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      In ‘Food,’ Geoff Sobelle Explores the Extremes of Eating

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      “I don’t want to tell people what to think,” the performance artist said of his latest show. “I just hope it tickles them and their curiosity.”It was a little before 6:30 on a recent weeknight, and the kitchen in Geoff Sobelle’s West Village home was in chaos. Two toddlers zoomed around on a ride-on truck and begged him to read from an “Alice in Wonderland” pop-up book. “In a minute,” Sobelle told his son as he stirred artichokes that were simmering on the stove. All the while, he talked to a reporter about his solo show, “Food,” which is running as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival through Nov. 18.“This is like a three-ring circus,” Sobelle, 47, said. He had invited me over for dinner with his family — his wife, Sophie Bortolussi, a longtime “Sleep No More” performer; and his two children, Louise, 4, and Elliott, 2 — or, as he wrote in an email, “my chaotic household as I try to get two toddlers to eat.”“It’s INSANE,” he’d added.Sobelle’s nightly domestic juggling act is akin to the intertwining, overlapping and colliding threads of audience participation, sleight-of-hand and physical comedy in “Food,” a plotless, absurdist “meditation on how and why we eat,” as he described it.During the 90-minute show, which Sobelle created with the magician Steve Cuiffo (“A Simulacrum”) and co-directed with Lee Sunday Evans, he traces the history of food from the days when buffalo roamed to the present. For the first 40 minutes, he embodies a waiter at a fine-dining establishment who takes orders from audience members seated around a massive white-clothed table, making a cherry pie and an apple appear on a silver platter as if by magic.“Food” is a satire of human greed, with Sobelle consuming, among many, many things, what one critic called “a concerning quantity of ranch.”Iain MastertonBut the show quickly devolves into a satire of human greed, with Sobelle consuming, at one previous performance — brace yourself — six apples, a bowl of cherry tomatoes, a bowl of lettuce, what one critic called “a concerning quantity of ranch,” a half-dozen asparagus stalks, five carrots, a raw onion, three bowls of rice, a 22-ounce rib-eye, a baked potato, a bowl of egg yolks, a bottle of wine, a fish, a cherry pie, another bottle of wine, a lit candle, a pack of cigarettes (gulped, not just smoked), four napkins, part of a phone and a few dollar bills.That’s about 9,000 calories in 15 minutes. And he does it twice on Saturdays.“Matinees are seriously rough,” said Sobelle, who performed the show at Arizona State University last month and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August. “I’m definitely still getting used to it.”How can he eat that much? Does he have to train like Joey Chestnut?“It’s like freestyle Olympic eating,” he said, as his wife burst into laughter. “You just have to do it.”That seems to be the theme of Sobelle’s life, whether it’s helping his son realize his dream of dressing up as both a fire truck and a car for Halloween or creating shows that push the boundary between absurd satire and purposeful meaninglessness.“The power of the shows is provoking something in the audience,” he said, “not tying a bow around the subject of food.”“Food” is the third in Sobelle’s series of participatory theater shows exploring the uncommonness of common themes. The first, “The Object Lesson” (2013), examined our relationship to everyday objects, and in the second, “Home” (2017), he raised a house onstage for a meditation on what makes a home; all three premiered at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.Though “we’ve been vegetarian on and off for years,” Sobelle said, he consumes beef in his show. “The character’s not vegetarian.”Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“I knew I wanted to play with the ritual of gathering around a table,” he said about “Food.” “And that lent itself to thinking about fine dining and the spaces where it happens. Especially places like BAM and the Edinburgh International Festival, because they’re kind of fancy.”He enlisted Cuiffo, a friend of more than 20 years whom he has collaborated with on a half-dozen shows, to help him create the magic tricks and physical comedy.“Geoff is really great at going deep on an idea, whether it’s an intellectual idea or a physical theater trick,” Cuiffo said in a recent phone conversation. “He’ll keep going at it until he finds these really funny or magical or poignant moments.”Like all his shows, “Food” is heavy on audience participation. Sobelle asks people to share memories evoked by the wine he serves, or to describe the last recipe they made. He lives for the unpredictability of each performance.“Sometimes it works like a charm, and sometimes I just work hard to make it look like it’s working like a charm, or sometimes it just doesn’t work,” he said. “But that’s the adventure.”Dinner was now ready (“Time to eat!” he called to the kids), and he and Bortolussi spooned roasted carrots, cauliflower and butternut squash into wooden serving bowls, which he ferried over to a table in front of giant mirror.“We’ve been vegetarian on and off for years,” he said. “It’s about sustainability.”But what about the steak that I watched him wolf down during a video recording of the show’s premiere last year?Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“If I’m working, I don’t have to be a vegetarian,” he said. “The character’s not vegetarian.”When he was 16 and living in Los Angeles, he said, he visited a school on a marginal farm in Vershire, Vt., where he harvested food that other students had planted. “That was pretty profound to understand where it was coming from, and that you were part of the process, instead of just going to the supermarket and getting something shrink-wrapped,” he said.But to be clear, he said, his show has no moral message.