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      ‘Izzard Hamlet New York’ Review: A Solo Show That’s More Noble Than Wise

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      Eddie Izzard is a wildly witty ad-libber, but a play straitjackets this gift — especially in this new staging that is short of ideas.To laugh, or not to laugh? That is the question.Or at least one you may consider early in Eddie Izzard’s “Hamlet,” in which the comic portrays all the roles herself.Something is certainly a little silly about dramatizing Hamlet fighting with his mother by having a left hand wrestle with the arm of the right, evoking Peter Sellers’s scientist who struggles to restrain himself from raising his arm in Nazi salute in “Dr. Strangelove.” And solo sword fights have possibilities that a brilliant comedian like Izzard might exploit.Yet, as Izzard darts around the stage, from role to role, hopscotching in and out of the audience declaiming speeches, what becomes clear is this frenetic staging is earnest, surprisingly traditional and deadly serious. A wildly witty ad-libber, Izzard can make two-hour monologues feel like a stream-of-conscious eruption. A play straitjackets this gift. Except for a few flourishes, this staging, directed by Selina Cadell, is short of ideas. (Imagine sock puppets without the socks and you get an idea of her Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.)Inside a modern, minimalist set (designed by Tom Piper) with no props, Izzard, who mounted a solo theatrical adaptation of “Great Expectations” last year, sometimes represents changing characters by spinning, other times by just moving a few feet. If there is method here, I did not detect it. If you don’t know “Hamlet,” there is no chance you are going to follow the play within a play. If you do, you might wonder why Izzard doesn’t spend more time playing the characters watching, not talking.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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      Inside a ‘Hadestown’ Star’s Home in Harlem

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      ‘I’ve been here a while,’ said Lillias White, who plays Hermes in the Tony-winning musical. ‘Hence the clutter.’Lillias White may pay the rent, but her rescue dog, LaKee, is inarguably the host and star of the house, a very packed one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a building in Harlem.LaKee (pronounced “Lucky”), a Chihuahua mix, is the first to respond to a knock on the door — way ahead of Ms. White or the resident Bengal cat, Mr. Jaxson Ifya Nasty. And she is first in the entryway to greet visitors. Effusively.To be clear, Ms. White, 72, a star of the Tony-winning musical “Hadestown,” is warm and welcoming. (See the show now; she’s leaving March 17.) But it’s a daily battle not to be upstaged by LaKee, even considering Ms. White’s many Broadway credits (“Fela!,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” “Once on This Island” and “Chicago,” among others); her awards, notably a Tony for her performance as a streetwise hooker in the 1997 musical “The Life”; and her experiences as a solo act (she’ll be teaching a cabaret master class at the 92nd Street Y in early March).Ms. White moved into the apartment more than 30 years ago, at a difficult time in her life. “My two kids and I were living with my mother in Coney Island, because I’d lost my apartment in Brooklyn,” she said. “I’d gotten divorced, and I lost everything.”That’s Mr. Jaxson Ifya Nasty, the cat, next to a statue bequeathed to Lillias White by the proprietor of the Hell’s Kitchen bakery Amy’s Bread.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesWe 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: In ‘Self Portraits (Deluxe),’ a Provocateur Instigates Reflection

