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      ‘United States v. Gupta’ Review: Father’s Trial, Daughter’s Song

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      Deepali Gupta offers a meandering and muddled take on the trial of Rajat Gupta, a former head of McKinsey & Company.“The problem with exposition is, why would you want a map when you’re trying to get lost?” asks Deepali Gupta near the start of “United States v. Gupta.”Lost is certainly how one feels at several points of this meandering production about the trial and conviction for insider trading of Rajat Gupta — Deepali’s father and a former head of the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Over the course of its three hours, what is billed as a “musical tragedy” attempts to use Rajat’s trial as a dramatic trampoline for other topics: Deepali’s involuntary commitment in a psychiatric ward, the legacy of her grandfather (a freedom fighter and journalist), and the biases of business reporters.Confusion is immediately sown when Deepali tells us, by way of introduction, “I am writing a play, and I am making an appeal. The appeal is a play. I am appealing to your humanity. I am appealing to you. I am trying to make your humanity seem appealing.” The last line throws us back on our heels: Why is it our humanity that needs to be upholstered into something appealing?This question is never answered. And confusion reigns throughout the performance. Though based on an actual trial, characters’ identities are collapsed or otherwise destabilized. Arti Gollapudi plays all three of Deepali’s older sisters, for example, differing mainly by degrees of uptightness. To further complicate matters, Deepali addresses each of them as “Didi,” an honorific of endearment, so that it’s impossible to tell exactly which sister she’s seated next to while they watch their father’s trial.As the musical lurches from topic to topic — the show, directed by Caitlin Sullivan, is seasick with non sequiturs — it continually defers judgment about her father. It ends on the biggest unresolved question of all: whether Rajat Gupta was “a good man.” The jury has by then made its decision, but Deepali, a songwriter and performance artist, primes us to reconsider. When she sings, about a map of India, “how malleable are our borders, how permeable are our boundaries,” she could by hymning the boundary-free nature of not just her own existence, but her father’s, encouraging us to see him as a fallible being.Genre-wise, the play is also at war with itself. Despite its billing as a musical tragedy, it struggles to become either of those things. None of the tunes stuck out as particularly memorable, and many could be safely excised, including a nonsensical duet about SweeTarts sung by Deepali and one of her sisters.The inclination of “Gupta” toward digression merely distracts from the main point, which becomes increasingly muddled as the work inches along. By the end, the show is stuck somewhere between takedown and tribute, between reflecting on what a daughter stands to inherit from her father’s convictions, in both senses of the word, and ceding space to the patriarch to tell his own story. “Gupta” would have benefited, no question, from a map, but even more from a compass.United States v. GuptaThrough Nov. 28 at Jack, Brooklyn; jackny.org. Running time: 3 hours.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      Danielle Brooks and Sam Jay on Confidence and ‘The Color Purple’

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      Two creative people in two different fields in one wide-ranging conversation. This time: the actress and the comedian.Viewers first saw the actress Danielle Brooks as Taystee, the smartest and funniest of the prisoners on “Orange Is the New Black,” the incarceration dramedy that began in 2013 and ran for seven seasons on Netflix. This month, she’ll appear in “The Color Purple,” the second film adaptation of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, this one based on the 2005 Broadway musical it inspired. Brooks’s character, Sofia, forced to work a grueling job as a maid for a white political family in early 1900s Georgia, was portrayed by Oprah Winfrey in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation; Brooks, 34, a Juilliard School-trained actress who was raised in South Carolina, played her in the musical’s 2015 revival. That production was Brooks’s Broadway debut; last year, she starred alongside Samuel L. Jackson in a revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” (1990).The comedian Sam Jay, who grew up in Boston and whose humor Brooks has long admired, recently released her first HBO special, “Salute Me or Shoot Me.” Jay, 41, spent years doing stand-up in Los Angeles before joining the writers’ room of “Saturday Night Live” in 2017. She left the show after three seasons for two series, “Pause With Sam Jay” (2021) and “Bust Down” (2022), both