“I don’t want to tell people what to think,” he said. “I just hope it tickles them and their curiosity, and that it provokes something that they then want to go talk about at the bar or wherever their next destination is.”For the last part of the performance, Sobelle invites the audience to do just that sort of reflection, violently pulling away the tablecloth to reveal a field of dirt, on which he enacts a continuous scene with minimal dialogue that serves as a CliffsNotes of human cultivation and consumption.Absurd physical comedy has become a hallmark of shows created by Sobelle, who abandoned his childhood dream of becoming a doctor and a priest after seeing a production of “Cats” when he was 7 (“I wanted to be Rum Tum Tugger,” he said), to study English at Stanford, where he mounted what he called “experimental, D.I.Y. theater shows.”Sobelle and his wife, Sophie Bortolussi, prepared a meal of vegetables, including artichokes and aioli.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“Even my first experiences in high school with plays, I was more excited by the stuff beyond the script,” he said. “The things that were translated outside of the words, or in addition to the words.”After his freshman year, he spent a year abroad at the famed Jacques Lecoq school in Paris — Geoffrey Rush and Julie Taymor are alums — where he studied physical theater.“That was a real turning point,” said Sobelle, who counts Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton among his influences. “It was all about looking at theater before language.”The aspect of “Food” he enjoys most, he said, is the unpredictability of the performance. Sometimes an audience member eats the cherry pie he has set down. Sometimes a cellphone gets swept away when he removes the tablecloth. Sometimes audience members try to deconstruct the show in their responses to his prompts.“It’s not a play, but a performance,” he said, “one in which the audience plays just as big a role as me.”His son chose that moment to overturn a bowl of aioli, which Bortolussi rushed to mop up. Sobelle handed her a napkin. (“We always do at least one spill,” he said.)“OK,” he called to the kids. “Eating time is swiftly coming to a close.”That was fine with them: Elliott was snapping photos with a toy camera, and Louise was leafing through a French picture book.Sobelle sighed.“You don’t always get a cooperative audience,” he said. More

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      It Is Not Dead Yet! ‘Spamalot’ Returns to Broadway. (Cue the Coconuts.)

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      The Monty Python-inspired show wants to give audiences a reason “to laugh and enjoy and be taken away by this lunacy, in the best way possible.”The terrifying knights still say “Ni!” The dead? Well, they are not quite dead yet. And King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table (not dawn, not dusk, not late afternoon, but knights) still trot around to the sounds of coconuts banging together.All that is to say: “Spamalot” is back on Broadway, and it is still quite silly.The silliness was on display last month during a rehearsal at the Gibney Studios in Manhattan. David Josefsberg, one of the show’s standby actors, was having difficulty staying in character as the incompetent warlock Tim the Enchanter. The scene required him to adopt an outrageous accent to warn the knights about a scary beast, which ends up being a rabbit. (And the rabbit ends up being quite homicidal!) But he couldn’t keep it together as members of the cast and crew giggled while watching from the sides of the room. The giggles were contagious, filling the room throughout the rehearsal, including when the knights had to vary the banging of the coconuts between “trot” and “not trot.”The actors have been breaking character “all the time,” Josh Rhodes, the show’s director and choreographer, said after the rehearsal.“It’s lonely trying to land jokes. It’s a lousy thing to do to repeat it over and over again to a dead room,” Rhodes said. “Right now we’re still crafting it. So you want the energy in the room to still be a little silly.”Rhodes has a personal connection to the show: His husband, Lee Wilkins, was a replacement swing in the original Broadway production, which opened in 2005. They married during the run. As King Arthur, James Monroe Iglehart is among a who’s who of Broadway notables in the cast: “I make a joke all the time that there are two kings on Broadway — Mufasa and me.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor the uninitiated, “Spamalot” is a Monty Python-inspired spoof adapted from that comedy troupe’s 1975 cult film, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” A sendup of King Arthur’s mythical quest for the Holy Grail, the movie was written by and starred the group’s members — John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Graham Chapman and Terry Jones. It was Idle who had the idea to adapt it as a Broadway musical. (“Spam” is a reference to a Python sketch.)Idle wrote the original book and lyrics, and wrote the music with John Du Prez. Mike Nichols directed, and Casey Nicholaw choreographed. It was a smash, winning the Tony Award for best musical and running for nearly four years. In The New York Times, Ben Brantley called the show “resplendently silly” and a “fitful, eager celebration of inanity.”At the time of that initial Broadway run, it had been decades since any truly new Python material — the 1983 film “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life” — and the musical, which has since had productions in the West End and international tours, exposed a new generation to the quintessential British brand of humor. The revival, which opens Nov. 16 at the St. James Theater, is in a similar position. The last meaningful Python collaboration was in 2014, when the group united for a series of shows at the O2 Arena in London. (Two members of the group have died: Chapman in 1989 and Jones in 2020.)Idle said he had “no idea” how Python’s brand of humor had continued to hold up today.