Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Joanna Merlin, Known for Her Work Both Onstage and Off, Dies at 92

      by

      Soon after appearing in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” she began a new career as a prominent casting director.Joanna Merlin, who, after originating the role of Tzeitel, the eldest daughter, in the hit Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” became a renowned casting director, notably for Stephen Sondheim musicals including “Into the Woods” and “Follies,” died on Oct. 15 at her younger daughter’s home in Los Angeles. She was 92.Her older daughter, Rachel Dretzin, said the cause was complications of myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disease.The idea of becoming a casting director came from Hal Prince, the powerful producer of “Fiddler,” after she had left “Fiddler” to raise her two young daughters. He had interviewed several candidates and told Ms. Merlin that most of them “just didn’t like actors,” she told Backstage magazine.“He felt that since I was an actor and a mother, that I might be a good choice,” she added. “He understood that I was raising children and told me that he didn’t care what hours I put in, just as long as I got the work done.”She set to work in 1970, casting replacement actors in “Fiddler” during its last two years on Broadway. For the next two decades, she cast six musicals that were composed by Sondheim and produced (and usually directed) by Mr. Prince on Broadway: “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures,” “Side by Side by Sondheim” and “Merrily We Roll Along.”From left, Ms. Merlin, the composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the director Harold Prince and the playwright George Furth during a casting session for the 1981 Broadway musical “Merrily We Roll Along.”Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsHer casting credits also include two other Sondheim musicals, “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods”; Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Evita”; and “On the Twentieth Century,” by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Cy Coleman. All those shows except “Into the Woods” were directed by Mr. Prince.“What I found so interesting with Joanna,” James Lapine, who directed “Into the Woods” and wrote its book, based on the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, said in a phone interview, “was her determination to pursue nontraditional casting in the theater, which for me, at a young age, was something I hadn’t thought much about.”Ms. Merlin’s pursuit of diverse casting led Mr. Lapine to choose a Black actress, Terry Burrell, to replace the white one who had played one of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters, and Phylicia Rashad, who is Black, as a replacement for Bernadette Peters in the leading role of the Witch.In 1986, Ms. Merlin was a founder of the Non-Traditional Casting Project (now the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts), which seeks more opportunities for actors of color and actors with disabilities.Ms. Merlin, noting that there were many talented, nonwhite actors, told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 1990. “The reason they should be cast is because they’re good,”Ms. Merlin also cast six films, including Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” (1987), for which she won the Casting Society of America’s Artios Award. She also won an Artios for “Into the Woods.”Ms. Merlin, far right, with Zero Mostel, center, and three other “Fiddler on the Roof” cast members (from left, Maria Karnilova, Tanya Everett and Julia Migenes) backstage after the show’s opening night in 1964. Associated PressJo Ann Dolores Ratner was born on July 15, 1931, in Chicago. Her parents were Russian immigrants: Her father, Harry, owned a grocery store, and her mother, Toni (Merlin) Ratner, helped in the store and became a sculptor in her 60s.She moved to Los Angeles with her parents and her sister when she was 15.She attended the University of California, Los Angeles, for a year in the early 1950s and, after acting in plays in the Los Angeles area in the early and mid-1950s, appeared in her first movie role, a small part in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” (1956).After some more screen work and roles in Off and Off Off Broadway plays, Ms. Merlin made her Broadway debut in 1961 in Jean Anouilh’s “Becket,” as Gwendolen, the mistress of Thomas Becket, one of Britain’s most powerful figures in the 12th century, who was played by Laurence Olivier. Later that year, she returned to Broadway to portray Sigmund Freud’s wife in Henry Denker’s “A Far Country.”After four unsuccessful auditions for a role in Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” which was staged by Jerome Robbins, she auditioned eight times for Mr. Robbins when he was casting “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened in 1964. Although she lacked a strong singing voice, she was cast as Tzeitel, the oldest daughter of Tevye the milkman, the show’s principal character.The syndicated columnist Leonard Lyons wrote that when Ms. Merlin was pregnant in 1965 with her daughter Rachel, Zero Mostel, who played Tevye, told the stage manager: “Joanna’s baby just kicked. Send baby a note — not to kick.”She left the show in 1965 after Rachel was born, returned as Tzeitel a year later, and departed again in 1967 when she was replaced by her understudy, Bette Midler (who was also Rachel’s babysitter). After Julie’s birth in 1968, Mr. Prince made his offer.She continued to act, mostly in films and on television. Her roles included the dance teacher in “Fame” (1980), Julia Roberts’s mother in “Mystic Pizza” (1988) and an old Jewish woman in a short film, “Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn” (2008), which she and Ragnar Freidank adapted from a one-woman play by Ellen Cassedy.TV viewers might be most familiar with Ms. Merlin’s recurring role in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” She played Judge Lena Petrovsky 43 times from 2000 to 2011. No other actor has played a jurist more often in the “Law & Order” franchise. She also appeared, as two different defense lawyers, in five episodes of “Law & Order.”Ms. Merlin as a lawyer in a 1994 episode of “Law & Order.” She also played a judge in 43 episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” setting a record for the franchise.Jessica Burstein/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesHer career as an acting teacher began in 1998 at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a year later she began holding workshops dedicated to the acting technique of her teacher, Michael Chekhov.In the foreword to her book, “Auditioning: An Actor-Friendly Guide” (2001), Mr. Prince wrote: “Her taste is impeccable. In no instance can I remember her recommending anyone less than interesting for a role.”In addition to her daughter Rachel, a documentary filmmaker, and her daughter Julie Dretzin, an actress, Ms. Merlin is survived by five grandchildren. Her first marriage, to Marty Lubner, ended in divorce. Her marriage to David Dretzin ended with his death in 2006 after a car accident in which he suffered a traumatic brain injury. Her sister, Harriet Glickman, died in 2020.For “Pacific Overtures,” which takes place in Japan after Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s visit in 1853 and which had an all-Asian cast, Ms. Merlin engaged in “what may be one of the most poignant talent searches undertaken for a Broadway show,” according to a 1976 article in The New York Times.Racism and economics often forced Asian actors out of the profession at the time. So when she had no luck finding actors in New York, she worked with Asian community and theater groups, Asian newspapers and the State Department to fill the roles. A third of those ultimately signed for the production were nonprofessionals.Among them was the actor Gedde Watanabe, who was a young street singer in San Francisco when she approached him and invited him to audition.“I didn’t believe her,” Mr. Watanabe said. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Joey Evans Is Back. This Time He’s a Struggling Artist.

