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Broadway Shows Announce Reopening PlansMichael Paulson�� Waiting on BroadwayTimothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis morning, three of the biggest recent hits on Broadway — “Hamilton,” “The Lion King” and “Wicked” — announced plans to resume performances.Here’s what else to know → More
After two canceled Paris runs, a highly awaited production of Robert Walser’s “The Pond,” starring Adèle Haenel, finally made it to the stage in Switzerland.LAUSANNE, Switzerland — There is a feeling that streamed theater can’t quite replicate. It’s the sense of being immersed in a performance, to the point that you hang on to every sentence, every sound, every gesture. Distractions fade away. All that matters, briefly, is the actors’ next move.In “The Pond” (“L’Étang”), a new production by the French director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne, no move is inconsequential. Its two leads, Adèle Haenel and Ruth Vega Fernandez, aren’t just in the room with the audience: for much of this trippy exploration of family taboos, it feels as if you’re breathing with them.After six months of uncertainty because of the pandemic and two canceled Paris runs, “The Pond” finally made it to the stage earlier this month — in the Swiss city of Lausanne. While theater performances in France and Britain won’t resume until later in May, playhouses in Switzerland cautiously reopened on April 19.Restrictions still apply: No more than 50 audience members are allowed per show. Still, it’s a start. At the Vidy theater in Lausanne, where “The Pond” ran through Wednesday, tickets for the season sold out within hours. (The production is set to tour Europe this year, with a presentation at the Holland Festival, in Amsterdam, in June.)In a way, a world premiere in Switzerland was fitting for “The Pond.” Vienne’s show is based on a short play by the Swiss writer Robert Walser, about a child who pretends to drown in order to test his mother’s love.Walser wrote “The Pond” as a gift to his sister, Fanny, and it was arguably never intended for the stage. (For starters, it is only 20 pages long.) That suits Vienne, a trained puppeteer whose work is rarely driven by text. Her adaptation is in no way literal, yet it takes a magnifying glass to the unsettling allusions in Walser’s play — to child abuse, incest and family trauma.Fernandez stands in for the adults in “The Pond.” Between them, Fernandez and Haenel play 10 different characters.Estelle HananiaIt is also a feat of polyphony, which builds on Vienne’s interest in altering and distorting the voice. (In 2015, she took a close look at ventriloquy in “The Ventriloquists’ Convention.”) Between them, Haenel and Fernandez play 10 characters: Haenel embodies Fritz, the central character who fakes suicide, as well as his siblings and young friends, while Fernandez stands for the adults in the story.Theirs are virtuosic performances, built out of seemingly disparate elements. When the lights first go up on a large white box, designed by Vienne, the audience is greeted by seven puppets — life-size teenage girls, some of them huddled on and around a bed, with clothes strewn on the floor. One by one, to deafening club music, they are carried offstage by a technician.Haenel and Fernandez enter as the last doll disappears, and eerily, the actors appear to have taken their cues from the inanimate characters. Every step they take is in extreme slow motion, yet it doesn’t look robotic: Haenel, in baggy pants, an oversize sweater and a cap, has the slight hunch of an angsty teenager, while Fernandez exaggeratedly sways her hips.When they start speaking, on the other hand, Walser’s lines come fast. The narrative arc is clear, from Fritz’s squabbles with his sister to his attempts to reconnect with his mother, yet what happens visually has relatively little to do with it. When Fritz visits a sick friend, we see Haenel lying on the ground, laughing and emptying a bag of candy over her head.The gap between story and movement lends the proceedings an air of unreality, as does the accompanying soundscape. Haenel and Fernandez both wear body mics, and every sigh and groan is amplified to go with an ominous electronic score, composed by Stephen F. O’Malley and François J. Bonnet.Haenel, who rose to fame as a film actress and has become a prominent voice of the #MeToo movement in France, makes astounding use of this setup. Her voice rises and drops on a dime as she switches back and forth between the children in the story, yet she never plays the characters in a conventionally realistic manner.Some scenes feature life-size puppets. Estelle HananiaInstead, even in stillness, emotions wash over her body with affecting clarity. Time and again, in her performance, pain morphs into pleasure, before regressing back to pain. Between scenes, she climbs slowly onto the bed previously occupied by the inanimate teenage