“Python is portmanteau comedy,” Idle, 80, wrote in an email via a spokeswoman. “It has a bit of everything. People always found it funny but they didn’t always agree on which bits. I think it survives because it was written by its actors and acted by its writers. It is executive-free comedy.”This revival was the brainchild of the producer Jeffrey Finn, an executive at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Rhodes’s production of “Spamalot” had a critically well-received run there this past spring, and garnered enough of an audience response that Finn thought a Broadway production could overcome the ticket sale malaise that pervades the industry.“What I feel like we proved at the Kennedy Center is that the escapism and the joy in the theater that this show delivers is what I feel audiences are looking for now,” Finn said. “Because it’s a crazy, harsh world out there, and having two and a half hours just to laugh and enjoy and be taken away by this lunacy, in the best way possible, is just joyful.”“Spamalot” was adapted from the 1975 movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which satirizes the Arthurian legend. Columbia PicturesThe revival doesn’t update the book or music substantially, if at all, but the show does offer new staging, choreography and improv from a who’s who of Broadway notables, including James Monroe Iglehart (King Arthur), Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer (the Lady of the Lake), Ethan Slater (Prince Herbert) and Taran Killam (Lancelot).“Have you ever seen a person of color play the king? No,” said Iglehart, who originated the role of the Genie in the Broadway adaptation of “Aladdin.” (This is his first leading role on Broadway.) “I make a joke all the time that there are two kings on Broadway: Mufasa and me.”At the rehearsal, the run-through was chock-full of inside jokes about Broadway and references to current events. But ultimately the troupe’s material — exhibited in several films, a television show, tours and albums — is still the backbone of the show.Killam, the “Saturday Night Live” alum, called himself a “dyed-in-the-wool” Python fan and said that the “intelligent absurdist humor of Python is in my veins.” (Killam will be replaced by Alex Brightman in January. Brightman was in the Kennedy Center production, but the opening of the Broadway run conflicted with his current Broadway production, the play “The Shark Is Broken.”)“They were a true variety sketch group,” Killam said. “There were six different voices with different points of view and different objectives. So that brought such good balance. I think the sort of life spirit of their comedy is absurdity and certainly aiming that absurdity at social and economical structures of power, be it the monarchy or the church or banks or a class system. There is an intelligence about their absurdity.”The Python inclination to poke fun at institutions is present throughout “Spamalot,” as when God commands Arthur and his knights to find the Holy Grail. In response, a knight wonders why God himself — if he is all-knowing — doesn’t know where it is.The show’s director Josh Rhodes, center, flanked by the producer Jeffrey Finn, and the associate director Deidre Goodwin during rehearsals last month.Gregg Delman for The New York TimesThe biggest difference between “Holy Grail” and “Spamalot” is the Lady of the Lake character, who does not exist in the movie. The role has become a launching pad of sorts. Sara Ramirez won a best featured actress Tony for originating the role on Broadway. Hannah Waddingham, a star of the hit Apple show “Ted Lasso,” performed the part in the West End and was nominated for an Olivier.Kritzer, a theater veteran who last appeared on Broadway in “Beetlejuice,” wasn’t as familiar as Killam with the work of Monty Python, but she did see the original production with Ramirez.“I never thought of myself doing this role, simply for the fact that very tall women have played this part — and I am 5-foot-3,” Kritzer said. “Everyone’s like, ‘Oh my God, it’s perfect for you.’ And I was like, ‘Really?’ I always think of it as this tall person role. And then when I got into rehearsal, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is like my modern Carol Burnett showcase.’”In this version, Kritzer said, “they let us improvise a lot. I’m doing things that were never in the original, ever, ever. Musically and otherwise.”When Monty Python burst onto the scene in the 1960s, its brand of comedy was considered revolutionary. They broke the rules of traditional comedy at the time with unusually structured sketches that would routinely break the fourth wall, end abruptly and not rely on simple punchlines, not to mention Gilliam’s zany animations.Now, “Spamalot,” at least in 2023, is a safe comedy with an enduring fan base who devour all things Python. This was apparent at an early preview, when Killam emerged as one of the Knights of Ni. The crowd started chanting “Ni!” before Killam said a word, prompting Killam to gesture to the crowd as if to say, “You get it.”“Even in any of the comedies that I’ve done on Broadway, there’s always some like, ‘We’re going to learn something,’” Kritzer said. “We don’t really learn something in this. We just have a great time, and that’s OK.”As to whether this will be the last-ever newish Monty Python project, Idle responded, “We can only pray.” More

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      ‘Sabbath’s Theater’ Review: John Turturro Embodies a Life and a Libido