      by

      Joey Evans is a charming cad, a heel, an unapologetic womanizer, a gigolo. He’s a second-rate nightclub entertainer who breaks the heart of an ingénue and seduces a rich older woman, trading sex for money.In 1940, some people found Joey, the protagonist of the 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical “Pal Joey,” repellent. “Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” Brooks Atkinson famously wondered in his review for The New York Times.In the decades since, though, the main charge against the show hasn’t been foulness so much as incoherence. Production after production — the last one on Broadway was in 2008 — has attempted to rescue a handful of great Rodgers and Hart songs from the weak book that John O’Hara cobbled together from some of his demotic short stories published in The New Yorker.Seven years ago, the director Tony Goldwyn — best known as an actor — decided to try his hand at a rescue operation. He brought in the screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, and together they came up with an idea: What if Joey were a gifted, struggling artist? That way, it wouldn’t just be a story of sex and betrayal but also one of art versus ambition. After a few readings, though, that twist didn’t seem reason enough for a revival, so they added another: What if Joey were Black?Ephraim Sykes, who plays Joey Evans, with Marshal Davis, left, and Glover. “Playing this part has been freeing,” Sykes said. “Music is the lifeblood of this man, and it just so happens that one of his instruments is his body.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesTo tell that story, Goldwyn and LaGravenese, who are white, felt they needed Black collaborators, which is why their production of “Pal Joey,” opening at New York City Center on Nov. 1, is co-directed by Goldwyn and the tap dancer Savion Glover, who also did the choreography; and has a new book by LaGravenese and Daniel Beaty.The new story, set in the 1940s, is, as Beaty put it, “about the evolution of a Black artist” — a forward-thinking jazz singer — “in a world where there was no space for him to be his authentic self and what that costs him.” This is a story, he added, with contemporary relevance: “We’re still wrestling with a world where those the system has not been built for are fighting to have a voice.”It was Beaty’s idea to add some characters who would have been very surprising in any previous production of “Pal Joey” — Black ancestral spirits called the Griots. “At the start of the show, we have this character who is brokenhearted because of the absence of space for him,” he said, “but these ancestors appear, like an energy that lives within him, and give him some hope.”In this iteration of the play, Sykes’s Joey has a soul, and ancestors appear in the form of extraordinary tap dancers.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThose ancestors appear in the form of extraordinary tap dancers, including Dormeshia and Glover. And they keep reappearing throughout the show to remind Joey of his authentic self. This Joey, played by Ephraim Sykes, has a soul, and that soul expresses itself in the deeply rooted sound of Savion Glover’s tap dancing.The Griots are “a connection to something very old,” Beaty said. “The artists who have danced, sang and acted this path before. I have sat with many of them: Ossie Davis, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte. Ruby Dee told me, ‘We have always had to dance with a gun at our feet, but still we must dance.’”Glover, too, has always been an artist attuned to his ancestors, especially the veteran tap dancers who mentored him when he was a child. His solo shows can feel like séances, his jazz improvisations quoting those dead teachers and summoning their spirits. “Those Griots could be Jimmy Slyde, Lon Chaney, Chuck Green and Buster Brown,” he said, listing four hoofer-mentors he celebrated in the 1996 Broadway musical “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” for which he won a Tony Award for choreography.“Wherever I am, they will be,” he added. “They walk with me.”And not just in the Griot sections. At a recent rehearsal of one of Joey’s nightclub numbers, Glover stressed that he was stealing a rhythm from Henry LeTang, who choreographed “Black and Blue,” the 1989 Broadway show in which a teenage Glover shared the stage with Slyde, Chaney and other tap masters.“I appreciate the platform for dance to be part of the storytelling,” Glover said. “But if I have a side agenda, it would be to remind people of the contribution of those old cats.”The first Joey, in 1940, was a then-little-known Gene Kelly, who vaulted from the part into Hollywood fame. Frank Sinatra played Joey for the sanitized 1957 film. Revivals at City Center in the 1960s starred Bob Fosse, years before he directed shows like “Chicago” that made Joey’s sleaze into a dominant style.But Beaty and Glover are connecting “Pal Joey” to another history, another well. Like many productions Glover has been involved with — from “Jelly’s Last Jam” in 1991 to the 2016 reimagining of “Shuffle Along” — this “Pal Joey” is concerned with the transformations of jazz.Glover has always been an artist attuned to his dance ancestors. “They walk with me,” he said.