Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Beverly Johnson, ‘the Model With the Big Mouth’

      by

      In her new one-woman show, she details her 50-year modeling career, her tumultuous relationships — and an unsettling encounter with Bill Cosby.She was 18, new to New York, a tenderfoot in an industry said to eat its young. But Beverly Johnson was not short on brass.She had been quick in the early 1970s to sign with the formidable model agent Eileen Ford — and just as swift, at 19, to inform her, “I want to be on the cover of American Vogue.” When Ms. Ford asked her curtly, “Who do you think you are, Cleopatra?” Ms. Johnson was as curt with a comeback, murmuring, audibly enough, “That’s exactly who I think I am.”Ms. Johnson revisits that moment in “In Vogue,” her one-woman show set to open in Manhattan on Sunday. The play, largely derived from her 2015 memoir, “Beverly Johnson: The Face That Changed It All,” and written with the playwright Josh Ravetch, is by turns an upbeat and cautionary account of Ms. Johnson’s adventures — and hairy misadventures — in the mannequin trade.Onstage she tells of defying expectations and defecting to a competing modeling agency, despite the warnings of peers that such a move would amount to professional ruin.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?  More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      Opera Greets the Morning at the Prototype Festival

      by

      The offerings at this annual presentation of new opera and music theater tend to be politically charged, scrappy and stirring.“These people are not drunk,” a choir in quirkily customized blue robes sang on Saturday, “because it’s nine in the morning.”Watching these smiling performers in the light-flooded Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, I was surprised to discover that this startlingly contemporary sentence was a translation of a biblical verse, Acts 2:15. And it was an appropriate sentiment at, yes, about 9 a.m.In “Terce,” presented as part of this year’s Prototype festival of new opera and music theater, about three dozen choir members were praying, as Christians have done at that hour from the era of the early church. The work adapts and takes its name from the traditional liturgy for 9 o’clock, the time when the Holy Spirit is believed to have appeared to the apostles on Pentecost.In Brooklyn, there’s a twist, if not a wholly unfamiliar one: The divinity being celebrated in this folk-soul-gospel-medieval amalgam is, according to the script, a woman, a mother, “an undeniably female creator.”The singers of “Terce” celebrate “an undeniably female creator.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPolitically charged, scrappy, stirring, deeply earnest: “Terce,” created and led by Heather Christian, embodies Prototype, now in its 11th season and organized by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, the arts center in SoHo. (The festival runs through Sunday.)The hourlong performance had the intimacy that is crucial to this year’s best festival offerings. The members of the community choir that Christian has organized sing, dance and play instruments only steps from the audience that surrounds them. And, whether it’s the cold weather or the constant bad news, that closeness feels sweet and reassuring this January.It’s sweet and reassuring, too, in even cozier confines at HERE, where Prototype is presenting “The Promise,” a rock-cabaret song cycle that Wende, a Dutch singer, conceived with a group of collaborators.Wende’s “The Promise” at HERE.Raymond van OlphenAmong those creators is the composer Isobel Waller-Bridge, perhaps best known for scoring her sister Phoebe’s hit TV show “Fleabag.” And the lyrics of “The Promise” — the work of five writers — do reflect a kind of “Fleabag” sensibility. They are the voice of a modern woman, single, funny, dissatisfied, morbid, ambivalent at best about having children, prickly yet vulnerable. “I’m a lonely bitch,” goes one song’s rueful refrain.Restlessly stalking the tiny space and moving among the three other musicians, Wende has a mischievous grin that can swiftly give way to sneering anger and quiet despair. Her voice is tautly powerful yet quivering, a little like Fiona Apple’s — sometimes sultry, sometimes airy and wry. With resourcefully varied lighting by Freek Ros, the 19-song, 100-minute cycle keeps shifting its tone and pace; songs with pounding, propulsive jungle beats exist alongside vocals half-spoken to a piano.If the final minutes come close to being cloying without quite tipping over, they have that in common with “Terce.” But just as the physical proximity of the performers feels welcome this season, some sentimentality does, too. Wende somehow manages to create that rarity: anthemic crowd singalongs that even a hardened critic feels compelled to join.