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      Though a tour de force for its actors, an Off Broadway adaptation of Philip Roth’s willfully obscene 1995 novel is too faithful to its source.John Turturro begins the New Group’s “Sabbath’s Theater” with his pants down. He ends it with his pants off. In between, he masturbates on his lover’s grave, wears a pair of pink panties on his head and lingers on an oncology ward discussing outré sexual practices. This suggests a work meant to shock or at the very least goose the viewer. But excepting the performances of Turturro and Elizabeth Marvel as Sabbath’s wives and lovers, the show, for all its full-frontal nudity, is strangely inert. Flaccid? Sure.“Sabbath’s Theater,” now playing at the Signature Center, is an adaptation of Philip Roth’s 1995 novel, which won the National Book Award. It’s the story of Mickey Sabbath (Turturro), a former avant-garde puppeteer who devotes his later decades to adultery and complaint. When his mistress, Drenka (Marvel), dies, Sabbath, suddenly unmoored, leaves his New England home and his marriage, seeking erotic adventure and possibly his death.Scabrous and willfully obscene, the novel is often read as an exemplar of Roth’s late-career efflorescence, a distillation of his preoccupations, libidinal and otherwise. Then again, there are dissenters like Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, who wrote that the book has “a static and claustrophobic air, resulting in a novel that’s sour instead of manic, nasty instead of funny, lugubrious instead of liberating.” Sabbath is one of Roth’s many navel-gazing heroes. Sabbath’s gaze, however, aims just a little lower.Elizabeth Marvel as Sabbath’s wives and lovers is glorious, enfleshing characters who might otherwise seem merely male projections, our critic writes.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe problem at the Signature Center — a frequent one for Roth’s characters — is one of fidelity. Here’s the twist: This adaptation, by Turturro, a longtime friend of Roth’s, and the journalist and memoirist Ariel Levy, is simply too faithful, too monogamous. There’s no cheating, no straying, barely a flirtation, which means that the transmutation from book to stage is incomplete. “We didn’t write anything,” Levy told The Times. “It’s only Roth’s writing. Including most of the stage directions. Because you can’t top it.”Maybe so. But novels aren’t plays. And prose isn’t dialogue. Words that live comfortably on the page turn awkward and overly formal in the mouths of the actors. This version, a monologue with interruptions, shifts constantly between dialogue and direct address, the better to maintain Roth’s language. In this container, the drama stagnates, weighed down by Sabbath’s solipsistic gripes. (The adapters, in one decisive excision, have stripped those gripes of racism.)In his youth, Sabbath tells us, he was a guerrilla provocateur, the mastermind of a company called Sabbath’s Indecent Theater. If only some of that formal anarchy had infused this production. Where are the puppets, the street theater tactics? Jo Bonney is a sensitive and inventive director, yet here invention fails her. She offers a mostly spare stage, neatly delineated by Jeff Croiter’s clever lighting design and Alex Basco Koch’s dull projections, and a steady march from scene to scene as Sabbath, already a self-described “degenerate,” degenerates further. Yet not too far.As Sabbath says, in the middle of the play and again at the end, “To everyone I have ever horrified, to the appalled who’d consider me a dangerous man, loathsome, degenerate and gross. Not at all! My failure is failing to have gone far enough!” Agreed. I am a highly shockable sort of person. Still I can’t say that I ever felt truly scandalized or even absolutely engaged, most likely because the characters and situations remain unreal, tethered to the page. A brief scene of Sabbath trying to pleasure himself with his arthritic fingers was at least funny.If “Sabbath’s Theater” offers a limited tour of the human psyche, it succeeds as a tour de force for Turturro and for Marvel, too. (Jason Kravits is perfectly capable in a number of roles, most of them thankless.) As Sabbath, Turturro is shifty, kinetic, with a bend in the knees and a shrug in the shoulders, ferocious in his loathing and desire. His performance is vivid, visceral in a way that transcends the prose. Marvel, who is never anything less than glorious, enfleshes characters who might otherwise seem merely male projections. In contrast to Turturro’s arm-waving defiance, she offers an effortless stillness and a great capacity for joy. Her characters are fully human and quietly life-affirming, counterparts to Sabbath’s peculiar death drive.“Sabbath’s Theater,” no longer a book and not quite a play, is best enjoyed as a celebration of its performers. But it’s never as unholy as it wants to be.Sabbath’s TheaterThrough Dec. 17 at the Signature Center, Manhattan; thenewgroup.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘I Need That’ Review: It’s Always Messy in New Jersey

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      Danny DeVito returns to Broadway in a Theresa Rebeck comedy about a lonely old man lost in a houseful of junk.Even before the lights dim at the start of “I Need That,” the new Theresa Rebeck play at the American Airlines Theater, the show curtain and what’s in front of it offer plenty of exposition. The curtain is painted to depict the street grid of a neat New Jersey town, with neat houses on neat lots. But, uh-oh, creeping out from beneath it, on the floor of the stage, are boxes and bins overflowing with junk: ancient copies of Popular Science, bruised holiday decorations, stacks of old clothes, a sad single sneaker.So we know before the curtain rises on what one character describes as a “hellhole” of a home that we’ll be dealing with hoarding — and the orderly world that is horrified by it. Making the point even sharper is the entrance of the star, Danny DeVito, as Sam, the impish, 80-ish widower who lives there. Well, it’s