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesWorking with Glover “is a master class, to put it lightly,” Sykes said.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesIn the years after the premiere of “Pal Joey,” Rodgers and Hart’s last show together, jazz artists, more than any others, kept the songs of Rodgers and Hart alive, as ground for improvisations. This production’s new story has the benefit of justifying the inclusion of more of those songs. Along with eight from the original, including “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book,” this “Pal Joey” borrows 15 from other Rodgers and Hart shows, standards like “My Funny Valentine,” “Where or When,” “This Can’t Be Love” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.” Musically, the show is now a Rodgers and Hart songbook, rearranged by Daryl Waters and Glover.But the production’s jazz approach, evident in each number, is about more than just musical style. “Savion lives in the realm of possibility,” Goldwyn said. “Like: ‘Let’s not nail this down. Let’s see what it might begin to become.’ That creates an environment of constant discovery. It’s very fertile.”“We’re trying to create creation,” Glover said. “We want the audience to feel it is happening, like they’re at the club.”That kind of improvisational freedom requires a particular cast, especially a particular Joey. Sykes, who played David Ruffin in “Ain’t Too Proud,” the 2019 Broadway musical about the Temptations, trained as a dancer at the Alvin Ailey school.“I always spoke first with my body,” he said. “Learning to act standing still is something I’m still learning. Playing this part has been freeing. Music is the lifeblood of this man, and it just so happens that one of his instruments is his body.”“Savion lives in the realm of possibility,” Tony Goldwyn, center behind Glover, said. The pair are co-directors of this reimagined version. Amir Hamja/The New York TimesWorking with Glover, Sykes said, “is a master class, to put it lightly. He operates on such a different plane of thinking. He’s always pushing me past what I thought was my limit, and we’re all being pushed to create jazz, to make a different show every night.”A new character, a club owner named Lucille, is played by Loretta Devine, who was in the original cast of “Dreamgirls” in 1981. “She’s the closest to the language we’re trying to summon,” Glover said. “She’s the living proof.”LaGravenese said that the addition of the Lucille character, “the one closest to the ancestors,” was part of an idea to surround Joey with strong women. Linda, the ingénue, is now a confident equal, played by Aisha Jackson. Joey’s relationship with Vera, the rich older woman, played here by Elizabeth Stanley, is now interracial, which raises the stakes, but Vera’s character is also more complex.“In some earlier workshops, our Vera was the beautiful Marin Mazzie,” LaGravenese said. “And Marin” — who died in 2018 — “said ‘What if Vera really loves Joey?’ And that opened up another door to making her more human.”“Marin is an ancestor now, too,” Beaty said. “I think the energy we’ve been feeling in the rehearsal room is the presence of the ancestors. In the cultures I come from, Ghanaian and Cherokee and Blackfoot, we believe that when you invite in the ancestors, they show up.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Good Times and Bum Times Made These Theater Veterans Even Stronger

      by

      It’s challenging enough for an actor to portray someone who is alive and well. But can you imagine the extra scrutiny that comes when your model is sitting in the director’s chair?In the new musical “The Gardens of Anuncia,” Priscilla Lopez plays the title role, which is largely based on the childhood of the show’s director and co-choreographer, Graciela Daniele. Or at least, Daniele pointed out in a recent conversation, it’s “a version of me. A better version.”When the two stage veterans sat together last week, a day after performances began at Lincoln Center Theater, they laughed continuously, and threw themselves into the conversation with the full-bodied gusto of born performers. They mimed pranks they once pulled on castmates, hummed tunes from long-forgotten shows, and punctuated their stories with enough sound effects to make a Foley artist jealous.There might also have been a little bit of tearing up as they reminisced about their decades in the Broadway trenches — Lopez is 75, Daniele is almost a decade older — and reflected on the new project, a memory musical based on Daniele’s childhood in post-World War II Buenos Aires.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