“The Promise” and “Terce,” the Prototype presentations that are sticking with me most this year, are both plotless and characterless. Also leaning abstract, but in a far wilder and more surreal mode, is “Chornobyldorf,” a sprawling production of well over two intermissionless hours at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater. It has bravely traveled from Ukraine as a kind of nostalgic reminder of the loud, messy, nudity-filled, often self-serious, generally baffling shows that were once fixtures of downtown New York.“Chornobyldorf,” at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater.Valeriia LandarThe many-page synopsis describes a convoluted genesis for this “archaeological opera in seven novels,” created by Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko. But the premise is similar to “Station Eleven,” the book turned TV show, and the play “Mr. Burns”: After an apocalypse — the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is the specter here — a society tries to rise from the ashes though whatever fragments of culture remain.In the case of “Chornobyldorf,” this takes the form of revived yet still-distant memories of Baroque opera and polyphonic chant, shot through with eruptions of blastingly amplified punkish rage. The texts are difficult to decipher. The costumes are cut in ornate antique styles, but dolled up with bits of electrical wiring, and the instruments, many hand-built, are seemingly a collection of whatever was left over when the world ended: percussion, trombone, fluegelhorn, flute, folk string instruments like the bandura and dulcimer, sighing accordions.The sonic landscape creaks and roars, squeals and simmers, as this little society puts on eerily robotic, intensely solemn rituals, building to a screaming Mass and a climactic, hysterical danse macabre around a huge medallion of Lenin hanging from the ceiling. On a screen behind the performers, film footage pans through outdoor scenes, with nature looking majestic — and almost entirely abandoned by humans.“Chornobyldorf” is reminiscent of the loud, nudity-filled, generally baffling shows that were once fixtures of downtown New York.Artem GalkinThe slow, stylized pace and insular symbolism, together with the vivid film element and arcane eroticism, evokes Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster” cycle. And though the work is baggy, a dreamlike atmosphere takes hold; it’s hard to tell the exact meaning of a statuesque naked woman being stripped of the cymbals that hang from her arms, but the sequence is nevertheless arresting.“Adoration” is the most standard-issue, proscenium-theater opera Prototype is presenting this year. Based on a 2008 Atom Egoyan film, the 90-minute piece — being performed at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in Manhattan — trudges through a complicated plot involving a teenage boy’s announcement to his classmates that his father is a terrorist. (It turns out he’s not telling the truth, though to what narrative or emotional end is never quite clear.)Setting the story to music offers the promise of delving into the nuances of a group of troubled people. But the drearily expository monologues go on and on in Royce Vavrek’s leaden libretto. And while Mary Kouyoumdjian’s score offers some sinuous music for string quartet, its fevered quality feels generic and eventually tiresome; the drama, shapeless.More compelling than any character in “Adoration” is Dominic Shodekeh Talifero, the performer-protagonist of “Vodalities,” one of Prototype’s three short, online streaming offerings — and he doesn’t even speak words or sing pitches.Joined for the piece’s 16 minutes by the quartet So Percussion, he virtuosically yet subtly explores what he calls breath art, a delicate form of beat-boxing that inevitably, painfully suggests the Black Lives Matter rallying cry “I can’t breathe.” (The other digital presentations are “Swann,” a longing aria based on the true story of a 19th-century Black man who wore drag, and the antic, voice-processed “Whiteness.)Huang Ruo’s “Angel Island,” at the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Maria BaranovaHuang Ruo’s “Angel Island,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, delves into the dark history of American discrimination and violence against Chinese immigrants, many of whom were processed on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.The 90-minute work’s structure is elegant: Sections of historical narration, as in a Ken Burns documentary, alternate with poetic pieces for chorus, with members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street singing the words of writings found on the walls of the island’s immigrant processing center. Filling the back wall of the stage is a screen for the film artist Bill Morrison’s trademark, haunting manipulations of scratchy, blurry archival