lord Burleigh, a sniveling, slouching schemer with glasses perched at the tip of his nose, is too arch, and Shaun Taylor-Corbett’s Wilhelm Davison, the queen’s secretary, too dopey. And yet Taylor-Corbett’s selfish Earl of Leicester, caught between his love for each queen and his desire to save his own neck, lands with more punch.Picayo, left, taking the role of one of Elizabeth’s trusted advisers in this scene, consults with Shirine Babb’s queen.Zachary ElkindThe same for Picayo and Babb, whose contrasting stances — both headstrong and self-righteous in separate ways — bring fire. Babb makes a believable Elizabeth, firm and royally composed yet vulnerable beneath the surface, while Picayo embodies defiance, as when she hurls a throaty “I am your queen!” at her rival.“Before these strangers’ eyes, dishonor not yourself and me. Profane not, disgrace not the royal blood of Tudor. In my veins it flows as sure a stream as in your own,” Stuart declares to Elizabeth when they meet — a meeting that, in reality, never happened, by the way. And yet historical fiction loves to imagine it, understandably, because what could be juicier than a showdown between two powerful women?Still most versions of this story struggle to figure out how to handle these women. Often their personalities, strengths and fears become occluded by the machinations of the men around them, as happens occasionally here.Ultimately, despite the audacious contrasts that define this production, “Mary Stuart” also suffers from a case of “So what?” And by that I mean, “Why now?”One impulse seems to be the chance to talk about female power, or power in general. I could imagine a critique of our election fracas and all the recent chatter about the expectations placed on the royals of Buckingham Palace today.But for all the ways “Mary Stuart” asks us to see Elizabethan England in a Brooklyn apartment, it fails to show us what Elizabethan England can tell us about Brooklyn — and America, and contemporary England — now.Mary StuartThrough May 9; available on-demand at bedlam.org starting May 10. More

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      Review: ‘Waiting for Godot’ in the Bleakest Zoom Room Ever