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Covenant’ Review: When Inner Turmoil Is Its Own Ghost Story

      by

      The playwright York Walker makes a promising New York debut at Roundabout Underground.Much is made over whether one is “with God” or not in “Covenant,” a striking new Southern gothic work by York Walker. Following a town’s reaction to a bluesman’s mysterious homecoming in 1930s Georgia, this small, potent Roundabout Underground production sustains a scorching end-of-days tune as much through its electric cast and design elements as by Walker’s script and Tiffany Nichole Greene’s swift direction.Like each of the play’s four women, the 24-year-old Avery (Jade Payton) craves salvation. But she’s not seeking a flight to heaven, like her overbearing Mama (Crystal Dickinson), or from neglect, like her younger sister, Violet (Ashley N. Hildreth). Rather, she desires a certain kind of freedom. Ruthie (Lark White), a lovelorn neighbor grappling with her nascent sexuality, feels the same.A chance at that freedom appears when a childhood friend, Johnny (Chaundre Hall-Broomfield), returns to town after a yearslong absence, touring faraway juke joints. A smooth-talking guitarist, Johnny has dropped his stutter and — rumor has it — picked up prodigious musical skills from a pact with the Devil.Walker nods at the legend of Robert Johnson, the real-life bluesman whose startling technique gave rise to a claim that he had traded his soul for success playing “the Devil’s music.” But, though that mystery informs this play’s effective ghost story, “Covenant” is more interested in unraveling the women’s trust in faith, self and one another to examine how feelings become codified into mythology.The pious Mama thinks she can spot a dark spirit when she sees one and forbids Avery from spending time with Johnny. Seduced by his promise of a life bigger than her repressive own, she doesn’t obey, naturally, and soon comes home one night with bruises and a funny look in her eye. As the locals chatter, gossiping about midnight sightings of Johnny at the graveyard, the play probes each woman’s relationship to fact and fiction.Greene’s suspenseful production indulges in some elegant horror trappings, with characters often plunged in darkness, holding a single match as they share tales of cheating spouses and bad decisions — personal freedoms marked as evil because they stray from cultural dogma.Lawrence Moten’s claustrophobic set turns the audience into the cramped congregation of a Gothic Revival church, the action taking place on either side of its nave and lit by Cha See. Steve Cuiffo’s illusions and Justin Ellington’s sound design, both chilling, lean deep into the story’s supernatural suggestions.But the play’s terror is best conjured by Walker’s dialogue, which weaves rumor into legend and is delivered in gradient shades by an excellent cast. As Avery and Johnny, Payton and Hall-Broomfield play their scenes alluringly straight, and in her forceful turn as Violet, Hildreth believably generates powerful, skeptical chemistry with White’s awe-struck Ruthie.And Dickinson’s sanctimonious Mama comically punctuates each “lord” and “God” with the emphatic righteousness of a “T” sound, and with her beaded eyeglass chain (courtesy of Ari Fulton’s costumes) appears to have tears permanently fixed on her face.The violence of her devotion is made eerily physical in a choreographed prayer sequence (with movement overseen by Stephen Buescher) that shows the carnality often inherent in religion, which can traffic as much in darkness as in the light it claims to seek.If Walker reverse-engineers certain beats a bit too cleanly in order to expose the characters’ hypocrisies, his twists and developments are still satisfying. Working with great economy, Walker’s “Covenant” is an auspicious New York debut for a playwright who clearly has a gift for richly textured work.CovenantThrough Dec. 3 at the Black Box Theater, at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      West End Theatergoers Grumble as Prices for the Best Seats Surge

