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      In Justin Peck’s ‘Illinoise,’ Dance On and Feel It

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      Justin Peck was around 17 when he first heard the Sufjan Stevens album “Illinois,” an epic paean to the state, nearly two dozen tracks brimming with orchestral indie rock, dense, lyrical wistfulness and sometimes obscure local history. This listening experience came long before Peck wanted to make dances, before he was even a professional dancer.But “Illinois” urged him to move. “It was an instantaneous, illuminating thing that I felt like it was so danceable,” said Peck, now the resident choreographer and artistic adviser at New York City Ballet. “And it is so rare to find someone who can conjure that, especially someone who’s alive right now.”Ever since, Peck, 36, has found artistic inspiration in Stevens — “the voice in music that has led me down paths further than I’ve ever gone before,” he said.The two collaborated regularly, including on “Year of the Rabbit,” the ballet that launched Peck as a choreographer, in 2012. Not long after they began working together, Peck, hoping to experiment with storytelling forms, and influenced by dance-pop productions like Twyla Tharp’s “Movin’ Out,” asked if he could make a theatrical piece set to “Illinois.” Stevens took nearly five years to agree.Justin Peck, left, and Jackie Sibblies Drury, who said the show “feels like the most broadly appealing thing that I have actually ever worked on.”Sasha Arutyunova for The New York TimesAlmost five years later, the result is “Illinoise,” a project that is every bit as ambitious and genre-defying as its soundtrack: a narrative dance musical that combines a coming-of-age story, a snapshot of queer identity and a meditation on death, love, community, history, politics and zombies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Ally’ Review: Social Justice as a Maddening Hall of Mirrors

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      Itamar Moses’s play offers eloquent arguments on all sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it doesn’t offer much drama.As this is a trial, let’s start with the facts. Asaf Sternheim, who teaches writing at a university a lot like Penn, is asked by a former student, Baron Prince, to endorse a manifesto. The manifesto seeks justice for Baron’s cousin, Deronte, who was killed by police officers while being stopped for a theft he had nothing to do with.Also pertinent: Asaf (Josh Radnor) is a Jew, albeit the kind that subscribes, as he says, to the “acoustic-guitar-based variety” of Judaism. Baron (Elijah Jones) is Black, as was Deronte.And one more thing: The 20-page manifesto, tying violence against Black Americans to violence against all subjugated populations, calls for “sanctions on the apartheid state of Israel,” adding that “failure to do so will leave the United States complicit in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.”You could feel the “uh-oh” in the audience the night I saw “The Ally,” an important, maddening play by Itamar Moses that opened on Tuesday at the Public Theater.Words like “apartheid” and “genocide,” when applied to Israel and Palestinians, are sure to rile lots of people. But challenging the use of those words will equally rile others. Smack in the middle is Asaf, whom the play proceeds to put through a tribal-political wringer that leaves him — and left me — a limp dishrag.Whether you think that’s a good thing for a play to do may depend on your tolerance for endless, furious, yet familiar debate. There’s no question that Moses, whose biography as the Berkeley-raised son of Israeli immigrants is a close match for Asaf’s, knows the territory and its every skirmish intimately. It often seems that the arguments, on all sides, have been transcribed from personal experience or the news.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Netflix Becomes a Broadway Producer With Peter Morgan’s ‘Patriots’

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      The streamer is co-producing a play about Putin’s Russia from the creator of “The Crown” while also developing a screen adaptation.Netflix, the streaming behemoth that has evolved from mailing out DVDs in red envelopes to becoming a hugely important player in the entertainment industry, is embarking on a new adventure: producing on Broadway.The company will pick up its first Broadway credit this spring as a producer of “Patriots,” by Peter Morgan, the creator of the hit Netflix series “The Crown.” The new play is about an oligarch who was an early supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia but then fell out with him and wound up dead.Even before “Patriots” begins its Broadway previews on April 1, Netflix is already in the early stages of developing a screen adaptation of the story, according to Emily Feingold, a Netflix spokeswoman.“Patriots” will be Netflix’s first Broadway credit, but not its first stage venture. The company is actively involved as a producer of “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a play now running in London that is a prequel of sorts to the popular Netflix streaming series. The “Stranger Things” production is expected to come to Broadway, but the timing and other specifics are unknown.Netflix’s foray into Broadway producing comes at a time when the entertainment industry has been aggressively working to monetize intellectual property — adapting popular titles and franchises on many different platforms, including not only film, television and stage but also books, video games and immersive experiences.Broadway has long had the attention of Hollywood studios — Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal have been particularly active in pursuing stage adaptations of their films. And for some time now, the recording industry has been actively involved on Broadway, seeing the stage as another way to repurpose pop song catalogs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘Oh, Mary!’ Turns an Unhinged Bit Into Real Theater

