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      ‘Munich Medea: Happy Family’ Review: A Friendship Crushed by the Past

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      Themes of incest and sexual abuse of minors loom large in this strikingly becalmed play named after a legendarily vengeful Greek mother.“Munich Medea: Happy Family” carries the wrong trigger warning. Rather than cautioning us that Corinne Jaber’s debut play “addresses, but does not depict, sexual assault,” it should warn us that its tropes will be ploddingly predictable to just about anyone who has seen the #MeToo movement play out in recent years.On opposite sides of a sparsely furnished split-level stage, two women, Caroline and Alice, tell us about the dissolution of their childhood friendship after they were sexually abused by the same man. While the script seems to be pitched somewhere between a memory play and an exorcism, what unfolds onstage, under the director Lee Sunday Evans’s light touch, is as dry and sober as a deposition — with its mentions of consent (uttered 10 times in the play’s 75 minutes), forensic descriptions of rape and clockwork-like moments of catharsis. For a play named after a legendarily vengeful Greek mother, “Munich Medea” (a co-production of PlayCo and WP Theater) is a strikingly domesticated and becalmed production.This is not to say that mothers come off entirely well in this play. At one point, Caroline (a granite-faced Crystal Finn) — looking back on the abuse that her father (a louche Kurt Rhoads) inflicted on her best friend, Alice (Heather Raffo) — reflects that “none of this would’ve happened” without her mother’s consent, “which she gave, always, willingly and silently.” Her mother never materializes in the play. That the mother is effectively silenced could be a way for her daughter to exact poetic revenge, by silencing the person who wove a conspiracy of silence around her husband’s crimes. But the play is not wily enough to ambush the accomplice in her own trap.Alice’s own mother, a refugee from East Germany, is also conspicuously absent. A more sympathetic character, she’s described as a “virtuous, well-behaved Protestant” who once confronted Caroline’s father, asking him to leave her daughter alone, to no avail. As played by Rhoads, the father (he is given no proper name) is a silver-tongued theater actor who spends much of the play in his dressing room, elevated about 10 feet above the floor. Lines from Friedrich Schiller rain down on us from his lair, and even in old age, he has no trouble quoting Georg Büchner and Rainer Maria Rilke from memory. As with Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous pedophile, Humbert Humbert, the father in “Munich Medea” seems to believe that aesthetic ingenuity more than makes up for ethical lapses.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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      Marc Summers Is Still Up for a Double Dare. (Hold the Green Slime.)

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      “I made Nickelodeon,” the former “Double Dare” host said. Now he’s telling all in his Off Broadway show “The Life & Slimes of Marc Summers.”Rehearsing at a studio space in Times Square earlier this month, Marc Summers was crouched low, engaged in a conversation with God. Such scenes are staples of one-person shows like the kind that Summers is bringing to Off Broadway, but his arch tone suggested he wasn’t approaching this existential moment too earnestly.“What is my purpose in life?” Summers called out, wondering what he should do if he encountered disappointments or impediments on his journey.A booming, recorded voice answered that life may be full of pain and regrets, but it also offers humor and joy. “The only question,” the voice said, “is are you ready for it?”After further contemplation, Summers answered confidently. “I think I’m ready,” he said, pausing for effect. “I think I’m ready to take the physical challenge!”Summers is 72 with a head of mostly white and gray hair, but his toothy smile and exuberant cadence still make him easily recognizable to the generation of television viewers who were introduced to him as the host of the children’s game show “Double Dare.”“Double Dare,” which debuted in 1986 on Nickelodeon, blended a trivia competition with outrageously messy obstacle courses. A team of two youthful contestants could dare a rival duo to field a question, but their opponents, of course, could double dare them back. In that case the original team had to either answer the question or submit to a physical challenge.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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      ‘Six’ Creators Announce Their Second Act

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      Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow spent years working out how to follow their hit musical about Henry VIII’s wives. “Why Am I So Single?” is their answer.In January 2019, Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, the creators of the musical “Six,” were on a writer’s retreat in Connecticut, wondering how to follow up their celebrated first show.That month, “Six” — in which Henry VIII’s wives tell their stories via pop songs — was starting a major West End run, and a Broadway transfer was on the horizon. The show had already been a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and a growing number of American fans were streaming the show’s soundtrack. More and more, people wanted to know what the pair would do next.During the Connecticut retreat, they struggled to come up with new ideas, Marlow recalled in a recent interview, and instead gossiped about their love lives. Then, they had a breakthrough: “Maybe this is what we should write about,” Marlow said.On Wednesday, Marlow, 29, and Moss, 30, announced that their second musical, “Why Am I So Single?,” will open at the Garrick Theater in London on Aug. 27.The show, which has a 12-person cast, follows two friends struggling to write a musical and asking each other why they’re chronically single. That idea may sound similar to the creators’ time in Connecticut, but Moss, laughing nervously, said it was “definitely not a complete autobiography.”Marlow said that the musical, which includes songs inspired by Dua Lipa hits and numbers from “Singin’ in the Rain,” was “about friendship and love and loneliness and everything that goes with it.”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: In ‘The Apiary,’ the Bees Have a Troubling Tale to Tell