of which she helped create and starred in, and which highlight her frank, anecdotal style. This past October, the two gathered in a photo studio in downtown Manhattan to discuss acting, impostor syndrome and learning the importance of asking for what they need.T: Many stage shows that perform well are rumored to get adaptations that never materialize — but this one did, and quickly. Is that just the power of the film’s producer Oprah Winfrey?Danielle Brooks: I think for Oprah it’s making sure the story continues to have a life — that it lives through generations.Sam Jay: You shot in Georgia, right? I always wonder about Black people shooting these period films where they have to go back to being downtrodden, sweaty Black. How do you snap out of that and then just, like, go chill at Checkers?D.B.: It was tough but at times cool because you’re in it. It’s the difference between doing it on a stage versus on an actual plantation. It did get real at times: All I could think about was how many of my people were hung from those trees. I had the responsibility of making sure I told this very beloved story as honestly as I could to represent those people who aren’t here.Brooks and Corey Hawkins in the forthcoming film adaptation of “The Color Purple.”Eli Ade/Waner Bros.S.J.: Are they going to let the main characters Shug and Celie be gayer? Because they’re gay as hell in the book, and they really skipped over that in the first movie. When I read the book … it wasn’t just some crush; they were together.D.B.: You’re going to be satisfied. You get that, which I was happy about.S.J.: I feel like that was a part of the story Walker was trying to tell.D.B.: I got to meet her on set, and my close friend Corey Hawkins, who plays Harpo [Sofia’s husband], took a video of it, which was great because for me it starts with her. My whole pop-off — my Broadway career — started through her book.S.J.: These Broadway runs. …D.B.: It’s crazy. I imagine there was a lot of preparation before doing your HBO special, though, too. Do you remember how many shows you did before that?S.J.: I did somewhere around 300 shows for a year and a half. I was maybe three or four months into touring when I bumped into Chris Rock. We had dinner and he was like, “I don’t do less than 250 shows before filming.” So I immediately called my agent and got more on the books. Then I’m feeling myself because I’m, like, 20 shows away from my 250 and Chris goes, “Yeah, 50 more shows. I’m not telling you to do anything I wouldn’t do!” But I watch that special now and think, “Ah, growth.”D.B.: That’s how I feel with “The Color Purple.” When I did the Broadway show, I had so much anxiety and was going to therapy because I felt like an impostor. Cut to five years later, doing the movie, I felt such comfort. I might have done 500 shows, now that I think about it. One year, eight shows a week — someone do the math — but I felt more confident, worthy enough to portray this character.S.J.: Confidence, I’ve come to feel, is just knowledge. The more information you have, the more confident you are. When I look at my special, I can tell I was free.D.B.: I always thought you were free, every time I’ve watched you. I’m pretty picky about comedians; I don’t laugh at a lot of stuff. I’m the person in the audience the comedians make fun of, like, “Look at this bitch not laughing,” and then I’m still not laughing.S.J.: I think only you know what you’re hiding. In real life, I’m very silly and physical when I’m talking but, for some reason, when I’m onstage, I’m like, “You ain’t no clown! You don’t need to be doing all that flailing around.” It’s dumb because it’s comedy, but it was really me just being afraid to let that side out.D.B.: Did you ever feel, when you were starting out, that there was a comedian you wanted to style yourself to be like?Jay’s 2023 HBO special, “Salute Me or Shoot Me.” Courtesy of HBOS.J.: I don’t think I wanted to be like anyone, but you get ideas from others. Chris Rock was the first comic I saw who made sense to me. I grew up in a “Def Comedy Jam” era, with Black and white comedy being very separate. I love that era, but that’s not how my brain works. I’m not good at roasting. I’d seen George Carlin, too, and that seemed very white. But Chris was this hybrid I thought was cool.D.B.: I feel like some people won’t give you the real — where you think, “I can’t believe they just said that” — but also make you examine why you think the way you do. That’s so important in any medium, and the point of what we do, so we can see ourselves. Comedy’s always been that easier pill to swallow, for the truth. So when somebody can do that, not just make you laugh but question why you think about, you know, disabled people in some way, or why you don’t like to use the N-word, I find it important. What I’ve always enjoyed is that you don’t hold back. In a way, I can be guarded, but you’re very, “No, let’s talk