footage, its ghostliness echoed by the choir’s floating, elegiac sound.The slow-burning patience of Huang’s score is a virtue, even if the sections tend to linger too long — particularly the nonchoral ones, with the narration on top of a string quartet sawing away as accompaniment to balletically aggressive duets for two dancers, an Asian woman and white man.But the gradual build to a hypnotic conclusion was moving, with choral repetitions as relentless as waves on a beach, punctuated by the slow, steady beat of a gong. It was reminiscent of “Terce,” which ends with the metallic shimmer of a gently shaken chandelier made of keys and cutlery.There was a sense, in both finales, of the potential of music and performance — of community — to cleanse. To help us both remember and move forward. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      Three Festival Shows Explore Toxic Society

      by

      “Queens of Sheba” and “Volcano” at Under the Radar, and “Bacon,” at International Fringe Encore Series, expound on identity, captivity and violence.‘Queens of Sheba’Through Saturday as part of Under the Radar; utrfest.org. Running time: 1 hour.Theater makes much of the element of catharsis, but rarely is a show purgative all the way through, as the choreopoem “Queens of Sheba” is. A celebration of Black women, and a ticked-off commiseration for all the nonsense thrown their way, it names a host of psychic poisons and puts them on display.At Lincoln Center, this British piece pays homage to Ntozake Shange’s classic choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Written by Jessica L. Hagan and Ryan Calais Cameron (“For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy”), it is a series of loosely linked stories in verse.A cast of four (Paisley Billings, Déja J Bowens, Jadesola Odunjo and the standout, Muki Zubis) tells of microaggressions from colleagues, exoticization by white dates and, true to Shange, derogation by Black men, which carries a particular pain.There is also an othering question that the women get repeatedly: “Where are you from?” Their reply is a refrain in the show: “I say I am a mix. Of both racism and sexism — they lay equally on my skin.”Directed by Jessica Kaliisa, “Queens of Sheba” was only briefly at last year’s Under the Radar, its run truncated by visa delays. So the festival brought it back, to the Clark Studio Theater.It feels less crisply focused now, but its intent is clear. Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” is its anthem, and what she sings about — what they sing about, too — is exactly what these women want. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESWe 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?  More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Cosmos,’ Female Astronauts Dance Toward the Stars

      by

      A new show in Paris by Maëlle Poésy tells the story of the Mercury 13 space program, with choreographed movement and acrobatic sequences.Early on in “Cosmos,” a new production by the French theater director Maëlle Poésy, three performers walk slowly onstage, their bodies hidden in full spacesuits. There are plenty of clues in the playbill. After all, “Cosmos” was inspired by the Mercury 13, a group of American women who took part in a ’60s program that proved their fitness for space travel, but who never blasted off.Yet when they took their helmets off to reveal three women, I caught myself feeling surprised. Subconsciously, I realized, I still expected astronauts to be men.“Cosmos,” presented at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe, in Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb, brightly deconstructs this stereotype. The production belongs to an increasingly prominent theater genre: plays that center women’s stories as a form of historical or artistic redress, with the explicit aim of challenging conventional narratives.It’s a tricky exercise for writers and directors, as overly didactic productions quickly feel heavy-handed. Not here. Poésy and her co-writer, Kevin Keiss, delve into the space dream that fueled three of the Mercury 13 — Jerrie Cobb, Jane Briggs Hart and Wally Funk — in imaginative ways. There is upbeat dialogue and a few verbatim recreations of their public speeches, but “Cosmos” also makes use of movement to show the women striving toward the freedoms of space. The cast of five break open the large white wall that frames the action, and use dance and acrobatic sequences to express the intensity of Mercury 13’s training program and frustration at gender inequality.This allows Poésy to explore their trajectories without getting bogged down in the (eye-popping) details. As we learn, Cobb was just 18 when she got her commercial pilot’s license; later, she inaugurated new air routes across some of the most dangerous South American landscapes and flew