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      Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo star as Beckett’s tragicomic tramps — minus the comic part.Early audiences were baffled by “Waiting for Godot.” Even Peter Hall, who in 1955 directed the first English language production, claimed not to understand it. When actors with access to its author, Samuel Beckett, demanded explanations from him, he usually professed himself helpless to answer.Now, though some of the references have become more obscure with time, it’s hard to imagine anyone not fathoming the play’s gist. Decades of high school lit seminars, let alone the gradual opening of the playgoing class’s eyes to the world’s inequities and terrors, have transformed it from an enigmatic museum piece into an existential tchotchke.But there is more to “Waiting for Godot,” which the New Group has just released as a lugubrious film starring Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo, than its status as a modern classic suggests. Its portrait of life as a charnel house may be half the story but in this case, it’s the only half.After all, Beckett called “Godot” a tragicomedy, presumably with emphasis on the second part of the word because the first part speaks for itself. The thumbprints of Buster Keaton, and especially Laurel and Hardy, are all over its main characters, the broken-down migrant workers Vladimir and Estragon. (Estragon was first played on Broadway by the great vaudevillian and erstwhile Cowardly Lion Bert Lahr.) The undercard, Pozzo and Lucky, are no comic slouches either; together, the four wanderers, with their long-honed routines and jags of passive-aggressive mayhem, outnumber and upstage the Three Stooges.But of the New Group’s cast, which also includes Tarik Trotter as Pozzo and Wallace Shawn as Lucky, only Leguizamo, as Estragon, could really be considered a clown — and not just because he called himself one in his 2011 one-man show “Ghetto Klown.”A theatrical being to his core, he has the quick-twitch reflexes and papered-over wounds that can make injury funny. The best parts of this “Waiting for Godot” mine that duality, and also Leguizamo’s heritage; when Hawke, as Vladimir, discredits Estragon’s account of being beaten for no cause, we get a new, white-privilege angle on their recurrent miscommunication.Hawke, left, and Leguizamo mask up when approaching the other two tramps in the play.via The New Group Off StageBut even Leguizamo is done in by a production, directed by Scott Elliott, that is almost entirely — and, it would seem, deliberately — humorless. The actors are shot in separate gloomy interiors, and from stationary positions, so as to appear in Stygian Zoom-like frames as if at a virtual meeting of hobbits.And though Beckett did say, in response to a proposed in-the-round production, that “Godot” needed “a very closed box,” I doubt this is what he meant. In any case, a play that famously takes place outdoors, with its sole scenic element a barren tree that for Act II sprouts five leaves, is now mercilessly interiorized, and a relationship that is meant to test the limits of intimacy is unhelpfully kept at arm’s length from the start.To the extent this comments on our pandemic moment, it’s at least intriguing; a lot of thought seems to have gone into Vladimir and Estragon’s decisions to mask up, mostly when they approach Pozzo and Lucky. But this and other contemporary intrusions, including the use of cellphones for texting and black screens when the characters apparently disable their feed, don’t actually illuminate anything, let alone emphasize the play’s humor as they seem to intend. It’s hard to laugh when you can hardly see.That problem encourages a certain degree of overacting, especially from Hawke, as if he were trying to make himself visible from a distance. (He has lovely moments, though.) Trotter, who under the name Black Thought was a co-founder of the hip-hop group the Roots, uses his terrific stage voice to capture Pozzo’s first-act bluster without resorting to flailing, but has a harder time with the humbled version of the character who returns in Act II.At least Drake Bradshaw, in the small role of Godot’s young herald, is sweetly effective in both his appearances. And though Shawn, delivering Lucky’s impossible speech — nine minutes of gibberish — is able to make convincing emotional sense of the moment, the production as a whole doesn’t support his efforts. Vladimir and Estragon check out of the Zoom call for much of the harangue, encouraging us to think we might do so as well.It’s not that you need to be literal with “Waiting for Godot”; it’s anything but a naturalistic drama. I liked the designer Qween Jean’s past-midnight cowboy look for Hawke and Mets cap and tank top pandemic ensemble for Leguizamo. But if Elliott, working with the Academy Award winner John Ridley’s Nō Studios and the Hollywood producer Frank Marshall, has avoided excessive fealty to Beckett’s instructions — the estate approved the socially distanced production — he has not provided anything as coherent to take their place.For one thing, the action is awkwardly staged, even beyond the necessity of executing comedy bits when the actors, if not the characters, are calling in from different locations. (The passing of Lucky’s hat, a clear lift from Laurel and Hardy, is totally botched.) At three hours, the show is also long, even bloated. Most problematically, Vladimir’s and Estragon’s embraces, so necessary to the play’s emotional equilibrium, are about as warm here as octopi suckering up to opposite sides of a glass wall.Far from seeming too modern, though, this “Godot,” especially coming more than a year into the pandemic, seems too passé. Other companies, even no-budget ones like Theater in Quarantine, have long since figured out ways to make an aesthetic out of the limitations of lockdown. Why only now, just as those lockdowns are lifting, is this first-gen take on pandemic play production emerging? About the only expressive use of the medium is in the processing that gives the film the appearance of a dodgy video feed, with freezes and glitches that imitate a poor signal.You could argue that a dodgy feed is exactly the way “Godot” depicts life: as a poor approximation of what it should be. But in Vladimir and Estragon, Beckett also finds poignancy, humor and the last dregs of physical love, where Elliott and company find only horror. If they are right, what kind of pass have we come to, in which even Beckett’s vision is not bleak enough?Waiting for GodotThrough June 30; thenewgroup.org More

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      A First Look at Lincoln Center’s Outdoor Spaces

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      A First Look at Lincoln Center’s Outdoor SpacesMichael PaulsonWaiting for summer in New York ☀️Michael Paulson/The New York TimesCapacity will be limited, and early demand has outstripped ticket supply (most stuff is free, via digital lottery). You can also expect poetry readings, sound installations, family programming and visual art — like this piece by the artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya. More

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      ‘Zoetrope’ Review: And You Thought Your Apartment Was Small?