about it.”S.J.: It comes from a kind of twisted place of my mom passing away [in 1998, from lupus] and me accepting the idea of mortality, that you don’t live forever. I moved out when I was 16 — I’ve had no parent longer than I’ve had a parent. I sometimes don’t remember my mother’s face, but I remember how she made me feel. That’s all that remains. I remember the lessons she taught. So it’s just about trying to be intentional in every interaction.D.B.: I think that’s the same for me … being more guarded because my mother is a minister. She’s very much, “Be careful what you do; what you say is going to affect you till you die.” I love my mom, I respect her 100 percent, but I have to live for me because it’s my life. But I want to hear about your experience booking “S.N.L.” I want to be on that show so bad!S.J.: I get this call from my manager, “Will you audition for ‘S.N.L.’ tomorrow?” I’m like, “Do they really want me? I’m not doing a character.” I didn’t want to set myself up for failure. I audition, then get a call saying, “We know you auditioned for the cast but how would you like to come be a writer?” I hang up and I’m like, “Damn, OK, too ugly for TV.” But I needed to step into something new at that point in my career. I’m all about going toward things that you’re afraid of, so I said yeah.Brooks (center) as Sofia in the 2015 Broadway revival of “The Color Purple.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesD.B.: Do you ask for what you need when you’re doing a show, or do you settle a bit?S.J.: I’m going to ask for what I need.D.B.: I think about a lot of women in comedy who aren’t matching up to what men are making or getting, in terms of perks. It’s just not happening. I was watching Luenell’s comedy show, and she was talking about being on a plane with comedians, and the men are flying first class and she’s in coach.S.J.: At first, I was absolutely scared to ask. I didn’t know what was OK.D.B.: You do have a core group of people that you can go to where you can say, “Let’s be real: How much do you make on this?”S.J.: I wish it was stronger, but I do feel like I got a couple of people where we try to be pretty transparent about that stuff. That’s the age-old trick where you have a 9-to-5 and they’re like, “You guys aren’t allowed to talk about this.” And it’s like, “Yeah, so you can keep us all poor.”D.B.: That’s been one of the best parts of having a friend group in the industry, our transparency. We’re not gonna brag about our contracts, but if you want to know, we’ll lay it out so we can come up together. You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s what drives me crazy: when you find out someone had a personal chef or a trainer, and you’re like, “Nobody told me that was a possibility, and I needed it more than they did.”S.J.: I think working behind the scenes, working on “S.N.L.,” knowing the lengths they’ll go to make sure the talent is OK, now when I’m being the talent, I’m like, “Do that for me.” It sometimes feels bitchy, but that’s just a stigma in our heads as women.D.B.: There are a lot of ways we should be given more respect. I think about hair and makeup: Why is it so much to ask for someone who can actually do my hair, rather than teaching somebody to do it? And why is it so wrong to ask for somebody who can do my face rather than having to come to them with the products I use?S.J.: The ask, at its core, is coming from a place of having to build up the confidence to do this work. That’s the thing that gets misconstrued when Black people say they want Black people in these spaces. The reverse racism crowd sees that as wanting everything to be all Black, when, no, it’s because we know we need this stuff.D.B.: I don’t want to go to a costume fitting and have to give them a list of shops and places to get my clothes. On “The Color Purple,” our hair and makeup departments were phenomenal — the wigs matched; the lace was lacing.S.J.: You know “The Color Purple” is coming correct.T: How do you work comedy into your performance of Sofia, who’s one of the most visibly oppressed, but also most joyous, characters in the film?D.B.: Sometimes, when people go through so much, they don’t want to dwell on that; they’re longing for joy and laughter. She’s somebody who tries to stop generational curses, whether that be through an abusive marriage or abusive parents. She’s trying to bring her community to the right path. She might not have all the skills to do so — she might use her fists or her mouth — but, at her core, she’s not looking for a fight. She’s looking to have a great day.This interview has been edited and condensed.Danielle Brooks: Fashion: ObyDezign. Hair: Tish Celestine at La Belle Boutique, NYC. Makeup: Renee Sanganoo using Nars at the Only AgencySam Jay: Hair and makeup: Merrell Hollis More

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      Qui Nguyen Was Done Writing Plays. His Family Pulled Him Back In.