      by

      Concern is growing that a night at the theater in London is becoming unaffordable, especially when a production has starry names, like Kenneth Branagh’s “King Lear.”When hundreds of playgoers lined up outside Wyndham’s Theater in London this week, the mood was excited. They had come to see Kenneth Branagh, the revered Shakespearean actor, directing and playing the title role in “King Lear.”But some were still thinking about the price they’d paid to be there.Alan Hooper, 75, a retired teacher, said that, at the box office that morning, he was offered a seat in the first balcony for 200 pounds, around $240, or a standing place for a fraction of the cost. He chose to stand for the show’s two-hour run time. West End prices, Hooper said, were “out of control.”Another audience member, George Butler, 28, said that he was overjoyed to have secured two tickets for 20 pounds, or about $24, each, even if they were in the nosebleeds. “Theater is becoming very elitist,” Butler said. “The minute there’s a well known person in a play, it’s unaffordable.”London’s theater world is increasingly simmering with complaints over soaring ticket prices, and a perception that they are creeping closer to Broadway levels. Even as producers insist that a fraction of tickets must be sold at steep prices to offset cheap seats for low earners, concern is growing that a night at the theater is becoming an unaffordable luxury.The West End’s own stars are fueling the fuss. In April, Derek Jacobi, the veteran actor, told The Guardian newspaper that potential theatergoers were now having to think “more than twice” about attending shows. A few months later, David Tennant stirred debate when he told a Radio Times podcast that rising prices were “strangling the next generation of an audience coming through.”Leicester Square in London’s West End. British actors have spoken out about soaring ticket costs, noting that the prohibitive expense was limiting theater’s reach.Jane Stockdale for The New York TimesThis fall, theater message boards and social media erupted in indignation when tickets for a production of “Plaza Suite,” starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, went on sale with a top price of £395, around $477 — a level rarely heard of in London.Yet it was unclear whether these few high-profile cases reflected a wider problem. Alistair Smith, the editor of The Stage, a British theater newspaper, said it was difficult to analyze whether ticket prices were increasing across the board, because producers release so little sales data.To fill the gap, his newspaper annually surveys the cheapest and most expensive tickets across the West End. This year’s results, Smith said, showed that the average price for tickets in the most expensive price group was £141, or about $170 (a decade ago, the figure was a much lower £81). This year’s average was still “a long, long way behind Broadway,” he said, adding that the cost of the priciest tickets had barely changed since 2022, despite soaring household costs.However, Smith added, the average price of the least expensive tickets had risen by more than inflation to £25, or $30. “It would be a concern if that trend continues,” he said.For many West End producers, the perception of a price hike is a source of growing frustration. Patrick Gracey, a producer who sits on the board of the Society of London Theater, said that the news media published articles about high ticket prices because it “gets clicks.” Those stories were “misleading audiences about the availability of affordable tickets,” he said.Last year, Gracey said, theatergoers paid an average £54, or about $66, to see a West End show. (The average price on Broadway last week was double that at $125, according to data from The Broadway League.)Producers were facing soaring costs, Gracey added. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, some theaters saw their energy costs spike as much as 500 percent, and there were similar jumps in set-building material prices. Last year, West End actors and technical staff secured a pay deal that saw their wages rise, too.The average West End theater ticket price in 2022 was about $66: high, but considerably less expensive than Broadway tickets.Jane Stockdale for The New York TimesEven with those pressures, Gracey said producers were working to keep theater accessible and were offering cheap tickets for those who couldn’t splurge. “It’s only possible to offer those tickets because some people are paying top price,” he said.The producers of “King Lear” said in an emailed statement that they were offering 150 tickets per performance at £20 — equivalent to 19 percent of the house. Those included 17 in the front row, with the rest in the back rows of the theater’s three tiers.The problem was with audience perception, said Nick Hytner, a co-founder of the Bridge Theater. Producers needed to develop “a compelling counternarrative” that theater was affordable or else young people would decide that the art form wasn’t for them. Discounting the worst seats at the back of cramped Victorian theaters didn’t cut it, he said, adding that theaters need to develop more innovative approaches to pricing.Some theatergoers have justified the price of tickets for a once in a lifetime experience of seeing actors like Branagh onstage.Jane Stockdale for The New York TimesOne West End show that is trying something new is “Operation Mincemeat,” a musical set in World War II. At every performance, all the seats in the house cost the same price, but that amount rises gradually throughout the week, from £39.50 on Mondays to £89.50 on weekends. Jon Thoday, the managing director of Avalon, the show’s producer, said that the production lost money on Mondays, but added that the pricing strategy was good for the musical’s long term future because it brought in a younger audience.“There will always be a fuss about ticket prices, unless others change,” Thoday said.At “King Lear” earlier this week, theatergoers weren’t complaining about Branagh’s show, at least. Marshall Shaffer, 31, a movie journalist visiting from New York, said he had paid $403 for two tickets. “I did not think that was necessarily a bargain,” he said, “but Branagh’s probably the premiere Shakespeare interpreter of his time, and I think it’s worthwhile.”Another audience member, Penny Smith, joked that she’d had to “sell a child” to buy her ticket, but said she was happy to pay to see Branagh. Plus, she said with a laugh, the tickets were “a darn sight cheaper than New York. Have you seen the prices there?” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ to Return to Broadway Next Fall

      by

      A new production, directed by Kenny Leon, will feature a diverse cast and will aim to speak to contemporary America.“Our Town,” one of the most revered and enduring American dramas, will return to Broadway next fall in a new production directed by Kenny Leon.Leon has become among the more prolific directors working in New York. Just this year he has directed a revival of “Purlie Victorious,” currently running on Broadway, as well as the summer production of “Hamlet” at Shakespeare in the Park and the spring Off Broadway basketball-fan drama “King James” for the Manhattan Theater Club. He directed two Broadway revivals last season, the Tony-winning “Topdog/Underdog” as well as “Ohio State Murders,” and he has another one coming next spring, “Home.”Leon said he had long wanted to direct a Broadway production of “Our Town,” a 1938 play by Thornton Wilder. He has tackled the play twice in Atlanta, where he lives, first in 2010 with a full production at the True Colors Theater Company, which he co-founded, and then in 2017 with a one-night reading, starring Scarlett Johansson and the cast of an Avengers movie, to benefit hurricane victims in Puerto Rico.“I grew up thinking it wasn’t a play for me, but later in life I thought, ‘If you just include more people, it’s a play about our time and our planet and each other,’” he said in an interview.“The cast will not be all Black and it will not be all white and it will not be all famous,” he said. “I want all of us to feel included, and I want the play to speak to each and every heart in America.”The lead producer is Jeffrey Richards and no cast or theater has been announced. This will be the sixth production of “Our Town” on Broadway; the last one opened in 2002. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Boy Parts,’ the Play, Is a Winking Pastiche of Trauma Tropes