humanitarian supplies on the continen for decades. Briggs Hart was a World War II veteran, the wife of Senator Philip A. Hart, a long-serving Michigan Democrat, and a mother of eight when she successfully passed the Mercury 13 tests.The play is based on stories from the Mercury 13, a group of American women who took part in a 1960s program designed to test their fitness to go into space.Jean-Louis Fernandez“Cosmos” isn’t the first attempt to reclaim the women’s place in the history of space travel. In 2018, Netflix released a documentary about this pioneering group and the sexist attitudes that ultimately shut down the test program, “Mercury 13”; the Apple TV show “For All Mankind” also imagined what might have happened if women had been selected for a moon landing. Books, articles and an American play, Laurel Ollstein’s “They Promised Her the Moon,” have been written about Cobb and her peers. Yet few will have heard of them in Europe.The Mercury 13’s program, privately funded and hidden from public view, was an initiative of William Randolph Lovelace II, a NASA physician. Lovelace had heard whispers that the Soviet Union was considering sending a woman into space (in 1963, it did: Valentina Tereshkova). But Lovelace doesn’t appear in “Cosmos,” which focuses on Cobb, Briggs Hart and Funk as they learn that they have been selected for the project.As they detail the medical and physical tests that followed — think frozen water injected into ears, extreme sports and isolation tanks — the cast of five women begins to perform staccato movements choreographed by Leïla Ka, a rising French dance-maker. They kneel, crouch, lie down, get up again.Later, when they learn via telegram that the program has been canceled, despite the fact that they outperformed men on a number of metrics, they return to dance — this time frantically. In ’60s-style dresses, they pretend to apply lipstick, and touch their faces and torsos, as if trapped by expectations of femininity. Caroline Arrouas is especially striking as Briggs Hart, at one point taking off her high heels and banging them against a portion of the wall until it collapses.Arrouas, right, as Jane Briggs Hart, the wife of Senator Philip Hart and one of the Mercury 13.Jean-Louis FernandezThe women’s disappointment, and subsequent attempts to get Congress and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to allow women into NASA’s space program, are interspersed with stories of women born after them. Dominique Joannon, playing an astrophysicist from Chile, talks movingly about a childhood fascination with the stars; and Elphège Kongombé Yamale, as an astrobiologist, explores what the 1969 moon landing meant to women in the Central African Republic.Space and flight are metaphors throughout. Two performers — Liza Lapert, who plays Funk, and Joannon — are experienced acrobats, and at one point they climb the wall, opening little traps to let warm orange light through. Joannon delivers a galactic monologue while hanging from a bar high above the stage.In the final scene, Lapert climbs a rope center stage. As she hovers above the cast, she talks about Cobb’s and Briggs Hart’s deaths, then explains that Funk’s dream finally came true in 2021, when she became the oldest person to go into space, at 82, on a Blue Origin flight.“When the rocket left the ground, I took you with me,” she tells the others below, before resuming her climb, all the way to the lights hanging above the stage. The symbolism was obvious, yet neat: Finally, one of the Mercury 13 had completed their mission.CosmosThrough Jan. 21 at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe, in Saint-Denis, France; theatregerardphilipe.com. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      At UTR and Exponential, Four Soul-Enriching Experiments in Theater

      by

      Buckle up for “Open Mic Night” and “Search Party” at Under the Radar and two wildly adventurous works at the Exponential Festival.Critic’s Pick‘Open Mic Night’Through Jan. 18 as part of Under the Radar; utrfest.org. Running time: 50 minutes.For about two-thirds of Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey’s new show, “Open Mic Night,” Weiss alternated between reminiscing about a now-closed space and asking audience members a series of rapid-fire questions, like “Vipers or moles?” “Vacation or voting?” Mounsey was sitting behind a laptop, which she used to drop sound cues, and the blinding house lights remained on as Weiss engaged in crowd work.Suddenly, Weiss said: “I’m tired of playing this character. Hi, I’m the real Peter now.” But then the house lights went down and a spotlight went up, and he was holding a mic, looking like a stand-up comedian in full performance mode. What was real? What was pretend? The duo seemed to be slyly reminding us that maybe a stage is not a place where we should expect