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      Worldwide colony collapse is the subject of a bright, strange, upbeat thought experiment about insect hives, and our own.Here’s a pitch you haven’t heard before. It’s 2046. Bees in the wild have succumbed to a planet-wide die-off, taking almonds, avocados and honey down with them. But in a subterranean lab, three women doing “palliative care” with four remaining broods make a hopeful if gruesome discovery.Also, it’s a comedy. Call it “Little Hive of Horrors.”That’s the setup, if nowhere near the payoff, of the “The Apiary,” a bright, strange and mesmerizing marvel by Kate Douglas, making her professional playwriting debut with this Off Off Broadway production. Unlike most such debuts, though, “The Apiary,” which opened on Tuesday at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, is receiving a nearly perfect, first-class staging under the almost too good direction of Kate Whoriskey.I say “almost too good” because a staging so sensitive yet confident could disguise whatever flaws may lurk in the text. So be it: “The Apiary” flies by with so much good humor and novel eye candy (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bee lab represented onstage before) that you barely register the way the playwright’s thematic focus comes dangerously close to obsession.The insects are everywhere. To begin with, Walt Spangler’s set is dominated by four hive boxes and a gigantic gauze-walled chamber filled with little prop bugs I could swear were swarming. The backdrop features a honeycomb pattern. The floor, the railings and even the paper in the beekeepers’ desktop inboxes are bumblebee yellow.It’s not just the visuals, though. The characters talk bees, live bees, dream bees. Gwen (Taylor Schilling) is perhaps the least emotionally attached: As the lab’s manically insecure manager, she’s freaked out by the decline of the broods under her care less because it might mean ecological collapse than because it might mean funding cutbacks from “upstairs.” Countering her, the relentlessly optimistic Pilar (Carmen M. Herlihy) fully stans the critters: They are “very sensitive and so so smart,” she explains merrily to a newcomer. “They dance! They tell jokes.”We don’t hear those jokes, but between scenes we do see Stephanie Crousillat, in yoga wear and a gas mask — the costumes are by Jennifer Moeller — performing Warren Adams’s creepy bee choreography.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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      Shakespeare to Hit the Road While Central Park Theater Is Closed

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      The Delacorte is being renovated, so this summer will instead bring a mobile production and then a filmed play to outdoor sites in the city’s five boroughs.Free Shakespeare in the Park, one of the longtime treasures of summer in New York City, will be smaller-scale and itinerant this year because a gut renovation of the program’s Central Park home is underway.The Public Theater, the nonprofit organization that presents the annual Shakespeare festival, announced Tuesday that, instead of its usual large-scale productions at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, this year it would send a smaller production of “The Comedy of Errors” to parks and plazas around the city between Memorial Day and the end of June, followed by outdoor screenings of a filmed production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in July, August and early September.The production of “The Comedy of Errors” is a 90-minute bilingual musical adaptation from the director Rebecca Martinez and the composer Julian Mesri that the Public staged last year at city parks and recreation centers as part of the theater’s mobile unit. This summer’s five-week touring production will have a slightly larger company, and will visit some larger venues than last year’s production. It will start in Manhattan, with a week on a plaza in front of the New York Public Library’s flagship building in Bryant Park, followed by a series of dates at Hudson Yards and other locations in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island. All performances will be free.“It’s not a replacement for the Delacorte — it’s not intended to be a replacement — but my hope is that it will be successful enough as an experiment that this expanded version of what the mobile unit does can keep going indefinitely,” Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public, said in an interview.The filmed production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” directed by Kenny Leon and starring Danielle Brooks and Grantham Coleman, was shot during a run in Central Park in 2019; it will be screened outdoors, free, at sites in all five boroughs.“Much Ado About Nothing,” filmed for the PBS series Great Performances, will also be among four Shakespeare in the Park productions that can be streamed online during May and June. The others are a 2023 production of “Hamlet,” a 2022 production of “Richard III” and a 2021 production called “Merry Wives.” Streaming the Great Performances films will be free.The Delacorte has been closed since last fall for a $78 million renovation. A groundbreaking was held in October and the project is scheduled to finish sometime next year, and the summer of 2025 is expected to include Shakespeare back in Central Park. More

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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