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      With “Poor Yella Rednecks,” the writer continues to tell his Vietnamese American family’s immigrant story. Maybe one day his parents will even see the shows.Eight years ago, Qui Nguyen was at a low point. “I decided that my writing life had not amounted to much, and I felt I needed to concentrate on my family and my kids,” he said during a recent video conversation. “I was going to hang it up.” The new play he was working on, he added, was “a sort of swan song.”That play, “Vietgone,” was indeed a turning point for Nguyen. Because — plot twist! — it was a hit.Inspired by Nguyen’s parents, Quang and Tong, and their burgeoning relationship as Vietnamese immigrants in Arkansas in the mid-1970s, the play premiered at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif., in October 2015 and ran at Manhattan Theater Club the next fall. Since then, “Vietgone” has been produced all over North America.Around the time of the show’s early success, Nguyen moved to Los Angeles from New York, landing jobs at Marvel Studios and Disney, for which he co-wrote “Raya and the Last Dragon,” and wrote and co-directed “Strange World.” (He still works as a screenwriter and director for Disney in Los Angeles.)He has since revisited the story of his parents, and his irrepressible grandmother Huong, in “Poor Yella Rednecks,” which is running through Dec. 3 at Manhattan Theater Club. (It premiered at South Coast in 2019.) “Everyone’s like, ‘It’s a follow-up,’ but I own the fact that it’s a sequel,” Nguyen said, laughing.Ben Levin and Maureen Sebastian as Nguyen’s parents in “Poor Yella Rednecks” at Manhattan Theater Club, where it is scheduled to run through Dec. 3.Richard Termine for The New York TimesSet in 1980, the family saga picks up with Tong and Quang (played by Maureen Sebastian and Ben Levin) hitting a rough patch. “It’s their second love story, kind of something I had to go through with my own wife,” Nguyen said, adding that he has been commissioned to write a third installment, and that he hopes to eventually have five plays in the cycle.“I was convinced to not put ‘Vietgone 2’ on this one because people would be intimidated that they didn’t see the first one,” he said. “But in all honesty it’s ‘Vietgone 1,’ ‘Vietgone 2,’ ‘Vietgone 3,’ ‘4’ and ‘5.’” (Newcomers can rest assured that “Poor Yella Rednecks” works perfectly fine as a stand-alone.)“He’s taken probably the darkest moments of his parents’ marriage and turned them into beautifully comic scenes,” the director May Adrales said on the phone. “And I know he’s taken some from his own personal life and his own relationships,” she continued, adding that he “took some of those scenarios and would write a romantic-comedy version. That is why it’s so personal, but also it just demonstrates his own genius of craft to create that distance.”Nguyen’s distinctive style is marked by fluency in various emotional tones and pop-cultural vernaculars. As Adrales sees it, Nguyen is “taking a genre that’s very American, the immigrant story, and I feel like he’s completely renewed it.”In his review for The New York Times, Naveen Kumar described “Poor Yella Rednecks” as an “expletive-filled fusion of hip-hop and martial arts with the soapy twists and turns of addictive serial television.” (This summer Nguyen was featured in the PBS documentary series “Southern Storytellers” alongside the likes of Jesmyn Ward, Mary Steenburgen, Lyle Lovett and Jericho Brown.)“I think that often when people think of Asian American artists, you expect everyone to wear a lot of red and talk about dragons and pray to Buddha statues,” Nguyen said. “When I grew up, it was also about ‘Spider-Man’ and hip-hop, and those things that grew out of the ’80s and ’90s that were part of my childhood.” (Nguyen, who is 47, gives his age as “old enough to remember a time before cellphones.”)All of those influences were evident in the kapow-boom-blam! spectacles Nguyen wrote throughout the 2000s for the New York-based company Vampire Cowboys. (It’s the rare, if not only, theater group to have had a booth at Comic Con.)“He writes these insane fever dreams,” said Sebastian, whose previous Nguyen roles include a badass Shakespearean heroine in “Living Dead in Denmark” (2006), a space pilot in “Fight Girl Battle World” (2008) and a postapocalyptic warrior in “Soul Samurai” (2009). “You’re reading it on the page and you’re like, ‘There’s no possibility that this is stageable.’”She continued: “It’s such a testament to his belief in the ability of theater and in all of these people he is collecting as his artistic family and community.”Nguyen was a co-writer of the 2021 Disney film “Raya and the Last Dragon.”Disney +, via Associated PressHis 2011 play “She Kills Monsters” debuted at the Flea Theater in Manhattan, and is performed regularly in high schools and colleges.Joan MarcusIf one thing ties together Nguyen’s life and work, it’s a predilection for natural and chosen families. For starters, he remains loyal to his collaborators, working regularly with the same actors. Not only have Sebastian, Quan, Jon Hoche and Paco Tolson appeared in both “Vietgone” and “Poor Yella Rednecks,” but Adrales has also directed both stagings.When asked for an example that she felt illustrated her relationship with Nguyen, Sebastian recalled the time when she had to pull out of the New York production of “Vietgone” for personal and professional reasons. Nguyen was supportive. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about me or this show,’” Sebastian wrote me in a follow-up text message. “‘All I want is for you to have the life that makes you happy, to have your career and your family grow, for all your dreams to come true.’ And here we are today, still making art, still full of love and respect and admiration for one another. Still each other’s ride or die.”This loyalty and generosity of spirit are also reflected in the diversity found in his work, in which he allocates powerhouse leading roles to those too often relegated to supporting or sidekick status in the theater, be they women, people of color, queer folks or Dungeons & Dragons-loving geeks. All of them drive his play “She Kills Monsters,” which has become a perennial favorite in high schools and colleges in the years since its premiere in 2011.That popularity did not prevent “She Kills Monsters” from getting caught up in the culture wars roiling schools, with a planned production in Tennessee canceled because of its gay content. Nguyen sounded a little baffled by the kerfuffle. “It’s a play about connection and finding connection, and yet people are trying to create ways to create division out of it,” he said. “It’s definitely a weird time.”The need to connect continues to inspire him, including with the very people who gave him the prime material for the “Vietgone” project: his parents — who still haven’t seen or read the plays. “They don’t know if they were emotionally ready to tackle those things again,” Nguyen said. “But they’re so happy that those stories are out there, because they know that the reason I wrote them is for my kids, my nieces, and for kids that are like them.”Now that his parents are too old to easily leave Arkansas, where they still live, Nguyen has thought of a way to return the stories where they started, via a documentary, “The Family Vietgone,” that he and his younger brother have been working on. “I can make a movie,” he said, “and bring it to them and go, ‘Look — this is what I made.’” More

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      ‘Arcadia’ Review: Artistic Ambition Gets Thrown Into Chaos

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      Bedlam’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s time-traveling mind-bender of a play is a meditation on uncertainty.If even commonplace matters of everyday life — weather, traffic, disease — can defy scientific expectations, what hope could there be in predicting human behavior? With “Arcadia,” his 1993 play, Tom Stoppard set out to explore the science of this uncertainty and how it can disrupt our understanding of history. A new staging presented by Bedlam makes a valiant effort to adapt Stoppard’s cerebral probes into chaos theory, Newtonian law, thermodynamics and metaphysics for a 2023 audience, but the result is a muddled one. And that may just demonstrate Stoppard’s frustrating but brilliant point.Act 1 introduces us to the play’s complicated narrative mechanics, as we jump back and forth between the Regency Period of the early 1800s and the early 1990s. The staging of the 1990s years feels even closer to our own when two primary characters — the independent-minded author Hannah (Zuzanna Szadkowski) and one of her love interests, the logic-driven mathematician Valentine (Mike Labbadia) — pull out smartphones and sleek laptops.Stoppard sets the play in Derbyshire, a county in the East Midlands of England, but Eric Tucker, the director, has his actors drop the British accents. So when Hannah and Valentine enter an academic arms race with a smarmy Byron scholar named Bernard (Ian Zafir) who values poetry above all other subjects, they spew hard consonants and short vowels. The North American Englishness of it all makes it slightly easier to hold on to Stoppard’s words.Even in a space as physically intimate as the West End Theater (located on the second floor of a century-old church, which provides an aptly haunting atmosphere), the production feels cold, caught up in its own profundity at the expense of our comprehension. The Bedlam company’s acting is void of real thrill so the bits of Stoppard’s playful wordplay and humor we do catch fall flat in both centuries.There are two exceptions: the luminous Caroline Grogan as Thomasina, a preternaturally wise student, and the stormy Shaun Taylor-Corbett as Septimus, her tenacious tutor. Together, they find themselves on the brink of a major discovery that Valentine will investigate in the 1990s. The pair find a seductive chemistry that blossoms as Septimus opens Thomasina’s mind to entropic (and erotic) possibilities.In Act 2, the eras blur. Timelines that were previously distinct are now stacked on top of one another. After intermission, we’re ushered back into the theater only to discover that Tucker has brazenly swapped the actors’ playing area for our seating area. By doing so, Tucker fulfills Bedlam’s mission statement to “reinvigorate traditional forms” and “collapse aesthetic distance.” But he’s also honoring one of Stoppard’s main provocations — that the unknowability of the past meets the unknowability of the here and now.ArcadiaThrough Dec. 23 at the West End Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      Big Apple Circus Review: A Show That Bends Over Backward for You