authenticity. Plus, what does that even mean?Since their 2019 show “[50/50] old school animation,” Mounsey and Weiss have emerged as perhaps the most bracing theatermakers in New York City, a reputation confirmed in 2021 with “While You Were Partying” at Soho Rep. “Open Mic Night,” which runs through Jan. 18 and is being presented by Mabou Mines and Performance Space New York as part of this year’s Under the Radar festival, confirms that they are not so much about cringe as they are about questioning the relationship between artist and audience. (Nathan Fielder fans should take note.) During the round of questions, Weiss asked a woman, “Do you trust me?” After she said yes, he flatly said: “Interesting.” ELISABETH VINCENTELLICritic’s Pick‘Search Party’Through Jan. 13 as part of Under the Radar; utrfest.org. Running time: 1 hour.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?  More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      The EGOT Winner Behind Sondheim’s Signature Sound

      by

      To understand the role of the Broadway orchestrator, seek out the composer Stephen Sondheim’s piano demo for the song “Losing My Mind” from the musical “Follies” and then compare it to the version on the original cast recording. The demo’s tone is wistful and resigned, with a touch of the whiskey bar about it. In the finished version, the song sounds transformed: Ascending notes on the strings, interjections from the brass and crashing cymbals build to a powerful climax, evoking the heartache and inner turmoil contained in the lyric.What happened? The short answer: Jonathan Tunick.“I seem to have a nose for the theater, and it’s really like that,” Tunick, the prolific Broadway orchestrator, said during an interview in his book-lined study on the Upper West Side. “If something works, you can almost smell it.”Sondheim himself called Tunick the “best orchestrator in the history of the theater” during a 2011 video interview with Sony Masterworks. His work can be heard in three very different Sondheim musicals on New York stages right now: “Sweeney Todd,” “Merrily We Roll Along” and Sondheim’s posthumous musical, “Here We Are.”In fact, Tunick, 85, has orchestrated nearly every Sondheim musical since 1970, including “Company,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures,” “Into the Woods” and “Passion.” For other composers, he orchestrated “A Chorus Line,” “Nine,” “The Color Purple” and “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.” An EGOT winner (that rare recipient of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards), Tunick won a Tony for his “Titanic” orchestrations in 1997 (the first year the award was presented) and an Academy Award for the film version of “A Little Night Music.” Last fall he became the first orchestrator to have his portrait hung at Sardi’s.Sondheim and Tunick, in 2003, at the City Opera sitzprobe for the musical “A Little Night Music.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the Sardi’s event, at least a couple of guests could be heard wondering aloud: What does a Broadway orchestrator actually do?Typically, for a Broadway show of the kind Tunick might orchestrate, the composer provides the vocal part along with some form of accompaniment. That accompaniment can be a basic chord sheet, a fully realized piano part or anything in between. It’s the orchestrator’s task — a long and lonely one, Tunick said — to turn that accompaniment into something an orchestra can perform.There are, of course, more poetic descriptions. In Steven Suskin’s book “The Sound of Broadway Music,” the original “Carousel” orchestrator, Don Walker, likened orchestration to “the clothing of a musical thought”; Hans Spialek, who orchestrated “On Your Toes” and numerous other Rodgers and Hart shows, compared it to “painting a musical picture.”Tunick’s preferred analogy is “lighting for the ears.” He often confers with a show’s lighting designer to determine which colors and shadings will be used onstage. The orchestra, he said, has the ability “to provide its own shadings of light, darkness, warmth and texture to the music and lyrics.”For the Broadway premiere of “Company” in 1970, Tunick fashioned a crisp, gleaming sound that was the aural equivalent of the chrome-and-glass set by Boris Aronson. Tunick conjured a hellacious soundscape for the macabre “Sweeney Todd”: agitated strings, blazing horns and frantic xylophones that evoke the scurrying of rats. For “Merrily We Roll Along,” he replicated the bold, brassy up-tempo sound of 1960s Broadway overtures.From left, Lindsay Mendez, Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff in the Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” at the Hudson Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTunick sees to it that the instruments never get in the way of the words. “He is always aware of the