      by

      A London production adapted from Eliza Clark’s debut novel refuses to justify its unreliable narrator’s violence, but lacks narrative depth and complexity.How far can you go in the name of art? For Irina, nothing is off-limits. She’s a photographer who takes pictures of young men, with a particular preference for guys that are unprepossessing, shy and biddable. Irina’s “thing” is capturing male vulnerability, so she photographs her subjects in compromising poses; she takes liberties with consent, and violates their dignity in increasingly troubling and violent ways.Irina is the antiheroine of “Boy Parts,” adapted from Eliza Clark’s 2020 debut novel of the same name, and running at the Soho Theater, in London, through Nov. 25. It’s an engrossing and darkly funny one-woman show, but doesn’t quite make the best of its provocative premise.Aimée Kelly plays the role with a winning blend of caustic humor and narcissistic self-pity: She’s highly strung, manipulative and insecure. By modulating her voice and posture, Kelly also plays various other characters, including Flo — Irina’s best friend, whose almost canine devotion is rewarded with casual contempt — and a succession of hapless young men, portrayed a sympathetic, slouchy charm. Irina’s motivations are both aesthetic and political: She idolizes the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini — the director of the infamously graphic feature “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” — and wants to subvert the traditional power dynamics of objectification in the visual arts, by putting men on the receiving end of a violating gaze.Gillian Greer’s adaptation successfully transposes the unsettlingly blithe, almost jaunty narrative style that won over so many of the novel’s readers. (Despite garnering only modest coverage in the mainstream press, it became a viral hit on TikTok.) But some of the finer subtleties are lost. In the novel, Irina’s friends, while predominantly in her thrall, have occasional moments of clarity, in which they see her for what she was. Onstage, Irina metes out her sadism with relatively little pushback, but those telling little flashes of interpersonal tension would have lent themselves to stage adaptation, and Greer could have teased them out more.The set, by Peter Butler, is bare except for a single stool; a screen at the back of the stage shows a photograph of the garage Irina uses as her studio, switching images to denote different settings. But otherwise, and ironically — given that this is a tale about photography — the visual medium is almost entirely eschewed: We see no actual artworks, and events are relayed mostly through anecdote rather than action. The opening strains of Goldfrapp’s 2000 single “Lovely Head” provide an intermittent soundtrack, with doleful whistling and harpsichord creating a suitably gloomy atmosphere.The one-woman show format is apt, in a way, since the story revolves around an unreliable narrator. By standing in for all the other characters, Kelly as Irina has complete control over the narrative, and the absence of any other physical presence gives a literal expression to Irina’s self-absorption.But the format has its limitations. Toward the end of the show, there is a climactic scene in a gallery where Irina exhibits the photographs we’ve been watching her create. It’s an event that can make or break her career, and the place is meant to be teeming with people, but Kelly’s aloneness on the stage feels too palpable. Moreover, the production is poorly paced, and the gallery scene feels rushed, which exacerbates a sense of anticlimax. After all that leisurely buildup, the play’s momentum fizzles out in a matter of minutes.There is, of course, a tradition of thrillers in which a woman engages in the sort of creepy antics more typically associated with men, dating back to movies like “Fatal Attraction” (1987) and “Single White Female” (1992). The tendency, in recent years, has been to dignify the tawdry sensationalism of such stories by offering up pathological explanations for problematic behavior — a theme that has become drearily familiar in contemporary fiction — or, as in Emerald Fennell’s “Promising Young Woman” (2020), framing criminal exploits as morally legitimate revenge missions. In “Boy Parts,” Irina issues a pointed rejection of the trauma plot: “Maybe I just like to hurt people,” she says. She is bad, simply because she is bad.It’s refreshing, but it’s also something of a narrative dead end. There are no subplots here, no moral ambiguities, no ifs or buts. There just isn’t enough else going on to provide satisfying complexity or depth as Irina hurtles from one misdeed to the next in a steeplechase of cruelty and self-sabotage.The audience may project tongue-in-cheek irony onto it, if they so please. The trouble, in the end, is that a winking pastiche of schlock doesn’t look and feel all that different from schlock itself.Boy PartsThrough Nov. 25 at the Soho Theater, in London; sohotheatre.com. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      A Hairless Cat and Nickelback. What Could Be More Romantic?