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      Through self-examinations and social recriminations, Phillip Howze’s new show explores the injustices facing Black men.The playwright and performer Phillip Howze begins “Self Portraits (Deluxe),” now running at Jack in Brooklyn, by quietly asking for introductions. As he holds up a microphone to spectators (masks are required), Howze’s genial facial expressions mirror each person’s tone of voice. It’s a deceptively empathetic prologue to a fractious and abstracted 80-minute show.In sputtering, stream-of-consciousness-style prose, the artist delves into bouts of self-reflection and social recrimination. Howze muses that he’s never heard of a Black man dying on the toilet, confesses that he has a very small penis, and wonders whether there’s a condom for life experience. (A flushing sound punctuates each discursive riff.)“Make yourself comfortable,” he tells the audience, seated at various angles in the center of a low-ceilinged room the size of a convenience store. “The only way out is through.”The statement portends a sense of captivity that escalates, in ways that are both pointedly intentional and likely inadvertent, throughout this Bushwick Starr production, presented in association with Jack and directed by Dominique Rider. Strobe-like effects (by Masha Tsimring) and soundscapes that evoke an abandoned city on the moon (by Kathryn Ruvuna) lend tension, and an occasional air of drama, to the ensuing collage of performance art interludes. Howze’s preoccupations with shame and death create a tenuous through line.In the next scene, Howze is splayed out on a mattress beneath a suspended fun house mirror, skis dangling from the ceiling as he rehearses his final thoughts. It’s a nod to the death of the actress Natasha Richardson, who suffered fatal head injuries in a skiing accident in 2009. There are less distasteful ways of implicating an audience (mostly white, on the night I attended) in the injustice that attends the degradation of Black men than by suggesting that dying on the slopes is a relatively luxurious, and distinctly white, way to go.As a provocateur, Howze is neither subtle nor as sensitive as his outward demeanor suggests. In a sequence that would mortify anyone averse to audience participation, he gently beseeches a handful of patrons to stand with their hands up and foreheads against the wall, like a row of perpetrators. (“Would you mind? For me?”) Rather than a daring coup, it feels like a breach of good faith — for anyone to refuse would result in a different kind of humiliation.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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      When the Voice You Hear Is Not the Actor You See

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      The playwright Lucas Hnath has been making magic with the sound of speech. Now he’s directing a play by Mona Pirnot, his wife, in which a computer speaks her words.In the darkest moments of a family tragedy, when the playwright Mona Pirnot couldn’t find the strength to verbalize her feelings to her boyfriend or her therapist, she tried something a little unorthodox: She typed her thoughts into her laptop, and prompted a text-to-speech program to voice them aloud.It was a coping mechanism that also sparked a creative pivot: Pirnot’s then-boyfriend, now-husband, Lucas Hnath, is also a playwright, with a longtime interest in sound and a more recent history of building shows around disembodied voices. His last play, “A Simulacrum,” featured a magician re-creating his side of a conversation with Hnath, whose voice was heard via a tape recording; and his play before that, “Dana H.,” featured an actress lip-syncing interviews in which the playwright’s mother recounted the trauma of having been abducted.Now Hnath is directing Pirnot, who wrote and is the lone actor in “I Love You So Much I Could Die,” a diaristic exploration of how she was affected by a life-altering incident that incapacitated her sister at the start of the pandemic. In the 65-minute show, in previews Off Broadway at New York Theater Workshop, Pirnot sits on a ladderback chair, facing away from the audience, while a Microsoft text-to-speech program reads her lines. Between chapters of storytelling, Pirnot plays the guitar and sings songs that she wrote.Disembodied drama: Pirnot sits with her back to the audience for the entire play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe computer’s voice is male, robotic, and, of course, unemotional; its cadence, and the length of pauses, varies based on how Pirnot and Hnath have punctuated the text. The program makes occasional mistakes — a running joke concerns the pronunciation of Shia LaBeouf — that the artists cherish. Hearing a machine recount stories of very human pain can be awkwardly funny, and audiences are laughing, particularly early in the show, as they adjust to the disorienting experience.“I like the relentlessness that I can get with [the computer’s] voice that’s kind of shocking and surprising, and I find it to be at times very moving but at times extremely anxiety provoking,” Pirnot said. “This actually feels like I’m capturing and sharing a little bit of what this felt like.”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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      Book Review: “Cocktails With George and Martha” by Philip Gefter