lyric and the dramatic moment,” said Joel Fram, the music director of the Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.” He pointed to that show’s “Our Time” as an example, with its twinkling piano, simple woodwind solos, gentle rhythmic figure on the bassoon and pizzicato cello — a suitable soundtrack for the youthful optimism of the show’s protagonists at that point. “It serves the song rather than overwhelms it.”Charlie Alterman pointed to a favorite orchestration in “Company,” for which he served as the music director of the recent national tour. “It’s a bubbling up of emotion somewhere inside the character of Bobby,” he said, referring to the moment in the final number, “Being Alive,” when, unexpectedly, the melody of “Someone Is Waiting” — an earlier song filled with a yearning for companionship — sneaks in like a dawning realization.“Deep down there’s something that remembers the feeling of ‘Someone Is Waiting’ and wants to be heard,” Alterman said. The choice is intriguing on an intellectual level, “but at a gut level, it does that incredible thing that good music does, where you can’t quite explain it in your mind, but it’s clear as day in your heart.”Tunick remembers sneaking those few notes into “Being Alive” — and that Sondheim was pleased with the addition. “At least it showed him that I was paying attention,” Tunick said.More than merely making the music sound pretty or palatable, a great orchestrator “is also a playwright, telling the story and reflecting character in orchestral sound,” said Michael Starobin, who orchestrated Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Assassins.”As the “Being Alive” example above demonstrates, orchestration “can hint at unspoken secrets,” Tunick said. “Things that the characters don’t say, or don’t want to say, or don’t even know.”ONE PIECE OF MUSIC made a big impression on the young Jonathan Tunick: “Tubby the Tuba,” the 1945 children’s song, centers on a forlorn tuba who longs to play the melody instead of just the bass line. Much like “Peter and the Wolf,” the song highlighted the distinct characters of the individual instruments of the orchestra. “This idea penetrated my growing brain,” he said. “It developed into a lifelong obsession.”Tunick had some perfunctory piano lessons as a youngster growing up in New York — “I sailed through the Diller-Quaile book in a week” — but it was a clarinet, a gift from his amateur clarinetist uncle, that kept his interest.While a student at what is now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, he started his own band and played in the school orchestra as well as in the All City High School Orchestra. He started writing music, majoring in composition at Bard College, before paying his way through Juilliard by performing with the school’s orchestra.He was considerably more interested in what was happening at Birdland than on Broadway. “Musicals at the time were a little stodgy,” he said. “It was disposable popular entertainment. You’d throw it out like a used Kleenex. I was a little hipper than that.”While in college, a girlfriend introduced him to Frank Sinatra — and the possibilities of orchestral arrangement. He was struck by the way Nelson Riddle’s arrangements on Sinatra’s breakup album “In the Wee Small Hours” provided commentary, color and context. “He was tone painting,” Tunick said.College was followed by 10 years of fitful work as an arranger and orchestrator before a big break: orchestrating “Promises, Promises,” whose jazz-inflected score by Burt Bacharach brought a refreshingly contemporary sound to Broadway.Emboldened by that show’s success, Tunick called up Sondheim, whose originality and wit as a composer he had admired since hearing “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Tunick offered Sondheim his services for his next project.When he first heard the piano renditions of the songs that would become “Company,” Tunick was taken aback. With a few exceptions — “Barcelona” sounds like Erik Satie by way of Brazil, he observed — the score had a sound entirely of its own. “If anything it was sort of like Stravinsky, but not quite,” Tunick said, citing the peculiar melodies and rhythm of “The Little Things You Do Together” as an example of Sondheim’s startling originality. “What is that? In every case I had to give it careful thought.”Tunick is adapting the score of “A Little Night Music” for full orchestra, and will conduct a concert and recording of the new version this year.James Estrin/The New York TimesInitially, Tunick wasn’t overly confident in his ability to do justice to the material. “I was terrified,” he said. But, starting with “Company,” Tunick helped define the characteristic Sondheim sound. In contrast to the sumptuous blare of an entire orchestra at full blast, this was a sound defined by crisper lines, purer colors, more instrumental solos, more