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      ‘The Refuge Plays’ Review: A Surreal Family Saga on the Homestead

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      A family in exile contends with its future, and its ghosts, in Nathan Alan Davis’s new Off Broadway play starring Nicole Ari Parker.The unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” retreats, after an alienating odyssey through the South and Harlem, to live in a secret cellar. Underground is both an escape from oppression and a sanctuary where he can see himself on his own terms.Ellison’s 1952 novel is like gospel to the eldest matriarch in “The Refuge Plays” by the playwright Nathan Alan Davis. “Gotta make your own world in this world,” says Early (Nicole Ari Parker), a great-grandmother homesteading with her family. She can still chop firewood and hunt squirrels with a hammer, but when we first meet Early in this keen but unwieldy family saga, opening Wednesday at the Laura Pels Theater, her daily life has evolved beyond the need for such primal skills.Four generations of Early’s family are living together in the present-day Illinois wilderness, sharing a cabin built years ago by Early and her husband, Crazy Eddie (Daniel J. Watts). The too-small sofa and ratty armchair draped with quilts and crochet (the persuasively salvaged set is by Arnulfo Maldonado) indicate a modest home where her relatives choose to live out of kinship rather than necessity.Early’s great-grandson, Ha-Ha (J.J. Wynder), is the purest product of this social experiment: a 17-year-old who is deferential, bookish and comically naïve about girls. (Many of Davis’s character names are freighted with exaggerated symbolism.) Ha-Ha’s mother, Joy (Ngozi Anyanwu), tried striking out on her own when she was younger, but eventually returned. And Joy’s mother, Gail (Jessica Frances Dukes), the wife of Early’s deceased son, Walking Man, is the functional head of the household, though not for long: The spirit of Walking Man (Jon Michael Hill), a routine and welcome visitor, has just foretold her imminent death.Davis’s grand ambitions for “The Refuge Plays” are indicated by its running time — three hours and 20 minutes, with two intermissions — and by a title that suggests its three parts may not exactly cohere. The action rewinds to the past, revealing what drove Early into the woods, why others followed and what binds them together. (“If you don’t need me, leave me,” Early tells Walking Man.) Each act operates in a different mode: Sitcom conventions play out in the first (with Early as the armchair curmudgeon); surreal and Shakespearean elements dominate the second (with ghosts who incite an Oedipal revenge plot); and the third imagines a meet-cute in exile.Daniel J. Watts and Parker play a young couple who meet-cute in exile in an earlier section of the show.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis Roundabout Theater Company production, directed by Patricia McGregor and presented in association with New York Theater Workshop (where McGregor is the artistic director), benefits tremendously from bold interpretations of Davis’s characters. McGregor accentuates the humor Davis weaves throughout, and even mines more from between the lines, giving the production a sustained momentum. But the pace lags when Davis’s airy lyricism occasionally tips toward the sentimental, as in the heavy-handed second act. Early, for example, insists she has cried a nearby river with her tears.Parker (“And Just Like That …”) has an innate gentility that would seem an odd match for Early’s wild fate, but there is frisson in the juxtaposition and Parker lends Early a poised ferocity. Her flinty exterior is a formidable match for Eddie, the World War II vet who becomes her husband. Slightly sideways and nursing his own wounds, he’s a philosophical jester (Watts can land punchlines with the whites of his eyes) and proof that civilization inflicts violence in many forms.“The Refuge Plays” is populated with gifted storytellers, whose language is sticky with associations (like “if all your worries was ice cream” that melted at death’s door), and who can clearly see the ills of the outside world from the safe distance of their own. They conceive their identities in relation to one another, reflecting an organic sense of human responsibility, yet rib and curse one another like the members of any family would.Davis, whose speculative 2016 drama, “Nat Turner in Jerusalem,” was also produced by New York Theater Workshop, takes a sweeping view of Black life while isolating his characters from the social contexts and systems that would otherwise shape them. Some, like Early and Eddie, have their memories to contend with, while Walking Man, who was born in the woods, encounters human injustice from an absurd angle (beneath a heifer he tries to slaughter with a switchblade).In an attempt to imagine alternative ways of being, the playwright has smashed existing artistic forms and created new ones along the way. The result is provocative but messy: While the three acts interlock, they don’t propel each other forward, and Davis’s surfeit of ideas ultimately comes at the expense of a dramatic throughline. But cumbersome as it is, “The Refuge Plays” suggests the potential for stories to exceed the world’s limitations. Ellison would have to agree.The Refuge PlaysThrough Nov. 12 at Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 3 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Merrily We Roll Along,’ Finally Found in the Dark