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      The extraordinary within the everyday: A holiday season rite returns with aerialists, trapeze acts, funny clowns (really!) and cotton candy too.If confetti supplies have plummeted, if a spangle shortage now afflicts Manhattan, blame a tent at the southwestern corner of Lincoln Center. Yes, the Big Apple Circus has returned and for a little over a month New York will glimmer more brightly.In recent years, a return has been less certain. In 2016, after operating as a nonprofit for nearly 40 years, the original outfit shut down and filed for bankruptcy. An affiliate of a corporate restructuring firm bought it in 2017, then switched out its management and character several times. In 2021, it was sold again, to a corporation that counts the famed aerialist Nik Wallenda as a minority owner, and became a bit more death-defying.The German troupe Circus Theater Roncalli has given up using live animals but in one routine three performers pretended to be trained polar bears.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThis season, Big Apple has imported the German troupe Circus Theater Roncalli, which is mostly a cause for rejoicing. Roncalli stands as a skillful and endearing example of the form, a company steeped in circus classics, yet capable in most if not all ways, of moving with the times.It is sad that New York can no longer support a circus of its own and that Big Apple has become an intellectual property asset rather than a group enmeshed in the life of the city. But there’s nothing like an aerial balance act — or two, as is the case in “Circus Theater Roncalli: Journey to the Rainbow” — to make audiences forget all of that. Besides, this is New York. Who is from here anyway? Call it sequin diplomacy.Last weekend the mood in the tent was giddy and rapturous, with the younger spectators revved up on cotton candy and the older ones excited perhaps by the sight of at least four prestige TV stars sitting near the ring. A clown meandered amid the rows as an orchestra played frisky versions of classical and popular songs.Iryna Galenchyk’s aerial act with her partner is a wonder of strength and grace.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThe Roncalli company is steeped in circus classics, with acts like the Kirichenko acrobatic group.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThe show proper opens with Noel Aguilar’s fizzy juggling act, which began with batons and continued with Ping-Pong balls. (Ever caught a kernel of popcorn in your mouth? Imagine that, but in time to the music.) The finale involved straw hats, thrown like Frisbees. Aguilar dropped the odd baton and missed the occasional hat, which made the routine more impressive, because it showed what it took to excel.He ceded the stage to Andrey Romanovsky’s rubber leg contortionist act, in which Romanovsky skipped rope while bent over backward. He was replaced by a tightrope walker (the tightropes were, thankfully, near to the ground) and then by an acrobatics act in which the performers were dressed like members of Marie Antoinette’s court. They gave way to Iryna Galenchyk and Vladyslav Drobinko, whose romantic paired aerial act is a wonder of strength and grace. Throughout there were appearances by four clowns, all of whom were legitimately funny, a circus rarity. One, Paquin Jr., had great success with a routine that may have sacrificed a Cabbage Patch doll.The gift of the circus, wherever it’s from, our critic writes, is that it gives a glimpse of the extraordinary within the everyday.Ye Fan for The New York TimesRoncalli has given up using live animals (a sensible and respectable choice for any circus, though I do miss the Big Apple’s former dog and cat acts). But the second half began with a puzzling routine in which three performers in fur suits pretended to be trained polar bears. This was followed by a bicycle act and a sequence in which three gold-painted performers balanced atop one another, like statues come to life. No less singular, if much more hectic, was Emma Phillips’s foot juggling routine, in which she made an end table and a couple of antimacassars revolve atop her toes. A steampunk bubble routine delighted the children; a trapeze act, featuring Christoph Gobet and Julian Kaiser balancing, impossibly, foot to foot, made their mothers gasp.This is the gift of the circus, wherever it’s from: a glimpse of the extraordinary within the everyday, a vision of what time, tenacity and a heedless approach to muscle strain can achieve. And cotton candy, too? What glitter. What joy.Big Apple CircusThrough Jan. 1 at Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center, Manhattan; bigapplecircus.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Spamalot’ Review: You’ll Laugh in Its General Direction