not so much an entrance as a disclosure. Only after a series of knocks at the door wakes him up do we realize that amid the clutter submerging almost every surface of this once-handsome living room is Sam himself, indistinguishable from the trash.Alas, the busy set, by Alexander Dodge, leaves little for the rest of the play to do. Hyper-competently, like a good three-camera sitcom, Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s production for the Roundabout Theater Company, which opened on Thursday, will inch out Sam’s story — as well as that of his daughter, Amelia, and his old pal Foster. It will calibrate the requisite unsurprising surprises. It will cut its laughs with pathos and plump for a tear at the end.That’s no small feat, of course. Rebeck has a keen feeling for structure and the larger movements of storytelling. This is her 21st major New York production, and fifth on Broadway, since 1992. (She is also the creator of the TV series “Smash,” so she obviously knows plenty about sustaining conflict.) And there’s certainly pleasure to be had when an expert like DeVito, for 15 seasons a star of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” gets his mouth around a morsel of fragrant patois (he describes a worthless bottle cap as a meaningful souvenir “from my yout’”) or a juicy monologue. At one point he plays all sides of a game of Sorry!, complete with vicious kibitzing and gloating.But in the same way the monologue leans too heavily on foul-mouthed-grandpa laughs, the play overall, within its neat architecture, feels cluttered and obvious. Amelia, played by DeVito’s daughter Lucy, arrives in a flurry to tell her father that town authorities will condemn and evict him if he doesn’t get the mess — which is both a firetrap and an eyesore — under control. (A neighbor lady has reported the dishevelment.) Foster (Ray Anthony Thomas) offers to help clean up, but something always stops Sam in his tracks. “I’m organizing,” he insists. “I’m being selective.”Lucy DeVito, center, is a fine comic actor, hitting every joke and clapback with a clean thwack. Ray Anthony Thomas, left, plays a friend who offers to help clean up.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt around this point you realize that the play, having set Sam up as a mild hoarder — he doesn’t buy new things; his kitchen and bathrooms are clean — has not given him much to do but dither amusingly as he tries to decide what to part with. “It’s like ‘Sophie’s Choice,’” he whines. Nor much for Amelia to do but push back. (To her it’s more like “the end of ‘Carrie,’ where the house is so full of terrible things it just sucks itself into the earth.”) Eventually one of them will win, or this being a comedy, probably both.But because whatever will happen cannot do so until the last few of the play’s 100 minutes, most of what Rebeck offers is filler. Both Amelia and Foster are given grudges and secrets to pass the time. At least Amelia’s feel real enough, perhaps because Lucy DeVito, in her Broadway debut, is no nepo baby; she’s a fine comic actor, hitting every joke and clapback with a clean thwack. But Thomas is unable to make Foster more than a codger-comedy contrivance, despite or because of a tacked-on sad story and a not-very-credible interest in Sam’s trash.It’s hard to imagine what more one could make of an upbeat play about hoarding. The condition is not funny. Some hoarders suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder; more show strong indications of depression. To avoid a psychiatric rabbit hole, Rebeck has not only made Sam a sprite instead of a slug but also given him sympathetic, almost sensible, reasons for clinging to his stuff. (He misses his wife.) In a disposable society, hostile to aging, in which anything or anyone no longer obviously useful belongs in the landfill, he believes in hanging on. (He keeps refilling the same water bottle from 1976.) His hoarding isn’t a condition, it’s a protest.Though his only previous Broadway appearance was in the 2017 revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Price,” Danny DeVito commands interest without having to do much, and rewards it with funny readings of even unfunny lines. Yet despite his likability, the only parts of “I Need That” that feel authentic are those, near the end, in which the nonissue of Sam’s hoarding is momentarily swept offstage to make space for a few minutes of real father-daughter drama. To this, the DeVitos bring a vibrant understanding — part pride, part dismay, all mess — of what it means to be related. Sometimes what’s neat just isn’t as compelling as what’s not.I Need ThatThrough Dec. 30 at American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Pal Joey’ Review: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildering

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      Joey is still a heel in this major revision of the 1940 antihero musical, but he’s now a Black artist trying to find his true voice.It’s not often that the standout star of a show is its music supervisor, arranger or orchestrator, but in the gala presentation of “Pal Joey” at New York City Center through Sunday, all three are one man, Daryl Waters. More than the authors of the ambitious, bewildering revival’s new book, Waters, who has served similar roles on musicals as varied as “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” “After Midnight,” “The Cher Show” and “New York, New York,” makes a clear case in beautiful sound for its investigation into the melting pot of American music.That the rest of the revival (really a new creature, made from spare parts) is more suggestive than convincing is no crime; there has never been a satisfactory “Pal Joey.” Though the 1940 original featured some soon-to-be standards by Rodgers and Hart — “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” chief among them — its book by John O’Hara, based on his