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      Jonathan Groff, supported by Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, is thrillingly fierce in the first convincing revival of the cult flop Sondheim musical.To be a fan of the work of Stephen Sondheim, as Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, is “to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.” He meant not only that Sondheim’s songs are so often crushingly poignant but that the experience of loving them can feel unrequited. The shows they are in — he was reviewing the original production of “Merrily We Roll Along” — don’t always love you back.That was in 1981, when “Merrily,” with a problematic book by George Furth, suffered an ignominious Broadway debut of just 16 performances after 44 previews. No matter that Sondheim, responding to the story of a songwriter, had written his most conspicuously tuneful score to date, prompting pop recordings by Frank Sinatra (“Good Thing Going”) and Barbra Streisand (“Not a Day Goes By”). It was universally deemed a debacle.The debacle ended the working relationship between Sondheim and the director Harold Prince, whose five shows together in the 1970s — “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures” and “Sweeney Todd” — had redefined the American musical. With “Merrily,” they thought they were taking the form even further, with a complicated backward chronology and a cast of mostly inexperienced actors who played 40-ish adults at the start and grew into themselves at the end.After the show’s death by a thousand pans, Sondheim, saying he’d rather make video games, threatened to leave the theater entirely. Luckily, that didn’t happen — and “Merrily,” too, refused to give up, instead undergoing a seemingly endless series of unsatisfactory “improvements” that only seemed to confirm the hopelessness of making it matter.But with the opening of its first Broadway revival, after 42 years in the wilderness and the death of Sondheim in 2021, “Merrily” is no longer lost. Maria Friedman’s unsparing direction and a thrillingly fierce central performance by Jonathan Groff have given the show the hard shell it lacked. Now heartbreaking in the poignant sense only, “Merrily” has been found in the dark.When we meet him after the uplift of the gleaming overture, Groff, as the composer Franklin Shepard, is alone in an empty and unappealing liminal space. (The deliberately ugly sets, perhaps uglier than necessary, are by Soutra Gilmour.) He is wearing, and will throughout the show, a solemn undertaker’s outfit — black pants, black tie, white shirt. Even as everyone else changes with the times, in vivid costumes (also by Gilmour) that mark each notch on the timeline from 1976 to 1957, Frank always remains what he was: a one-man show. “Merrily” is the funeral he throws for his own ideals.Groff, right, with Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe as friends whose relationship sours in the Sondheim-Furth musical, which is getting its first Broadway revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe contrast between the pleasures that music can provide and the damage obvious in Frank’s demeanor immediately frames what follows as a solo psychodrama. Yes, Charley Kringas, who writes the words, and their friend Mary Flynn, a novelist turned theater critic, are there throughout, trying to encourage his better angels and corral his worse ones. But despite high-wattage, laser-focused performances by Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, they have no effect on him; they are clearly Frank’s pawns, willing or otherwise.How he destroys Mary, and nearly Charley as well, not without their assistance, is revealed as the musical’s formerly absent spine. In the first scene, a 1976 party for “Darkness Before Dawn,” a hack hit movie Frank has produced now that he no longer writes music, Mary is dispatched with barely a blink, or drunkenly dispatches herself.In the next scene, as Charley enumerates Frank’s misplaced priorities in a 1973 television interview — Radcliffe handles the song “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” superbly — Groff’s coldblooded rage is terrifying. Collateral damage along the way includes Frank’s first wife, Beth (Katie Rose Clarke); his second, Gussie (Krystal Joy Brown); his probable third, Meg (Talia Simone Robinson); his producer, Joe (Reg Rogers); and even his adorable young son. Who but a monster would betray such a punim?