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      In the first Broadway revival of the Monty Python musical, the old bits are verbatim but the clowns are running the circus.Even the coconuts get entrance applause.If you’ve seen “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the 1975 movie spoof of all things Arthurian and many things not, you know the coconuts I mean. And if you’re enough of a Python fan to have also seen “Spamalot,” the 2005 Broadway musical “lovingly ripped off” from the film, you’ve probably memorized the whole bit. That’s the one in which Arthur’s trusted patsy, Patsy, slaps coconut halves together so the deluded king can pretend he has a horse. Call it a filly à deux.But the coconuts, whether or not they came to medieval England strung between two migratory African swallows, have stiff competition for beloved silliness in the blissful Broadway revival of “Spamalot” that opened on Thursday at the St. James Theater. They are by no means the only old favorites greeted with entrance applause. Among many others, so are a troupe of self-flagellating monks, a cart of corpses, a vulgar French taunter and a Trojan rabbit.This is the problem, and I suppose the glory, of a property (or should I say a shrubbery) like “Spamalot,” by Eric Idle of the original troupe and the composer John Du Prez. Drilled deep into the culture through thousands of collegiate viewings, many of those viewings enhanced by once-illegal substances, the loosely assembled collection of skits has become holy writ, not to be messed with. If a production dared to change anything, it would surely face an audience of originalists screaming “ni!” — though to be fair, it faces them anyway, as “Spamalot” has become a kind of Python karaoke.So what’s a revival to do?This one, directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, gives the “ni”-sayers what they want. As far as I can tell, the best original bits are all preserved verbatim.Also preserved, obviously, is what passes for the plot, in which Arthur (James Monroe Iglehart) mucks about England with Patsy (Christopher Fitzgerald) in search of knights to sit at the “very round” table. Yet before the assembled half-wits can fully enjoy the Las Vegas floor show that is Camelot, God (Steve Martin in an uncredited voice-over) commands them to stop their tap dancing and shove off in search of the holy grail. Not everyone is impressed. “If God is all-knowing,” says the not-so-brave Sir Robin, who may be looking to avoid personal bloodshed, “surely He must know where it is.”Though uttering the same lines as Idle did in the movie, and as David Hyde Pierce did in the 2005 production, Michael Urie as Robin puts a differently delightful comic spin on them. Throughout, Rhodes has encouraged the cast to personalize the material and, in many cases, enhance it. Taran Killam, expert as Lancelot and several of the quirkiest supporting characters, gives the French taunter not only the requisite outrageous accent but also a raspberry aria worthy of Mozart. In turn, when he sneers “I blow my nose at you, so-called Arthur-king, you and all your silly English knnnniggets,” Arthur and Sir Galahad (Nik Walker) do a brilliant triple take — they are Black.In some hilarious head space between Liza Minnelli and Celine Dion, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, as the Lady of the Lake, essentially steals the show as she scats, belts and mutters private thoughts.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLetting the clowns run the flying circus, at least part-time, is integral to the history of Python’s success. (Idle told The Times that the material survives because “it was written by its actors and acted by its writers.”) It is also a smart move for a show that could otherwise feel calcified; a production I saw at the Stratford Festival over the summer seemed more like an animatronic museum exhibit, making me doubt it was really revivable.And even this mostly excellent production betrays a faint odor of mothballs, especially in the projection-heavy scenic design of Paul Tate dePoo III, so dependent on the feel of Terry Gilliam’s original animations. The key to the comedy is not after all replication but individuation. The Pythons were each their own kind of oddball, and the bits are only funny with fresh bite.Another humor helper is authenticity. When Lancelot (who likes to dance a lot) comes to the rescue of a damsel in distress, and that damsel turns out to be a dopey prince named Herbert (Ethan Slater), the comics calibrate the exact middle point between snark and sincerity. (“Just think, Herbert,” says Lance as they kiss, “in a thousand years’ time this will still be controversial.”) The drag bits are likewise laughable yet honorable, as when Galahad’s blowzy mother, Mrs. Galahad (Jimmy Smagula), the recent widow of Nobby the Cretin, stands up proudly to Arthur: “I didn’t vote for you.” Equal-opportunity offensiveness — to gays, Jews, French, Finns and every kind of Briton — makes the show inoffensive to all.Unless, that is, you are very sensitive about your addled divas in sparkly gowns. Among a cast of performers unafraid to chew scenery, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, as the Lady of the Lake, that “watery tart” who “lobbed a scimitar” at Arthur, is the top masticator. In some hilarious head space between Liza Minnelli and Celine Dion, scatting, belting and muttering private thoughts — including, on the night I saw it, ad-libs about Patti LuPone and Ozempic — she essentially steals the show despite her frequent absences from it. The first line of her big second-act number is “Whatever happened to my part?”The revival leans into such meta-moments, which lean away from the movie and into a wonderland of Broadway self-reference. (Another snake-eating-its-tail song is “The Song That Goes Like This.”) Rhodes knows how to build these beautifully; they take off like roman candles. (Shield your eyes from the brightness of Cory Pattak’s lights and the dazzle of Jen Caprio’s costumes.) And if too many of the big numbers hit the same notes of