      by

      When performers Kayla Pecchioni and Colin Barkell met at a Tonys viewing party, a kitten named Paw McCatney helped break the ice.On Sept. 26, 2021, Colin Ernest Barkell spotted Kayla Dianne Pecchioni stroking her hairless kitten at a screening of the Tony Awards. He was instantly attracted. Especially to the cat.In the lounge of the Chicago apartment building where theater fans had gathered for the show, “I was like, ‘I need to see this guy’,” he said of the creature. By the time “Moulin Rouge!” had racked up its final award that night, he was halfway in love with the blanket-swaddled kitten in Ms. Pecchioni’s arms. Three nights later, he fell fully in love with Ms. Pecchioni.Mr. Barkell and Ms. Pecchioni, who reside in Harlem, are performing artists. She is currently the swing role and an understudy for the character Sugar Kane in Broadway’s “Some Like It Hot.” Before he formed the rock band King Vaudeville last year, he was a professional Irish dancer.Their meet-up in the lobby of Marquee at Block 37 apartments was not random: That September, both had been cast in “Paradise Square,” a musical that started its run in Chicago before moving to Broadway in April 2022. Each had made their way to the lobby for the Tonys screening with their castmates 12 days into rehearsals.Colin Barkell, left, also performed in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKayla Pecchioni, in the coral-colored dress, performs in “Paradise Square.”Kevin BerneFor Ms. Pecchioni, 31, the viewing party had given rise to dueling instincts. “It was our first opportunity to hang out as a cast, which was great,” she said. But the gathering in an unfamiliar city with a roomful of newish faces was also anxiety producing. Paw McCatney, the kitten she had adopted four months earlier as an emotional support animal to help her through the stress and uncertainty of the pandemic, helped with that. A hairless cat, she said, is a reliable conversation starter.“It’s 50-50 for people,” she said. “They’re either, ‘I’m very intrigued!’ or ‘Get that thing away from me.’” That Mr. Barkell so instantly placed himself in the former category qualified him as new friend material right away.Ms. Pecchioni is from Louisville, Ky. Until she was 4, she lived with her maternal grandparents, Andrea and Frank Pecchioni, so her mother, Deedee Cummings, could finish her bachelor’s degree at Bennett College. “I had this fun hippie life with my grandparents,” she said. “We’d garden and listen to the Beatles. It was very, very lovely.”Soon after Ms. Cummings earned her diploma and returned to Louisville, she met Ms. Pecchioni’s stepfather, Anthony Cummings. She has two younger brothers, Anthony II and Nicholas.Binge more Vows columns here and read all our wedding, relationship and divorce coverage here.A love of musicals came early. “Chicago,” the 2002 movie, “rocked my world,” she said. But in high school at the Youth Performing Arts School of Louisville, she majored in dance. Later, at Northern Kentucky University, she focused on acting and singing, graduating in 2014 with a bachelor of fine arts degree in musical theater.The bride’s shoes and bouquet.Perri LeighTwo years of performing on Norwegian Cruise Line cruises followed, something she could have done forever, she said. “The only thing that broke me out of it was my mom kind of tapping me on the shoulder and saying, ‘You have bigger goals.’”In 2016, she moved to Inwood, in Manhattan, and days later booked her first gig as a singer with the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. A year later, she landed a leading role playing Nabulungi in “The Book of Mormon.”In lean times, before she was cast in “Paradise Square,” she worked retail jobs at stores including Lululemon. Her social life didn’t slip through the cracks. “I dated a lot” in New York she said. “But I always dated with the intention of finding my person, and nothing ever really stuck.”On Tonys night in Chicago, she didn’t see Mr. Barkell as a potential boyfriend. She had noticed him on day one of rehearsals, first because of his height — Mr. Barkell is six-foot-six — and then because of his baritone voice, which everyone else paid attention to, too. “It’s something the entire room took notice of, like ‘Who is this person?’” she said. But “I was like, he’s just a guy, you know?’” Once he had established his appreciation for Paw McCatney, he became just a guy she trusted enough to escort her on a sightseeing tour around Chicago.Mr. Barkell, 32, was born in Long Beach, Calif., and moved to Sterling, Va., with his parents, Leland and Nancy Barkell, and older sister, Erin, at the start of high school for his father’s career as lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marines. Though the family is “barely Irish,” he said, he had taken a few Irish dance lessons before he left California. As a teenager, he picked it up again, enrolling in classes at the Maple Academy of Irish Dance in nearby Vienna.