“Merrily” is thus no longer, as it seemed in 1981, the story of the gradual, almost inevitable dimming of youth’s sweet illusions but rather the story of their falsity in the first place. Frank is only devoted to Mary and Charley when he doesn’t have access to anyone more useful. To think he turned into that monster is a mistake: He always was one, as Sondheim clearly understood. “That’s what everyone does,” Mary sings once the three-way friendship has collapsed. “Blames the way it is/on the way it was/On the way it never ever was.”Friedman has thrown in her lot with the coruscating insight of the songs, making a tactical decision — successful but not without consequences — to deprioritize everything else, including the score’s brassy élan. “Merrily” Kremlinologists will want to know that the version onstage at the Hudson Theater, though slightly bigger than the Off Broadway version that opened at New York Theater Workshop in December 2022, is still somewhat underscaled for Broadway. It has a cast of 19 instead of 17 and an orchestra of 13 instead of nine.In Maria Friedman’s unsparing production, our critic writes, the trajectories for the secondary characters at last make some sense.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt takes more than even those larger numbers to deliver the Golden Age thrill that is, after all, the show’s milieu. (The original orchestra had 20 players.) Other than the costumes, the minimal design is more practical than inspiring; the sound of the band (playing new orchestrations by Sondheim’s longtime collaborator Jonathan Tunick) is especially unbalanced. The choreography by Tim Jackson too often seems charades-like. Some of the solo singing could be more effective, technically and thus emotionally.And then there is, as always, the book. Friedman has apparently made her peace with Furth’s final Frankensteined version; though its pieces are coarsely sutured and don’t quite line up, at least the thing walks. If in seeking to sweeten the main story it still leans too heavily on thin satire for laughs — morning news shows, Hollywood sycophancy — the trajectories for the secondary characters, especially Beth and Gussie, who are now more than cannon fodder, at last make some sense.In this production, though, it wouldn’t matter much if they didn’t. Radcliffe’s wit and modesty, combined with Mendez’s zing and luster, provide perfect settings for what is now (as it has never been previously) the inarguably central performance. Groff, always a compelling actor, here steps up to an unmissable one. With his immense charisma turned in on itself, he seems to sweat emotion: ambition, disappointment and, most frighteningly, a terrible frozen disgust.I don’t know whether that’s what Furth intended, but Sondheim is brutally clear about the insidiousness of great talent. In Frank, it eats everything it can find, eventually including itself. “Who says ‘Lonely at the top’?” he sings amid the end-stage cynicism of his loveless Bel Air party. “I say, ‘Let it never stop.’”What a strange and daring thing for the great and greatly missed Sondheim to dramatize, and for Friedman to forefront. I’d call it heartbreaking if the result weren’t finally such a palpable hit.Merrily We Roll AlongThrough March 24 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; merrilyonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Well-Made, and Massively Weird: A New Theater Season in Berlin

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      Recent premieres in the city ranged from a spare take on the recent Broadway hit “Prima Facie” to a dose of sheer artistic lunacy.It may be less polished and more rough-hewed than in New York, London or Paris, but Berlin’s theater scene is uniquely diverse, unpredictable and boundary-pushing. Buoyed by lavish public subsidies and boasting a fleet of remarkable actors and daring directors, it is also uncommonly accessible, thanks to low ticket prices and the growing popularity of English surtitles.This season, Berlin’s five main repertory theaters will present a total of 87 premieres, 29 of them at the Deutsches Theater, a storied playhouse that opened in 1883. Its new artistic director, Iris Laufenberg, opened her tenure by programing the German-language premiere of Suzie Miller’s “Prima Facie,” a recent hit on Broadway and the West End that won Tony and Olivier Awards, including for its star, Jodie Comer.The Hungarian director Andras Domotor stages the one-woman play as a chamber drama, with minimal props, stark fluorescent lighting and lots of empty space for his star, Mercy Dorcas Otieno. While the staging embraces a degree of abstraction rarely seen in commercial theater in London or New York, the show is also a vehicle for a prodigious and fearless actress.Otieno, who was born in Kenya, delivers a sweaty and emotionally naked performance as a lawyer who defends men accused of sexual assault, and then finds herself the plaintiff in such a case after she is raped by a colleague. She carries this intense 100-minute-long show on her capable