girls, with a hint of erotic charge — also present between Fritz and his sister Klara. At times, it’s impossible to tell whether Haenel is assuming their roles, or making the story up in a dreamlike state.Opposite her, Fernandez plays Fritz’s parents — especially his mother — with hardened distance. While she and Haenel rarely look at each other, there is an unspoken power struggle between them: at one point, Haenel stands over Fernandez as she crumbles to the floor, and unhurriedly spits at her feet.It’s a transfixing performance, which brings to the surface emotions that are often suppressed in dysfunctional family settings. Haenel and Fernandez are by turns sensual and monstrous; Fritz is thrilled to have earned proof of his family’s love after his carefully staged stunt by the pond, while his mother resolves to make amends without quite knowing how.“Now all is good,” Fernandez says. “I will make it up to you.” Briefly, they walk toward each other. A resolution is in sight, until Haenel stops and bends over in pain, gulping for air. While Walser suggests a form of reconciliation, in Vienne’s world, there is no such thing as a happy family ending. Trauma runs too deep.It may sound too bleak for audiences after a tough year, yet as I emerged from the Vidy theater, my mind was as stimulated as it’s been in months. For 90 minutes, artists claimed my full attention, and repaid it in spades. I’m ready for more. More
Other highlights include a new show by Kristina Wong, Joshua Harmon’s “Bad Jews” and “Broadway by the Year.”“It is about access.” That, put plainly, is the main reason the Young Vic in London will continue to livestream shows even after in-person theater resumes. “Access is our driver,” Kwame Kwei-Armah, the theater’s artistic director, said in a recent interview. “And this is a way that we make that access just a little more here and now.”As Broadway and theaters around the United States prepare to return to live performances, there are still many questions around issues of ticket price, fairness and programming. Streaming is likely to remain part of those discussions since, as you can see in the selections below, it is more varied and, well, accessible than ever.‘Miscast21’Since 2001, the annual “Miscast” benefit for MCC Theater has created an alternate universe in which gender roles are not so much erased as gleefully subverted, with performers taking on numbers they would be unlikely to land in typical productions. This year will see the return of Gavin Creel and Aaron Tveit for another power duet after their take on “Take Me or Leave Me,” from “Rent,” became an instant classic five years ago. Other participants include Kelly Marie Tran, Annaleigh Ashford, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Cheyenne Jackson (welcome back!), LaChanze, Idina Menzel, Kelli O’Hara and Billy Porter. May 16-20; mcctheater.org.TheatertreffenWhat is mainstream theater to German eyes can be completely wild to American ones. So this annual event should blow a few minds. Like the Golden Mask Festival in Russia, Theatertreffen showcases exciting shows from diverse companies. This year’s productions — online, with subtitles — include revisited classics and new works, both livestreamed and on demand. Dive in. May 13-24; berlinerfestspiele.de/enKristina Wong in “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord.”via New York Theater Workshop‘Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord’The writer and performer Kristina Wong continues to use her own experiences to interrogate politics and civics with this follow-up to “Kristina Wong for Public Office” last year. In that monologue, Wong talked about her stint on the Wilshire Center Koreatown Neighborhood Council in Los Angeles. Now, she turns her attention to how she enrolled family and friends to make face coverings during the pandemic. May 14-16; nytw.org.Brian Bedford as Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of being Earnest” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘The Importance of Being Earnest’When Brian Bedford took on the role of Lady Bracknell in 2011, Charles Isherwood wrote in The New York Times that the formidable character had “perhaps never been more imperious, more indomitable — or more delectably entertaining.” Now L.A. Theater Works is making the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of Oscar Wilde’s best play available again. The ace supporting cast includes a rising Santino Fontana as Algernon Moncrieff. Through May 31; theatermania.stream.If one gender-reversed Lady Bracknell just isn’t enough, check out the L.A. Theater Works audio production starring Charles Busch. latw.org.Michael Zegen, left, and Tracee Chimo in “Bad Jews” Off Broadway in 2013.