epistolary novel and New Yorker stories, didn’t match them in tone or dramatic serviceability.Back then, the problem was thought to be the nature of Joey himself, a greasy heel trying to scheme his way from itinerant crooner to supper club smoothie. Along the way he picked up and discarded an innocent named Linda English, traded sex for financial support with a socialite named Vera Simpson and generally ruined everything he touched with his grifty hands. The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson concluded that the show was distasteful because you couldn’t “draw sweet water from a foul well.”But the rise and triumph of the antihero show, with protagonists like J. Pierrepont Finch, Sweeney Todd and Evan Hansen, has since proved such characters ripe for musicalization. The problem faced by the various would-be saviors of “Pal Joey” — there were Broadway revivals in 1952, 1963, 1976 and 2008 — is rather what new throughline to impose and how to make the best use of its songs.In choosing to alter the racial frame of the story, the current version’s adapters, Richard LaGravenese and Daniel Koa Beaty, have made a powerful and promising intervention. Their Joey (Ephraim Sykes) is Black, with the tortured soul of a true artist. The Chicago club in which he sings is now a Black establishment, run by Lucille Wallace (Loretta Devine), a former star of Harlem nightspots. Linda (Aisha Jackson) is a Black singer, too, but one who prefers radio to live performance so as to be “judged by what people hear, not by what they see.”Sykes as Joey and Elizabeth Stanley as the socialite Vera Simpson, who financially supports Joey.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat is all worth exploring, and sometimes succeeds in snapping the tired old setups into vivid life. Because Vera (Elizabeth Stanley) is still white, her dalliance with Joey takes on new overtones and evokes new dangers. Though Joey remains acquisitive of both women and wealth, and Sykes, a Tony nominee for “Ain’t Too Proud,” is excellent at making his cunning charismatic, he is no longer shallow. Instead he’s deep, trying to find a way to render his true voice in a white world. Ancestral spirits who, according to the script, represent “soul, authenticity, power and freedom,” encourage him through percussive sound and movement; the often-astonishing choreography, part tap, part stomp, part African dance, is by Savion Glover.Interesting as all this is, or could be with further time and elaboration, race was the wrong problem to solve in “Pal Joey.” What really never worked, and still does not, is the way the songs hang with the story. Innovators though they were, Rodgers and Hart had only just begun to explore, as Rodgers would continue to do much more deeply with Oscar Hammerstein II, how to make song an expression of narrative itself, not just a character sketch or appliquéd decoration. In particular, Hart’s delightful lyrics (“I’m vexed again./Perplexed again./Thank God I can be oversexed again”) kept pulling focus from the show’s heart of darkness with their sparky wit.The new “Pal Joey” doubles down on that problem. Not counting two reprises, it features all or parts of 21 songs, only seven of which were written for “Pal Joey.” (Another eight of the originals were cut.) Because the added songs come from a variety of other shows, mostly “The Boys From Syracuse” and “Babes in Arms,” these are naturally even more decorative and disengaged than the originals. It does nothing to turn the vanishingly minor Melba Snyder — a society reporter who sings (and strips to) the great but obviously shoehorned “Zip” — into Melvin Snyder (Brooks Ashmanskas), who bravely does the same. You still have no idea why the character is there.Sykes, Aisha Jackson and ensemble members in the gala production, which features Savion Glover’s often-astonishing choreography.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn the other hand, the giant and varied new tunestack — including standards like “Where or When,” “My Funny Valentine” and “Blue Moon” — gives Waters some gorgeous raw material to work with. It’s a mystery to me how he creates so many conflicting kinds of sound, representing different strands of American popular music, from just four players onstage (including the devastating trumpeter Alphonso Horne) and five offstage. Sometimes the original songs are barely recognizable in their new clothing; at other times they have the uncanny familiarity of a post-facelift face that makes you want to say: You look different.Satisfying as that then-and-now duality is in theory, it adds to a rather large list of confusing and incomplete choices overall. What does it mean that Vera almost outdoes the Black characters in the use of scat singing and melismatic riffs? (Stanley is pushing way too hard.) Why does the relationship between Vera and Joey provoke racist threats while Lucille’s with a white gangster (Jeb Brown) provokes nothing but laughs? (Devine is a welcome source of humor and good spirits in the otherwise nearly humorless production.) Why is Linda barely integrated into the action, performing most of her songs (rendered modestly by Jackson) in the no-context of a recording booth?And though the roughness of the sound (many lyrics were unintelligible as of Wednesday night) and the longueurs of the staging (by Tony Goldwyn and, again, Glover) can be written off to the usual City Center problem of under-rehearsal, a show with such evidently large ambitions — Emilio Sosa’s glamorous early-1940s costumes, a monumental under-the-el set by Derek McLane, lit moodily by Jon Goldman — needs to be more than intriguing. It needs to be coherent.You can certainly count on coherence from the songs themselves, no matter how randomly they sometimes seem to have been placed in one Rodgers and Hart show instead of another. Even completely shorn of plot relevance, they are evergreen for a reason. Though this “Pal Joey” rightfully questions the appropriation of Black voices in American popular song — referring to the King of Jazz, Paul Whiteman, and the King of Swing, Benny Goodman, Joey says, “Awful lot of Kings out there playing our music” — it’s strange to build that argument on the back of these standards. If they’re the problem, why celebrate them, and make them sound so good in the process?Pal JoeyThrough Nov. 5 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Treason,’ the Musical, Was Built on an Online Foundation