shoulders and commands our attention long after the absorbing drama of the play’s first half gives way to clunky speechifying toward the end of the evening.A more compelling and disquieting exploration of sexual assault and trauma is “In Memory of Doris Bither,” written and directed by Yana Thönnes and running at the Schaubühne. The play is based on the true story behind the 1982 film “The Entity,” a hit horror flick that starred Barbara Hershey as a woman who claimed she was sexually assaulted by a malevolent spirit occupying her house in Los Angeles. In 1974, Bither, a single mother living with her four children, was at the center of a sensational investigation into paranormal activity that Hollywood later served up for entertainment.Performed in a mix of German and English (with surtitles in both languages), “In Memory of Doris Bither” does not so much recreate the alleged haunting as examine how the case — and the success of “The Entity” — reverberates. On Katharina Pia Schütz’s sparse set, the interior of a sterile suburban home, a wash of pink wallpaper, carpeting and curtains, the actors Ruth Rosenfeld, Kate Strong and Heinrich Horwitz obsessively sift through memories and try to make sense of Bither’s torment. The play’s horror, it becomes clear, is not supernatural but psychological.My only complaint about this absorbing and uncanny show is that it ended abruptly after 70 intense minutes. Then again, the play’s unfinished quality, its lack of resolution, may be intentional: Bither, who died in 1999, claimed the haunting was real until the very end.Heinrich Horwitz, Ruth Rosenfeld, and Kate Strong in “In Memory of Doris Bither” at Schaubühne.Philip FroweinAt the start of this busy theater season, new plays by two leading German-language writers were elevated by young, dynamic directors who crafted fluid and stylish productions for texts that were rather uneven.The novelist and playwright Rainald Goetz shot to prominence 40 years ago with the novel “Insane,” a nightmarish odyssey through a madhouse. Ever since, he has been a bad boy of the German literary scene, known for a sprawling literary blog and a novel about ’90s techno culture. His latest, “Baracke,” is a poetic, rambling and infuriatingly undramatic play about German history, family violence and the impossibility of finding love.For the work’s world premiere at the Deutsches Theater, the young Swiss director Claudia Bossard has served up a stylistically varied, epoch-spanning staging that provides a gloss on Goetz’s epic grouse while sometimes subverting it. Nine intrepid actors courageously follow their director into battle, even if the stakes of Goetz’s stream-of-consciousness text aren’t always clear.Over at the Berliner Ensemble, there was more focused critique in the prolific German-Swiss writer Sybille Berg’s “Things Can Only Get Better” (“Es kann doch nur noch besser werden”) a dystopian parable about A.I. and the Metaverse taking over our lives. It’s somewhere between a screed, a cautionary tale and a blackly comic satire.Perra Inmunda, Amelie Willberg and Meo Wulf in “Things Can Only Get Better.”JR Berliner EnsembleThe director Max Lindemann floods the stage with digital projections, while actors with illuminated smartphones glued to their hands cavort jerkily on a rotating platform. The characters receive an endless succession of Amazon packages, praise the “great men who have made our lives so easy: Bill, Jeff and, naturally, Elon” and brag about using ChatGPT to write plays. Everything Berg says does seem worrying, but her targets are a bit obvious and the dialogue is often glib.Like with “Baracke,” the production comes to the rescue, with movement, light, outlandish costumes and eclectic music by the Swiss D.J. Olan! It’s another step in the right direction for the Berliner Ensemble, the playhouse that has recently cast off its conservative reputation and emerged as one of the Germany’s most interesting theaters.It has become de rigeur to bemoan the loss of Berlin’s gleefully anarchic and experimental side, most clearly represented, perhaps, by the recent transformation of a famous former squat into the slick photography exhibition center Fotografiska. But Berlin can still be relied on to deliver some sheer artistic lunacy.“Baracke” at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.Thomas Aurin“Toter Salon” is a monthly series of short performances written and directed by Lydia Haider and performed in an intimate venue at the Volksbühne theater. During the most recent installment, “Blut,” Haider stood in front of a coffin and officiated a gleefully blasphemous mass, which was frequently drowned out by the droning and often earsplitting score, by the Austrian electronic music artist Jung An Tagen.In her satanic priest garb, Haider also approached the spectators with an ice bucket full of white wine spritzer, which she drizzled into the mouths of willing audience members. For those unwilling to get down on their knees to receive her communion, there were Bloody Marys in plastic shot glasses. Sloppy, underdeveloped and massively weird, the hourlong performance was an endurance test.Yet suffering though the plumes of cigarette smoke, cheap booze and earsplitting music, I was oddly pleased that Berlin’s theater scene could accommodate both this level of experimental insanity and a well-made play like “Prima Facie.” Berlin may have lost much of its famed wildness, but at least when it comes to theater, there’s something for everyone. More