“It was something I really loved to do, even though it’s not necessarily something that comes naturally to a tall person because there’s balance and coordination involved,” he said.Kennedy Caughell, a “Paradise Square” castmate and wedding guest, said, “I watched their love grow from this kind of nervous affection for each other to falling head over heels.” As a couple, “they heat up a room.”Perri LeighAt first he struggled to find his footing. But by 2012, when he moved to Galway, Ireland, for two years to further his dance studies, he had won multiple regional championships. A year later, he placed eighth in the World Irish Dancing Championships. His 2016 bachelor’s degree in geography and geographical information sciences from George Mason University took him seven years to complete. “I kept leaving to do dance,” he said.Like Ms. Pecchioni, he performed on cruise lines after college and later bounced between New York and Nashville working as a dancer and singer. Then, in 2021, “I got this crazy opportunity to be in a Broadway show, which wasn’t on my radar as something to pursue,” he said. The opportunity landed because of his background: “Paradise Square,” set in the Civil War era, is about an intersecting community of free Black people and Irish immigrants in New York’s Five Points neighborhood.On meeting Ms. Pecchioni in Chicago, his first thought wasn’t that they should date. “It’s such a roller coaster,” he said of his career, that dating anyone with intention seemed nearly impossible. But he changed his mind quickly on Sept. 29, when he arrived at her temporary digs for their tour of the city.Mr. Barkell gets choked up at the memory of the music she was playing when he knocked. “No way,” he said, when she opened the door. “You’re playing Nickelback?” Ms. Pecchioni braced herself for what she thought would be a polarizing conversation. “For whatever reason, it’s always been fun for people to hate Nickelback,” she said. But “I frigging love Nickelback.” Same with Mr. Barkell: “I said, ‘These guys have had hit after hit. They’re bangers. They should be respected.’”Ms. Pecchioni describes herself as “a big music person.” Hence Paw McCatney, a nod to her lifelong love of the Beatles, introduced to her by her grandparents. Mr. Barkell is also a Beatles fan. But both consider the Nickelback moment a defining one.The 140 guests ate beef tenderloin and chicken piccata at dinner. The bride is from Louisville, Ky., where the wedding was held. Perri Leigh“That was the spark,” she said. “There was a quick switch where it went from getting to know each other to something else.” At Chicago’s Riverwalk, over beers at the Northman Beer & Cider Garden, they established that both were single. Before they walked home, he kissed her. Then “it was, I’m going to spend every day with her. I knew it and I very nearly said that,” he said.A week and a half later, he told her he was in love with her. “A day after that I said, ‘So, you want to be my girlfriend?’” Falling for Ms. Pecchioni had delivered him clarity. “For me it was, ‘Oh, so this is what it’s supposed to feel like.’” Ms. Pecchioni felt the same.“Paradise Square” ran in Chicago until early December. For the holidays, the couple road tripped to Nashville, where Mr. Barkell was performing with a band that predated King Vaudeville, and then to Louisville and Calumet, Mich., where Mr. Barkell’s parents had retired. Both had given their families a heads-up about the seriousness of their romance. A sense of instant acceptance greeted them in both hometowns. “Everything naturally fell into place,” Ms. Pecchioni said. “That’s the theme of our whole relationship.”When the show made its Broadway debut last year, Mr. Barkell moved into Ms. Pecchioni and Paw’s Harlem apartment. When it closed in July, he was already planning to propose. His parents knew a jeweler in Michigan who helped him design a diamond and blue topaz toi et moi ring; on Oct. 3, after a night spent performing Irish dance at a charity event at Chelsea Factory, he presented it in their living room.“He was crying and I was screaming,” Ms. Pecchioni said. Her excitement aside, it wasn’t the proposal she had imagined. In her fantasy version, she looked down at her suitor as he dropped to one knee. In real life, “he’s so tall we were still eye-to-eye.”Both bride and groom studied and made a career of dance, so, not surprisingly, dance — including an Irish dance session — was a big part of their reception.Perri LeighOn Oct. 8, Ms. Pecchioni and Mr. Barkell were married at Hazelnut Farm in Louisville. Derwin Webb, a Pecchioni family friend and a judge of the Jefferson County Court, officiated a traditional ceremony for 140 guests that included several former “Paradise Square” castmates.When Mr. Webb pronounced them married, they looked out on a sea of damp-eyed, cheering loved ones. With a double-fist bump and happy tears of their own, the couple recessed down the grassy aisle to what both considered the role of a lifetime: as partners for life.On This DayWhen Oct. 8, 2023Where Hazelnut Farm, Louisville, Ky.They’re the Tops At a cocktail hour steps from the altar, guests were shown Southern hospitality in the form of a grazing table piled with fresh fruit, cheeses and caviar. For dinner, they chose from beef tenderloin and chicken piccata. Dessert was a strawberry cake topped with a Polaroid picture of the couple in their wedding clothes (a Martina Liana gown for her; a black tuxedo for him). “We always wanted to look like the cake topper couple at our wedding,” Ms. Pecchioni said.Step Lively After the couple danced with their parents, a dance floor was cleared for an Irish dance session led by Mr. Barkell. More than a dozen guests joined in, with Ms. Pecchioni making a late entrance to dance her way into the heart of the group.From Day 1 Kennedy Caughell, a “Paradise Square” castmate and wedding guest, was there the night the couple bonded at the 2021 Tony Awards. Back in Chicago, “I watched their love grow from this kind of nervous affection for each other to falling head over heels,” she said. As a couple, “they heat up a room.” More