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      Exquisite Corpse Company’s clever choose-your-own-adventure play has a handful of viewers peek in on a Brooklyn couple in really close quarters.In this real estate market, Brooklyn agents can find renters for pretty much any apartment, even one in a vacant lot across from a Subway and a Smoothie King at the border of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. One Lilliputian even by New York City standards.Meet the tenants: a Black woman named Angel (Starr Kirkland) and her white girlfriend “Bae” (Leana Gardella), who share the space in the Exquisite Corpse Company’s imaginatively conceived and playfully executed “Zoetrope,” a live interactive show performed inside — surprise — an 8 by 12 trailer. A handful of audience members peek in through glass cutouts on three sides, listening through plastic headphones plugged into a mini MP3 player.It’s 2020, right at the start of the pandemic, and at first the stay-at-home orders land like news of a snow day: Angel and Bae dance around the apartment, smoke bowls, watch TV. But things quickly unravel. In various versions of the roughly 35-minute plot, they fall out about race and privilege; find emotional connection elsewhere; and fight about the struggle to buy groceries or get a flu shot.The ending of the play is inevitable, but the path it takes to get there varies, depending on the audience. Directed by Porcia Lewis and Tess Howsam, “Zoetrope” is both a surreal diorama of the recent past and a voyeuristic choose-your-own-adventure-style performance.Forget traditional seating options like mezzanine or balcony; for “Zoetrope” you get to choose from “TV,” “Time (a calendar),” “Portrait” and “Fish Tank.” These are the openings through which you examine Angel and Bae’s pandemic life.From my seat at the TV, I peered, “Truman Show”-style, through the screen, unnerved by the glances of the couple as they sat down to watch Netflix, in fact staring directly through the glass at my face.Starr Kirkland as Angel, with her hand in a fish tank that doubles as a window for a viewer looking in from outside.Jess DaleneWritten by Leah Barker, Emily Krause and Elinor T. Vanderburg, the play has over two dozen possible story lines: Each writer has contributed three scenes, with audience members selecting how the narrative will progress from one setup to another by choosing among buttons illustrated with seemingly random images.The images give few hints of what plot turns may come: My own options were a VHS tape, a Goldfish cracker with sunglasses perched on its head, and a bottle of Absolut vodka with a tag that said “Drink me.”I won’t tell you what I picked (your experience, should you go, will be your own). But my selection was beside the point; the small scale of “Zoetrope” allows it to be truly interactive in ways that larger productions cannot logistically pull off. The show lets the audience be, in some small but significant way, the authors of the story.Though I shouldn’t give short shrift to the actual authors, who deliver a heightened experiment in language with frequent leaps into the surreal. A pet fish speaks; the TV offers prophecies of the future; scenes are paused and fast-forwarded.All the while Angel and Bae share a kind of whimsical dream-speak, interrupted by moments of brutal honesty and bold self-definition. “Before I was all airy hollow soft spaces and those spaces filled up solid and now I don’t feel like I owe anyone anything anymore,” Bae says in one scene, almost as a threat.Kirkland and Gardella, the actors at my performance (Vanessa Lynah and Jules Forsburg-Lary star on other evenings), lack chemistry but tap into the volatile brio of the script’s terse exchanges and passive-aggressive asides.Bae, flattened into a liberal feminist villain, bursts into many scenes as an interruption of her girlfriend’s thoughts and monologues. Angel, whom the script clearly favors, comes off as real and familiar, caught between fury and exhaustion at a throwaway comment or phrase from Bae, her face suddenly tight and guarded.The biggest pleasure of “Zoetrope” is spying on this couple in their space, beautifully designed by Emily Addison and Dominica Montoya. The black-and-white interior does double duty, catching the eye but also echoing the racial tensions; the set combines the chic sophistication of an art installation (the Victorian-style love seat, the white owl bust) and the self-aware playfulness of Brooklyn millennial life. (I really liked the Lucky Charms box, rendered without any of the usual cheery colors.)Strobe effects and abrupt color shifts (lighting by Krista Smith) punctuate the sudden absurdist twists. Ran Xia’s sound design is more hit-or-miss; too often the cheap headphones were no match for the everyday street music of Brooklyn.Given the choice to go back to the dark early days of lockdown, I would absolutely pass. But at “Zoetrope” I found myself falling into an anomalous nostalgia — a kind of historical fiction where the strangeness of isolation allows for the possibility that anything can happen.After one of my scene selections, Angel knelt down in front of the TV screen to ask me, “Do we ever go back to how we were?”Did she mean a world without social distancing and masks? Or did she mean a world that seemed less (overtly) frightening for us, two Black women?The best I could do was shrug. After all, I was just a face on a screen, watching through the glass.ZoetropeThrough May 23 at 134 Vanderbilt Ave Brooklyn, N.Y.; exquisitecorpsecompany.com More