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      ‘Holidays,’ a Madonna Musical, Pays Tribute to the Star

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      “Holidays,” the first musical to include the pop icon’s songs, arrives just days before her “Celebration” tour starts. But matching the star’s talents is a challenge.Two lovers belting “Open Your Heart.” A misunderstood woman exhorting a roaring audience to “Express Yourself.” A gay wedding extravaganza set to “Like A Prayer.”No, this isn’t a preview of the stage antics in Madonna’s highly anticipated “Celebration” tour, which starts Saturday in London, at the O2 Arena. In Paris, the French stage director Nathan Guichet has started the party early with “Holidays,” a plucky new musical inspired by the global pop icon.It’s a wonder no Madonna jukebox musical has made it to the stage until now. Her back catalog brims with highly theatrical songs, and if “Holidays” is any indication, it doesn’t take a big-budget, bells-and-whistles production to get admirers of the pop icon to buy tickets.This two-hour show, which is set to run at the Alhambra theater through Jan. 28, features just four performers and one (very pink) set.Guichet has woven 15 Madonna songs into a fictional script performed in French. It is centered on four childhood friends, with somewhat contrived results: A number of twists and turns clearly exist to shoehorn songs into the show. (A character somehow lands in San Pedro, the island mentioned in “La Isla Bonita,” solely to cue Madonna’s 1986 track.) Yet by the end of a recent performance, Parisians were on their feet, fully hung up on Madonna nostalgia.Madonna performing during her Blond Ambition tour, in Rotterdam in 1990. “Holidays” tries to capture the star’s many talents.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesThe French capital is an unlikely setting for the first Madonna musical. Still, the newfound popularity of American-style musicals in France means there is a hunger for new titles, while producing costs are lower than on Broadway. “Holidays” came together in a year or so with a budget hovering around $1 million, according to its lead producer, Stéphane Pontacq. (For comparison, Broadway’s “Jagged Little Pill,” a jukebox musical inspired by the music of Alanis Morissette, was capitalized for up to $14 million in 2019.)Guichet, who has directed and produced original productions including a ”reimagining of “The Snow Queen,” said in an email that he was inspired by an interview Madonna gave to The Daily Star newspaper in 2012. “I’d sanction my songs to be made into a musical,” she said at the time. “But I wouldn’t do it myself, I don’t think that would interest me.”“Holidays” premiered just as global curiosity surrounds Madonna, who turned 65 in August. In June, she postponed “Celebration,” her 12th world tour, because of what her manager called a “serious bacterial infection.” The U.S. leg of the tour has now been rescheduled to start in December, following a series of concerts in Europe.There is little doubt that “Celebration” will be a lavish affair: Delivering a show to remember is what Madonna does, and has been doing consistently for four decades. Part of the challenge, when staging a tribute like “Holidays,” is trying to match her many talents.It is clear from the singing numbers in “Holidays,” all set to recorded music, that Madonna’s history of gutsy performances has challenge the performers to go above and beyond. The four women who carry the show all have moments of brilliance, and work hard to make the often dubious script shine.In it, a young heiress who is about to get married, Louise, gathers three friends she hasn’t seen in well over a decade. Their passion for Madonna united the quartet as teenagers, and every year, on Aug. 16, Madonna’s birthday, they would come to mark that special “holiday.”They reconvene as adults in Louise’s childhood home in a French village, which features a full-on Madonna altar: an eccentric pink bedroom suite designed for the girls by Louise’s doting father, covered in portraits of their idol.It takes a while for the four characters to gel. Louise, played by Juliette Behar, starts off as a manic pixie blonde, a “Material Girl” proxy with an over-excited delivery. Of her three friends, one, Valentina (Fanny Delaigue), has become a mysterious, provocative star in the United States, not unlike Madonna herself; another, Nikki, is a travel blogger with a history of family abuse. The fourth, Suzanne, is the proverbial underdog, who stayed in their local town and is stuck in underpaid jobs.The production weaves together Madonna songs into a fictional story centered on four childhood friends.NeibaPhotoThroughout, the main thing the four women have in common is Madonna. What “Holidays” gets right is what the star represents for many women: A sense of freedom and empowerment, the belief that they could break free of existing norms. It quickly becomes clear that Louise and her future husband don’t see eye to eye, and her friends encourage her to think beyond what is expected of her. Similarly, in a nod to Madonna’s longstanding L.G.B.T.Q. activism, a gay romance links two of the four friends, and blossoms movingly with the song “Secret.”