too-muchness, Rhodes also lands the quiet ones gently, including “I’m All Alone,” in which Arthur laments his solitude while poor Patsy, fulfilling his name, stands next to him singing backup.For all its nostalgia value, and its endless verbal invention, “Spamalot,” like “Holy Grail,” and like the television series that spawned them both, has a very vexed soul. Taunters are angry, the taunted suffer, royals trace their authority to “some moistened bint” and God sends horseless knights to locate misplaced cups. It’s not a nice world out there in the Middle Ages — or ours. Luckily, vexations are evergreen if given half a chance, and, at least on Broadway, are assuageable. Just remember to always look on the bright side of life. And that supposedly harmless bunnies aren’t.SpamalotAt the St. James Theater, Manhattan; spamalotthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Park Avenue Armory Will Host ‘Illinoise’ and ‘Indra’s Net’ in 2024

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      The Armory’s upcoming season also includes the North American premiere of ‘Inside Light.’The Park Avenue Armory announced its 2024 season on Thursday, including the New York City arrival of “Illinoise,” a dance-theater work based on a Sufjan Stevens album and staged by Justin Peck, and the North American premiere of “Indra’s Net,” an immersive installation performance inspired by a Buddhist story and created by the interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk.Rebecca Robertson, the founding president and executive producer of Park Avenue Armory, said the season of performances would provide audiences with opportunities to explore themes of interdependence and spirituality.“It’s a special journey about joy, contemplation and spiritual exploration,” Robertson said.“Illinoise,” which will run for several weeks starting March 2, is an adaptation of Stevens’s 2005 concept album “Illinois,” leading the audience through the American heartland from campfire storytelling to the edge of the cosmos. This music-theater production, adapted by Peck and the Pulitzer-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, will feature new arrangements by the composer and pianist Timo Andres.Performances of “Indra’s Net,” featuring Monk’s vocal ensemble, as well as a 16-piece chamber orchestra and an eight-member chorus, will start on Sept. 23. The work draws on music, movement and architecture to tell a tale of interconnectedness and interdependence inspired by an ancient Buddhist and Hindu legend in which an enlightened king stretches a net across the universe, placing a jewel at each intersection.The Armory’s season will also include the North American premiere of “Inside Light,” in which Kathinka Pasveer, director of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music, performs five electronic compositions from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 29-hour opera cycle “Licht.” The performance, which opens on June 5, was conceived specifically for the Armory and will include lasers and a high-definition video projection.In addition to those performances, the Armory’s upcoming season includes:The world premiere of “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful,” from the choreographer Kyle Abraham, with digital design by Cao Yuxi and a score composed and performed live by yMusic.The North American premiere of “R.O.S.E,” a homage to club culture by the choreographer Sharon Eyal that is directed by Gai Behar and Caius Pawson.“Shall We Gather at the River,” a musical call to climate action that weaves together Bach cantatas and Black American spirituals. It will be staged by the director Peter Sellars and performed by the Oxford Bach Soloists and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street. More

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      ‘How to Dance in Ohio’: A Story About Autism and Connection

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      In a first for Broadway, openly autistic actors are playing the autistic characters in this new musical about a doctor helping neurodiverse clients.To get to Amigo Family Counseling, I walked down beige hallways on the first floor of a building in a ho-hum Columbus, Ohio, office park a short walk from a Bob Evans restaurant.The center’s clinical director, Dr. Emilio Amigo, waved at me once I got inside. Behind a closed door I heard the voices of his clients — autistic young adults from mostly working- and middle-class central Ohio families — boisterously chatting about their Friday night plans.I was there to talk about “How to Dance in Ohio,” a new Broadway musical that features Dr. Amigo and seven of his autistic clients as characters. The show — pop in score and sensibility — is based on Alexandra Shiva’s 2015 documentary, which follows Dr. Amigo and many more of his clients as they navigate life and eagerly, but anxiously, prepare for a spring formal. (The musical is in previews at the Belasco Theater in Manhattan, where it is scheduled to open on Dec. 10. The documentary is on Max.)In a room filled with board games and framed illustrations of rainbow-bright robots, I met Tommy Van Atta. I asked him to tell me what it was like to be in the documentary and now be a character in a musical adaptation. Van Atta, 28, who has the frame of a linebacker, paused for a few seconds, then spoke softly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More