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      COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE AND MARTHA: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ by Philip GefterWhat a document dump!The most delicious parts of “Cocktails With George and Martha,” Philip Gefter’s unapologetically obsessive new book about “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — the dark ’n’ stormy, oft-revived 1962 Broadway hit by Edward Albee that became a moneymaking movie and an eternal marriage meme — are diary excerpts from the screenwriter Ernest Lehman. (Gefter calls the diary “unpublished,” but at least some of it surfaced in the turn-of-the-millennium magazine Talk, now hard to find.)That Lehman is no longer a household name, if he ever was, is one of showbiz history’s many injustices. Before the thankless task of condensing Albee’s three-hour play for the big screen (on top of producing), he wrote the scripts for “North by Northwest” (1959), arguably Hitchcock’s greatest, and with some help, “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957). The latter was based on his experience copywriting for a press agent, which inspired a novelette in Cosmopolitan called “Tell Me About It Tomorrow!” (Will someone please bring back the novelette?)From beyond the grave, in a production journal titled “Fun and Games With George and Martha” housed at the Harry Ransom Center, Lehman dishes on working with Mike Nichols, the then-darling of New York intellectuals hired to direct his first Hollywood film, starring his famous, furiously canoodling friends Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.But first “Cocktails With George and Martha” fans out like a deck of cards the back story of the play, which initially featured Uta Hagen as Martha, the delulu grown daughter of a New England college president, and Arthur Hill as George, her husband, an associate history professor whose career has stalled. (Yes, they are named for the first first couple of America.) A younger married pair named Nick and Honey come over for the world’s longest and most hellacious nightcap.Steeped in alcohol and analysis themselves, sophisticated audiences thrilled to the play’s voyeurism and vulgar language, even as the Pulitzer Prize committee got prudish, suspending the drama prize the year “Woolf” was eligible.Gefter describes how another playwright, probably jealous of the box-office returns, accused Albee rather homophobically of “neuroticism” and “nihilism” in The New York Times. “If the theater must bring us only what we can immediately apprehend or comfortably relate to,” Albee responded in one of cultural journalism’s best mic drops, “let us stop going to the theater entirely. Let us play patty-cake with one another or sit in our rooms and contemplate our paunchy middles.”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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      ‘Hills of California’ Review: A Stage Mother’s Unhappy Brood

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      Jez Butterworth’s new play explores the family dynamics of a song and dance troupe that didn’t make the big time.In Jez Butterworth’s new play, we — the audience and protagonists alike — are kept waiting and wondering.It’s the summer of 1976 and Britain is in the midst of a heat wave. In Blackpool, a seaside town in northwestern England, three sisters, Jill, Ruby and Gloria, are reunited in the guesthouse that had been the childhood home, because their hotelier mother, Veronica, is dying of cancer. They must decide whether to put her out of her misery with a high dose of morphine, or let her continue to suffer.A fourth sister, Joan, had emigrated to the United States 20 years earlier to launch a music career, and hasn’t been in touch with the family since. Will she come home now? Why did she cut contact? Well, she had her reasons.“The Hills of California,” written by Butterworth (“The Ferryman,” “Jerusalem”) and directed by Sam Mendes (“The Lehmann Trilogy”), runs at the Harold Pinter Theater in London, through June 15. Rob Howell’s impressive set makes the most of the playhouse’s nearly 40-foot grid height, with three flights of stairs leading up to the unseen guest rooms.The action unfolds on the first floor, where an endearingly tacky bamboo drinks bar and large metal jukebox imbue the cheap-and-cheerful Blackpool stylings with a quiet, sentimental dignity. The hotel is called the Seaview but you can’t actually see the water from its windows. The dialogue is zippy, the humor sharp, dark and irreverent. A minor character sets the tone in an early exchange with Jill: “How’s your mother? The nurse says she’s dying.”At several points, the set rotates to show us the hotel’s kitchen quarters, and we are transported back to the 1950s. We see the sisters as teenagers (played by four younger actors), under the rigorous if somewhat domineering stewardship of their mother, Veronica (an imperiously poised Laura Donnelly), who trains them up as a song and dance troupe. They rehearse songs by The Andrews Sisters, as well as the 1948 hit by Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers that gives the play its title. (The music is arranged by Candida Caldicot.)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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      ‘Russian Troll Farm’ Review: A Stream of Memes, Eroding Trust in Democracy