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      The producers cultivated online followers for three years before mounting a full production, bringing them along on the show’s journey to the stage.The catchy, folk-tinged numbers from “Treason the Musical” have been streamed online over a million times, in 96 countries. Its fans — known as “Plotters” — have been listening to an EP, an acoustic record and a live album of the songs, as well as sharing their own performances on TikTok. But until this fall, there hadn’t even been a full-scale production of the show.Unlike “Beetlejuice,” “Heathers” or “Dear Evan Hansen,” which all parlayed onstage popularity into huge digital followings, “Treason” is turning the formula for musical success around. Its producers cultivated an online fandom for three years before raising the curtain on the show, and are now banking on those fans buying theater tickets, too.It seems to be working. “Treason” is currently on a 27-show tour of Britain that culminates in two performances at London’s largest theater, the 2,286-seater Palladium, on Nov. 21-22.Created by Ricky Allan, the musical tells the story of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605: a failed attempt by a group of persecuted English Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London and assassinate the protestant King James I. The show features folk ballads, rousing pop and rock numbers, and spoken word and rap, with period costumes — ruffs and capes, doublets and hose — and candle-like lighting to evoke a 17th-century setting.As an original retelling of an episode from English history, “Treason” brings to mind another grass-roots British success story: “Six,” the hit musical about the wives of King Henry VIII. “Six” started out as a scrappy student show in the Edinburgh Fringe and grew into a professional production that is playing on the West End and Broadway. Its cast album became the second-most streamed of all time (after “Hamilton”), and its Instagram account has more followers than any West End show ever.Roxanne Couch, center, as Catherine Parr, one of the six wives of King Henry VII in “Six.”Pamela RaithWe 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

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      ‘Poor Yella Rednecks’ Review: A Writer’s Origin Story Remixes Conventions

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      Qui Nguyen’s crowd-tickling comedy about a Vietnamese family in Arkansas mixes hip-hop and martial arts with soapy twists and turns.The playwright Qui Nguyen has made a career of imagining marginalized people as heroic leads. That includes his parents, who emigrated from Vietnam and met in an Arkansas refugee camp, a story Nguyen chronicled in his raunchy rom-com-style play “Vietgone.”“Poor Yella Rednecks,” which opened Wednesday in a rollicking, comic book-inspired production at New York City Center, picks up five years later, in 1980, when their marriage hits the rocks and the playwright is a 5-year-old struggling to learn English.Commissioned by Manhattan Theater Club and South Coast Repertory, where it premiered in 2019, “Poor Yella Rednecks” functions as the playwright’s own superhero origin story: Nguyen has become not only a wizard of language and form, but also an expert M.C., subverting and remixing conventions to confront abiding questions about displacement and assimilation. How can immigrants become legible to the American-born generations of their own families, and to audiences who are so white, the playwright’s mother says, that they resemble a Fleetwood Mac concert?Nguyen’s answer is an expletive-filled fusion of hip-hop and martial arts with the soapy twists and turns of addictive serial television. Under the wry and nimble direction of May Adrales, “Poor Yella Rednecks” is a crowd-tickling comedy that squashes preconceptions in order to place hearts in a vise grip.Framed as recollections Nguyen gathered from his mother, Tong, in 2015, the show begins with the playwright (portrayed onstage as a middle-aged man by Jon Norman Schneider) interviewing Tong (a dynamite Maureen Sebastian), who speaks with a pinched face and a thick accent. But Tong soon demands to have her son’s “pot and a mouth” style of talking in the play he is writing, and for white characters to sound the way she hears them, as a garble of slang and empty signifiers (so he has them squawk exclamations like “Yeehaw!” or “Mitch McConnell!”). From then on, we hear Nguyen’s family talk in frank, and often crass, English when they are understood to be speaking Vietnamese. (Nguyen’s parents were heartbroken when they met, Tong says, “so we comforted each other with our crotches.”)Though his family’s history is rooted in upheaval and loss, Qui Nguyen presents it with a delicate balance of over-the-top humor and unforced sincerity, our critic writes.Richard Termine for The New York TimesRewind 35 years, and Tong tears away her granny garb (thrifty southwestern costumes designed by Valérie Thérèse Bart) to play a younger version of herself. Tong and the playwright’s father, Quang (Ben Levin), who looks like a matinee idol but can’t find work, are nearly broke and are each being drawn back into previous relationships. Tong, a waitress at a diner, partly blames her mother, Huong (a dry-as-gin Samantha Quan), for the difficulty that her son, known as Little Man