variation and contrast of tonal effects.That sound is certainly present in “Here We Are,” the new musical about privileged urbanites trapped in an existential nightmare. Befitting the sinister surrealism of the source material — the Luis Buñuel films “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel” — Tunick’s underscoring at times resembles the effervescently weird music of a Looney Tunes cartoon. And, once again, the orchestra knows something the characters don’t, greeting the happy exclamation “What a perfect day!” with notes that jar and thud.Orchestrating that show after Sondheim’s death in 2021 was “like going through the letters of a deceased friend,” said Tunick, “editing them for publication.” Tunick was happy with the result. “We went out on a high note,” he added.The musical collaboration will carry on, though.Having already reorchestrated several Sondheim shows — not just the ones he orchestrated originally — Tunick is adapting the score of “A Little Night Music” for full orchestra, rendering it more suitable for performance by symphony orchestras and in opera houses. He will conduct a concert and recording of the new version this year.In an even more profound and lasting way, of course, through cast albums and successive productions, the Sondheim-Tunick collaboration will continue to inspire generations of musical theater lovers — and reward ever closer listening.Tunick’s last meeting with Sondheim turned out to be only weeks before the composer’s death, at a concert of Tunick’s work at Sharon Playhouse in Connecticut. Tunick took the opportunity to say a few words to his longtime collaborator: “I know you hate sentimentality. But I have to tell you how much it’s meant to me, working with you all these years.”As Tunick tearily remembers it, Sondheim put his arm around him, saying, “Jonathan, we’re lucky we met one another.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Review: For Jews, an Unanswered ‘Prayer for the French Republic’

      by

      In Joshua Harmon’s play about the legacies of antisemitism, a Parisian family must decide when it’s time to get out.Such is the sadness of our world that plays about antisemitism, however historical, cannot help but be prescient. Take “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s sprawling family drama about the Salomons, Jews who have “been in France more than a thousand years,” as one of them puts it, still sounding provisional. With violent incidents on the rise, and a fascistic, Nazi-adjacent party gaining in the polls, should they finally seek safety elsewhere?When it ran Off Broadway in 2022, “Prayer for the French Republic” already seemed painfully timely, with the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, the murder of a Holocaust survivor in Paris and other antisemitic atrocities barely in the rearview mirror. Two years later, with so much more awfulness to choose from, Harmon, revising his script for Broadway, has cut references to those events. What is too much for the world is way too much for the play.And the play, for all its urgency, is already way too much. Running just over three hours, “Prayer for the French Republic,” which opened on Tuesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is still not long enough to do justice to the multiple histories it wants to tell. In the manner of prestige television series, but compressed for the stage to the point of confusion, it tries to dramatize the largest and most intractable world issues within the microcosm of a single family, creating an impossible burden on both.The play also revisits an earlier time, alternating scenes set in the mid-1940s with, from left, Daniel Oreskes, Nancy Robinette, Ethan Haberfield and Ari Brand.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat this Manhattan Theater Club production, directed by David Cromer, remains mostly riveting is the result of the richness of Harmon’s novelistic detail — and the exceptional skill of the principal actors in realizing it. Chief among them is Betsy Aidem, as Marcelle Salomon Benhamou, a psychiatrist living in Paris in 2016 who seems to need a psychiatrist herself. Overprotective and yet hypercritical of her two children, she loses control when one of them, Daniel (Aria Shahghasemi), is beaten up by antisemitic thugs near the school where he teaches.Marcelle’s frenzied response creates a fissure in the family that the play then proceeds to pry wide open. Her husband, Charles Benhamou (Nael Nacer), a physician who emigrated to France from Algeria when conditions became impossible for Jews in the early 1960s, eventually concludes that, like his native country then, his adopted one now is profoundly unsafe. Familiar with sudden uprootings, he wants to move as soon as possible — to Israel.Pointing out that Israel is no one’s idea of a safe haven, Marcelle is at