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      An unlikely dark comedy imagines the people pushing #PizzaGate, Donald Trump and who knows what next.No one misses the early days and dark theaters of the Covid pandemic, but the emergency workaround of streaming content was good for a few things anyway. People who formerly could not afford admission suddenly could, since much of it was free, and artists from anywhere could now be seen everywhere, with just a Wi-Fi connection.That’s how I first encountered “Russian Troll Farm,” a play by Sarah Gancher intended for the stage but that had its debut, in 2020, as an online co-production of three far-flung institutions: TheaterWorks Hartford, TheaterSquared in Fayetteville, Ark., and the Brooklyn-based Civilians. At the time, I found its subject and form beautifully realized and ideally matched — the subject being online interference in the 2016 presidential election by a Russian internet agency.“This is digitally native theater,” I wrote, “not just a play plopped into a Zoom box.”Now the box has been ripped open, and a fully staged live work coaxed out of it. But the production of “Russian Troll Farm” that opened on Thursday at the Vineyard Theater is an entirely different, and in some ways disappointing, experience. Though still informative and trenchant, and given a swifter staging by the director Darko Tresnjak, it has lost the thrill of the original’s accommodation to the extreme constraints of its time.Not that it is any less relevant in ours; fake news will surely be as prominent in the 2024 election cycle (is Taylor Swift a pro-Biden psy-op?) as it was in 2016. That’s when, as Gancher recounts using many real texts, posts and tweets of the time, trolls at the Internet Research Agency — a real place in St. Petersburg, Russia — devised sticky memes and other content meant to undermine confidence in the electoral process, sow general discord, legitimize Trumpism and vaporize Hillary Clinton.But the play is less interested in classics of the conspiracy genre like #PizzaGate and Frazzledrip than in the kinds of people who would dream them up. In the manner of sitcoms like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Office,” “Russian Troll Farm” focuses on four such (fictional) trolls, neatly differentiated from one another and from their dragonish supervisor, Ljuba (Christine Lahti).King, left, and Lavelle as two of the trolls whose various schemes for advancement and connection end disastrously.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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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      ‘Bark of Millions’ Review: Taylor Mac’s Rock Opera at BAM

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      If Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s four-hour rock opera were aiming to succeed on aural gorgeousness and visual spectacle alone, there would be no cause to quibble.Somewhere close to the four-hour mark in “Bark of Millions,” the polychromatic cavalcade of splendor that is Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s new rock opera, I finally realized why the woman in front of me had been reading on her phone throughout the performance. And why she had looked at me like I was way out of line when I couldn’t bear the glowing screen any longer, leaned forward and implored her to stop.The words on her phone were excerpts from the show’s lyrics, a free digital version of the printed fan deck on sale at concessions. More than 50 songs in, she was grasping at that text in an attempt to follow along. Because the great frustration of “Bark of Millions,” which continues through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, is that there are far too many songs in which the music drowns out the lyrics, making the meaning a bafflement. (Sound design is by Brendan Aanes.) In those moments, time decelerates.If “Bark of Millions” were aiming to succeed on aural gorgeousness and visual spectacle alone, there would be no cause to quibble. Those are plentiful in Ray’s genre-hopping music, richly interpreted by the band he directs, and in Machine Dazzle’s ingeniously odd costumes, such as the sparkly pastel number in which Mac begins the evening, looking like Weird Barbie as an acid-tinged sprite, dressed for Versailles by way of ’60s Vegas.But Mac’s vivid, often poetic lyrics are not incidental. In the creation of the score, they were the starting point, each of the 55 songs inspired by a figure in queer history. It is a mosaic of a show, inherently political in its affirmation of queer heritage and community, though as Mac tells the audience, it is not a history lesson: “We beg you not to Google in your seats.”From left, Jack Fuller, Mama Alto and Thornetta Davis.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesStill, there are degrees of mystery, and I do not believe that “Bark of Millions” — which Mac, its principal director, describes aptly in a program note as “an opera-concert-song-cycle-musical-performance-art-piece-play” — means to leave us so much in the dark.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