and represented by a wide-eyed puppet, faces fitting in at school. Huong, who only speaks Vietnamese, worries that learning to talk like his peers will turn Little Man (endearingly designed by David Valentine and maneuvered by Schneider) into a stranger.As in “Vietgone,” “Poor Yella Rednecks” shows Nguyen’s onstage parents expressing their most vehement feelings, and occasional exposition, in verse, rapping over uncomplicated beats composed here by Shane Rettig, who also designed the game show-like sound. (“Cuz I’m more than just pretty, my brain is damn witty,” Tong raps. “Gimme one hot second Imma run this city.”) For the title song, Nguyen borrows a familiar declaration about the work ethic of immigrants from the musical “Hamilton,” though his own less sophisticated lyrics, which are better at illuminating conflict than romance, may not exactly hold up in comparison.Though rooted in upheaval and tragic loss, Nguyen’s family history is presented with a delicate balance of over-the-top humor and unforced sincerity. Jon Hoche, who plays Quang’s best friend Nhan, is a boisterous bro with a soft underbelly, while Paco Tolson is almost pitifully hapless as Bobby, Tong’s bumbling white ex. Tolson also plays the godfather of Marvel, Stan Lee, whose presence as a sporadic narrator adds to the show’s graphic-novel aesthetic; the set by Tim Mackabee spells out “yella” in big, rotating letters, lit in emphatic color by Lap Chi Chu.For all of its surprises, including action sequences I won’t spoil here, the play falters only when it tips into obviously earnest territory. Nguyen doesn’t need a surrogate to detail his intent; the story soars on its own.Poor Yella RednecksThrough Nov. 26 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Merry Me’ Review: A Loopy Sex Comedy Focused on Female Pleasure

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      Hansol Jung’s new play riffs on Greek dramas, the Restoration comedy “The Country Wife” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.”On an imaginary island off the coast of some enemy state that exists only in fantasy, a navy is becalmed. A blackout is to blame, but it’s the good kind of blackout — the kind that stops a war in its tracks.Still, it means the phones aren’t working. So when Pvt. Willy Memnon’s mother calls him up from elsewhere on the base camp, she does it the analog way: on a paper cup attached to a string.“William Iphigenio Memnon,” she says, using his full name because she means business, “pick up the cup, I need to ask you something.”Unusual middle name, no? Then again, his father is Gen. Aga Memnon, and his mother is Mrs. Memnon, a.k.a. Clytemnestra. And in Hansol Jung’s delightfully loopy sex comedy, “Merry Me,” it matters not a whit that navies don’t tend to have generals and privates, or that the Clytemnestra we know from ancient Greek drama, mother to the sacrificed Iphigenia, stays at home when her Agamemnon goes off to the Trojan War.In “Merry Me,” directed by Leigh Silverman at New York Theater Workshop, Clytemnestra (Cindy Cheung) tags along, and becomes one of quite a few women to fall for the seductive charms of Lt. Shane Horne (Esco Jouléy), Jung’s libidinous heroine. Another is Willy’s frustrated wife, Sapph (Nicole Villamil) — as in Sappho, and yes she writes poetry.From left, Cindy Cheung, Shaunette Renée Wilson and David Ryan Smith in Jung’s refreshingly playful mash-up, directed by Leigh Silverman. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesVirtuosic though Shane is at giving sexual pleasure, she is having trouble with her own orgasms, which for reasons best known to her she refers to as her “merries.”“Can we not call it that?” her psychiatrist, Jess O’Nope (Marinda Anderson), requests, not unreasonably.Shane, just out of solitary confinement “for having sexed up the general’s wife,” has a plan to hatch, and she needs Jess’s help — Aeschylus and Euripides being merely two of the sources that Jung (“Wolf Play”) is riffing on in this frolic through the stacks.She borrows, too, from William Wycherley’s notoriously randy Restoration comedy “The Country Wife.” Its hero, Horner, spreads a rumor of his own impotence so he can proceed with his many liaisons unsuspected. The version of that in “Merry Me” involves Jess telling everyone that Shane has turned straight.This lie is handy for fending off General Memnon (David Ryan Smith), who wants Shane “court marshaled for her heretically heterophobic courting habits.” It also ensures her freedom to woo women, with Sapph soon topping the list. Except that the pseudo-enlightened Willy (Ryan Spahn) is nowhere near as gullible as his father.It’s a ridiculous, convoluted plot, with only a tenuous logic in its connection to Shane’s orgasmic quest, but there is a gleeful, almost punchy abandon to this play’s dedication to queer female pleasure, embrace of bawdy fun and relish of theatrical in-jokes.With shout-outs to Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Thornton Wilder, “Merry Me” pilfers successfully from Shakespeare (when Sapph dons a mannish disguise that Shane sees right through) and from Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” (which lends a glamorous, comic, sexually skilled Angel, played by Shaunette Renée Wilson). If such a mash-up smacks slightly of drama school, “Merry Me” also has a refreshingly playful spirit that established artists sometimes lose out in the world.Rachel Hauck’s set gives an angel’s-eye view of the base camp, with rows of miniature tents arrayed on a vertical backdrop, and in fact the Angel and her winged colleagues are much concerned with goings-on there. Godlike, they caused the blackout that has paused the war. To lift it, they demand a sacrifice — and in this feminist retelling, that’s not going to be anybody’s daughter.Pvt. Willy Memnon, they’re looking at you.Merry MeThrough Nov. 19 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More