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      Cole Escola’s play, which imagines Mary Todd Lincoln as a frustrated cabaret singer, surprisingly pulls off stretching a stupid joke to its extremes.“For God’s sake, Mary!” Abraham Lincoln says to his wife in “Oh, Mary!,” Cole Escola’s unhinged historical fantasia that imagines its protagonist as an alcoholic cabaret singer married to a gay guy. “How would it look for the first lady of the United States to be flitting around a stage right now in the ruins of war!”“How would it look?!” she responds. “Sensational!”It’s a moment reminiscent of Escola’s early YouTube humor, like in the sketch “Bernadette Peters Does Her Taxes.” An accountant exasperatingly asks for a ballpark figure, and Escola’s Bernadette, wiggling like a charmed snake with their hands on their hips, asks, “Is this a ballpark figure?”So stupid. So campy. So unexpected. And yes, like Mrs. Lincoln, even sensational.There’s little else in New York theater right now quite as surprising as “Oh, Mary!” Written by and starring Escola, it’s a bit taken to an 80-minute extreme that’s silly, nasty, tasteless and, in the end, good theater — the kind of show that will leave you gagging, both in the sense that you’ll be losing your mind with joy, and that you might just be grossed out.Escola’s humor is tailored like a Bernadette Peters concert gown to New York gays who were brought up on a diet of alt-cabaret and “Strangers With Candy.” Mary Todd Lincoln would scowl comfortably alongside the Hollywood starlets of Charles Busch and the manic guests of “At Home With Amy Sedaris.”To this lineage Escola adds a sensibility that’s queer and crass; you often get the impression that their ideas start with a wig in search of a story, inspired by tropes from pop culture — mainly, vintage TV and commercials that begin with “I’m a mom.” Out come characters like Donna Germaine, the sweetly hapless real estate agent of “Pee Pee Manor,” and Fifi, the saloon singer of “Our Home Out West,” a parody of 1970s Christmas specials.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘The Effect,’ Investigating Love and Other Drugs

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      The world of experimental medical research might not seem like it has much to say to the world of theater, but Lucy Prebble sees connections. Both require subjects and observers, both take place within a carefully controlled environment and both depend on a certain amount of luck.“The more I thought about it, the more I thought, ‘That’s kind of what we do,’” said Prebble, a British playwright and screenwriter.In 2006, Prebble became fascinated with one botched medical trial in particular, in which six healthy young Britons experienced multiple organ failure after taking a novel drug. The incident partly inspired “The Effect,” Prebble’s play about two participants in a drug trial that alters the course of their lives. First produced in 2012 at the National Theater in London (and performed in New York at the Barrow Street Theater in 2016), it was revived there last fall and will come to New York on March 3 for a limited engagement at the Shed.Like the London revival, the New York run will star Paapa Essiedu (“I May Destroy You,” “Black Mirror”) and Taylor Russell (“Waves,” “Bones and All”) as Tristan and Connie, two people from different class backgrounds with near opposite personalities who are given an antidepressant with the potential to induce feelings of love. When the drug proves stronger than expected — testing the boundary between love and mania — the trial’s administrators (played by Michele Austin and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) struggle to keep it from spinning out of control.“I couldn’t quite work out whether it was a tragedy or a triumph,” Essiedu said of the play. “Even now, having done it for two months, I never quite settle on what I believe.”Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York Times“They know what they feel but they don’t know why they feel it,” Essiedu said of Tristan and Connie. “Are they experiencing something that’s 1 in 1 billion? Or will it be here today and gone tomorrow?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Fiasco Theater’s ‘Pericles,’ the Cruise of a Lifetime