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis Jewish American LifeThe excellent Play-PerView series is rolling out a reading of Joshua Harmon’s lacerating “Bad Jews” with the original cast members Tracee Chimo Pallero, Philip Ettinger and Michael Zegen. Harmon went on to bigger things, including “Significant Other” on Broadway, but this show is arguably his sharpest — or at least his funniest — and was propelled by Chimo’s etched-in-acid portrayal of venomous self-righteousness. May 15-19; play-perview.com. Happily, Chimo also turns up in the Spotlight on Plays reading of Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Sisters Rosensweig” as Pfeni, the youngest of the title siblings (a role originated by Frances McDormand in the Off Broadway premiere, in 1992). There’s more: Lisa Edelstein will read Sara (Jane Alexander way back when) and Kathryn Hahn will be Gorgeous (once the great Madeline Kahn). May 20-24; stellartickets.com.Jassa Ahluwalia, left, and Sophie Melville in a rehearsal for “Herding Cats.”Danny Kaan‘Herding Cats’This livestreamed version of Lucinda Coxon’s twist-filled dark comedy about a pair of roommates will star Jassa Ahluwalia (“Unforgotten”) and Sophie Melville in Britain, with Greg Germann (“Grey’s Anatomy”) joining from the United States. Coxon is a fine writer, of the play “Happy Now?” and the film adaptation of “The Danish Girl,” and this trans-Atlantic setup should make for an interesting experiment. May 19-22; stellartickets.com.The cast of the opera adaptation of Lynn Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel,” whose premiere was delayed by the pandemic.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBackstage StoriesLet’s face it: Behind-the-scenes shenanigans are often more fun than what’s onstage. In the virtual benefit “Tales from the Wings: A Lincoln Center Theater Celebration,” stars including Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, Rosemary Harris, Paulo Szot and Ruthie Ann Miles will share what we hope will be juicy anecdotes, interspersed with footage from some classic productions as well as teasers for two shows that were postponed by the pandemic: the musical “Flying Over Sunset,” from James Lapine, Tom Kitt and Michael Korie; and Ricky Ian Gordon and Lynn Nottage’s operatic adaptation of her play “Intimate Apparel.” May 13-17; lct.org.In Britain, “For One Knight Only” gets an encore airing after its premiere in November. Kenneth Branagh hosts Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen and Maggie Smith as they reminisce about their incredibly long careers — imagine a highbrow installment of the “Red” film series, except with stars firing off bons mots rather than guns. May 21-30; www.stream.theatre/season/116.‘Crave’In the United States, it’s hard to fathom how wildly popular the playwright Sarah Kane is on European stages: Her uncompromisingly bleak “Crave” hits a raw nerve and responds to a malaise that is often hard to pinpoint. Now, the Chichester Festival Theater in England is again making available its acclaimed production of this “throat punch of a play,” from November. May 19-29; cft.org.uk.‘Grey Matters’The company Colt Coeur may be small, but it has an impressive track record unearthing intriguing shows, so we’re ready to gamble on this play about an interracial marriage in 1970s and ’80s Brooklyn, by Eden Marryshow. Steve H. Broadnax III, of Katori Hall’s “The Hot Wing King” and the coming “Thoughts of a Colored Man” on Broadway, directs. May 22-26; coltcoeur.org.‘Broadway by the Year’As this cabaret series’ name suggests, it usually focuses on musicals that opened in a given year, but this spring the attention is shifting to songwriters. Start off with “The Kander & Ebb Years” (through May 12), in which Beth Leavel, Ute Lemper and Tony Yazbeck tackle material from “Chicago” and “Cabaret,” but also “Flora, the Red Menace.” Next, Max von Essen, Liz Callaway and Ethan Slater help celebrate everybody’s favorite pandemic hero with “The Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber Years” (May 24-26). So, “Love Never Dies”: yea or nay? thetownhall.org. More
Author: Everything Theatre
in Features and Interviews, News
12 May 2021
14 Views
People are looking at me! It’s my cloak of visibility.FInally.A warrior, with a purpose.All this time I was wearing it the wrong way.Just turn it round and you are …seen.
Playing at The Space Arts Centre, 1 to 5 June
Live stream also available on 3 June.
Meet busy, juggling, cool mum, Amy. She’s popular, successful and has mastered the ‘slut drop’. Wearing her cloak of visibility, Amy is a ‘warrior with a purpose’. Pass the gin.
So why is she aimlessly wandering the streets of London?
The Cloak of Visibility is an exciting and thought-provoking one-woman show exploring the pressure, that many women feel, to be seen to ‘have it all’. The play tackles rarely spoken about issues with humour and compassion. More
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
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
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
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