first inalterably opposed to the idea. But it is less her fear of the Middle East than her connection to France that compels her to stay. Her elderly father, Pierre (Richard Masur), runs the last of the piano stores that the Salomons built into a national brand, with 22 stores, over five generations starting in 1855. A gorgeous, amber-colored grand, with “Salomon” spelled in gold on the fallboard, is the first and last thing we see in the show.There are few pieces of furniture harder to pack than a grand piano, which here becomes symbolic of the gift Jews have made to French culture and the expectation of permanent welcome the gift would seem to have earned them. That it hasn’t is the story’s heartbreak.But France is hardly the whole story, as Harmon shows us in alternating scenes set in the mid-1940s. Somehow left untouched by the German occupation of Paris, Marcelle’s great-grandparents Irma and Adolphe Salomon (Nancy Robinette and Daniel Oreskes) await word of the fate of their family at the end of the war. Soon, their son Lucien (Ari Brand) returns with his son, Pierre (Ethan Haberfield) — the old man of the later scenes but then just 15. Both father and son are obviously traumatized by their time in Auschwitz. And where is everyone else?You can probably guess. But if the scenes from the earlier period lend pathos to the later one, with which they frequently interpenetrate, little flows back from the later to the earlier. The 1940s material is sad but dutiful. Similarly, three characters who take up a lot of the play’s energy in the 2010s do not actually contribute much to its central conflict. One is Marcelle’s brother, Patrick (Anthony Edwards): aggressively atheistic, disdainful of Sabbaths and seders, nasty without apparent cause except to provide cover for his otherwise contextless presence as the narrator.Ranson, left, and Benhamou clash over their opposing views about Israel.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSlightly more integrated, and much more entertaining, is Marcelle and Charles’s daughter, Elodie (Frances Benhamou), a frequently pajamafied, hilariously logorrheic, self-involved know-it-all riding out the tail end of a two-year manic-depressive episode. (If you saw Harmon’s 2012 play, “Bad Jews,” she’ll remind you of Daphna Feygenbaum, an early version of the type.) Her punching bag is Molly (Molly Ranson), a distant cousin who visits Paris during her college year abroad. Both Marcelle and Elodie lay into Molly constantly, as if her naïveté, which they attribute to her being a pampered American, were a crime against Judaism.Though Ranson makes as good a case on Molly’s behalf as the script will allow — she played the object of Daphna’s fury in “Bad Jews,” so she knows the territory — her conflict with the Benhamou women, like her budding romance with dreamy Daniel, is a loose end and a diversion: a season-two development in a one-season story. She is, at least, more likable than the Parisians. Marcelle’s frenzies and Elodie’s diatribes (one lasts a withering 17 minutes) tip the tone into psychiatric cabaret, leaving the antisemitic trauma to jostle for dramatic space with the garden-variety antisocial kind, eventually to be overwhelmed by it.Is it Harmon’s point that “bad” Jews like the Salomons in the 2010s, perhaps made neurotic in the first place by antisemitism, have as much right to the protection of their homeland as unimpeachably “good” ones, like their forebears in the 1940s? In any case, a right to our attention is a different matter, especially as the characters’ fiercely defended opinions grow repetitive and perseverative — and then flip radically, without apparent motivation. By the third act, the arguments have stripped their gears completely, and the play ends in sentimental exhaustion.That exhaustion is one of the few elements of naturalism (to be a Jew is to be morally exhausted) in a mostly expressionistic production. Like many Cromer stagings, “Prayer for the French Republic” is richly and darkly lit (in this case by Amith Chandrashaker) and moves among periods and locations with exquisite smoothness on tracks and turntables (sets by Takeshi Kata). The original music, by Daniel Kluger, sounds like Jewish memory, led by the cheerful-baleful tang of a clarinet.But like Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” “Prayer for the French Republic” (its title the name of a blessing recited in French synagogues for 200 years) gets lost in its central question: How can Jews know if it’s time to leave yet another home, in a history of hundreds, where they think they are safe but may soon find out otherwise? The prayer that they might not have to leave at all — the prayer for the end of antisemitism itself — has not been answered yet.Prayer for the French RepublicThrough Feb. 18 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes. More