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      If Fiasco Theater has mixed results in its production of this Shakespearean tragicomedy, it celebrates actors supporting and delighting in one another’s work.“Pericles” is a bit of a mess. Spanning decades and traversing the ancient Mediterranean like some deeply misbegotten Carnival Cruise, this Shakespeare play mingles comedy, tragedy and Christian allegory. There are two assassination plots, two shipwrecks, a brothel, a riddle, a tournament and some very convenient pirates. Deliberately anachronistic, it was described by Ben Jonson, a rival playwright, as a “mouldy tale” and “stale.”So, who better to face down this confusion than a company called Fiasco? A devised theater ensemble founded by half a dozen Brown MFA graduates, Fiasco has a soft spot for Shakespeare’s less loved works. The company broke out in 2011 with a production of “Cymbeline” and later staged “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.” (Fiasco’s 2017 production of a crowd-pleaser like “Twelfth Night”? An outlier.)Rather than relying on the published text of “Pericles,” Fiasco has set much of the poetry to music — sometimes supplying original words — and interpolated passages from a prose version by George Wilkins, a pamphleteer and publican. (Wilkins is often cited as the play’s co-author, mostly because scholars disbelieve that Shakespeare could have written anything as patchy as the first two acts.)Ben Steinfeld, a company member and the director, stages this revised text at Classic Stage Company using Fiasco’s poor-theater playbook — a mostly bare stage furnished with charisma, invention, spirit and song. “A miracle may come your way,” an early number promises.Through the hectic first half, this approach falters. Pericles (Paco Tolson at first, then Tatiana Wechsler, Noah Brody and finally Devin E. Haqq) goes to so many places in such a short time that characters and climes blur, especially without the help of scenery to differentiate each country. As Steinfeld’s narrator admits, “Now this is just an empty space/It’s hard to give a sense of place.” (No set designer is credited, though Ashley Rose Horton designed the vaguely Grecian costumes and Mextly Couzin the golden lighting.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Cynthia Nixon Is Nowhere and Everywhere in ‘Seven Year Disappear’

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      A sleekly designed production, starring Cynthia Nixon and Taylor Trensch, aims to skewer the art world but falls flat.The problem with writing a play about absence: How to fill the void? When a performance artist known as Miriam (Cynthia Nixon) vanishes in “The Seven Year Disappear,” a two-hander by Jordan Seavey that opened Monday at the Signature Center, we know only that she is a narcissist who steals the air from any room she enters.“The Whitney is mine,” she exclaims in the opening scene, after her adult son and manager, Naphtali (Taylor Trensch), informs her that the museum has made some sort of offer to Marina Abramovic. After seven years off the map, when Miriam returns, she has the gall to ask Naphtali whether he will help turn his abandonment into her next piece.Scenes following Miriam’s reappearance, which occurs on the heels of the 2016 election, are intercut with a reverse chronology of Naphtali’s search for her, which is really a quest to find himself — in a change of careers, a series of sexual liaisons and a lot of hard drugs.“The Seven Year Disappear” has the ostensible trappings of an art-world satire, and this New Group production, directed by Scott Elliott, appears sleekly designed to deliver one. But satire calls for a more distinct point of view, discernible targets, and a greater measure of specificity and insight. The staging here, with an emphasis on style and high-tech mediation, appears keen to make up for their lack.The production includes a mix of live and recorded footage displayed on flat screens suspended above the set.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA mix of live and recorded footage of the actors is displayed on flat-screen TVs suspended above the slick, black set (by Derek McLane); at times, their faces appear in close-up stills (projections by John Narun) that could be digital ads for Jil Sander. Onstage, the actors are dressed in black-canvas coveralls and combat boots (costumes are by Qween Jean), and intermittently speak into standing mics (sound is by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen). The cumulative effect is one of performance-art cosplay, which could be funny if it didn’t seem so earnest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Joan Holden, 85, Playwright Who Skewered Rich and Powerful, Dies

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      As the principal writer for the Obie-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe, she created iconoclastic left-wing satire that courted both chuckles and outrage.To Joan Holden, a fiercely left-wing playwright for the award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe, life in a capitalist society offered almost too many targets: conniving politicians, labor-squashing industrialists and masters of war looking to profit by spreading conflict around the globe, to name just a few.As the theater collective’s principal playwright from 1967 to 2000, she largely trafficked in satire, collaborating on loose-limbed lampoons and melodramas like “Ripped Van Winkle,” about a 1960s hippie who conks out for decades after a monster L.S.D. trip and awakens to find himself trapped in a nightmare of yuppie greed and materialism in the 1980s.Even in the troupe’s broadest farces, the point was to make audiences chuckle their way to political enlightenment.Ms Holden during an event staged by her San Francisco Mime Troupe in 1969. Audiences needed little background to figure out the group’s leftist political leanings. via Holden family“I write plays about things I’m pissed off about, usually attacking people in power,” she said as part of a panel on humor in 1999, as reported in her obituary in The San Francisco Chronicle. She described humor as “the revenge of the powerless.”“Physically, I can’t get at these people,” she said, but she “can expose them to ridicule. Maybe I can’t slay the dragon, but I can make him look silly.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More