“Holidays” isn’t a Madonna-backed venture. Promotional material for the production names her as infrequently as possible and the playbill’s plot summary only refers to the “famous pop star” who inspired the main characters. Luckily for the producers, it doesn’t take much to telegraph the mystery star’s identity. The poster art for “Holidays” closely mirrors one of Madonna’s best-known portraits, with her head tilted back and eyes closed on the cover of her 1986 album “True Blue.”Still, as fan tributes go, “Holidays” is a welcome reminder that Madonna’s catalog has rare staying power — and offers space for others to make their mark onstage. As Suzanne, Ana Ka brings serious vocal chops to the table, and lends heart to a character that could easily feel miserabilist.And the charismatic Nevedya, a budding musical star in France who recently headlined a production inspired by Josephine Baker, takes the role of Nikki and runs with it. A consummate dancer and singer, she brought striking arm flourishes and even a death drop to a “Vogue” number that otherwise felt a little timid, and in her hands, “Papa Don’t Preach” became a powerful plea to a father attempting to clip her wings.Madonna herself will be in Paris with “Celebration” in November. Until then, “Holidays” is an entertainingly upbeat stand-in. More

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      Review: In ‘Bite Me,’ Taking Aim at Familiar Teenage Tropes

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      Eliana Pipes’s new play is too pat to convincingly explore the societal imbalances resulting from race, class and gender.Good girls falling for bad boys is a cornerstone of high school dramas. Usually the story goes something like this: She sticks to the rules while he breaks them, and their meeting inspires a mutual coming-of-age.In “Bite Me,” by the playwright Eliana Pipes, the reasons a studious girl can’t afford to slip up while her crush has the privilege to slack off hum beneath their budding friendship like the drone of a fluorescent blub.The pair share custody of a neglected supply closet (the set is by Chika Shimizu), where Melody retreats to hide her tears from the queen bees and Nathan stores the petty contraband he swipes for fun, not because he needs money. As Nathan (David Garelik) makes clear, he has plenty of cash to pay for the homework he buys from Melody (Malika Samuel), a top student and an obvious outsider, who rides the bus for an hour each way to their suburban school from an unnamed city.This 90-minute two-person play, a co-production with Colt Coeur that recently opened at the WP Theater, is set in 2004 (as illustrated by Sarita Fellows’s fresh-from-the-mall costumes and Tosin Olufolabi’s alt-pop playlist). The fact that Melody is Black and Nathan is white does not immediately seem to influence their interactions as obviously as the conventional gender roles that have long governed the social and sexual politics of American teenagers: that every girl ought to be pretty and sweet, and guys should act tough and nonplused.Melody and Nathan each appear intent on conforming to such expectations, and, under the direction of Rebecca Martínez, the actors play convincing iterations of recognizable types (the minority overachiever primed to act out; the self-destructive slacker with a heart). But Pipes is also interested in how race, class and gender can play a role in determining who needs to hustle for the opportunities that others freely squander. (This is a theme in her work: Her play “Dream Hou$e,” produced by multiple regional theaters last year, is a surreal critique of gentrification.)The full extent of Melody’s isolation doesn’t become clear until their 10-year reunion, more than three-quarters through the play, when the revelation lends electricity only in retrospect to what otherwise seems, as the title “Bite Me” might suggest, like a trope-heavy, ill-fated infatuation.The fantasy of returning to the scene of one’s adolescent torment as a hot and successful adult is well-trodden, and Pipes’s use of it here is a bit too pat. Still, sometimes ridding closets of their ghosts is the only way to move forward.Bite MeThrough Oct. 22 at WP Theater, Manhattan; wptheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Solo Shows in Theater This Fall: Patrick Page, Isabelle Adjani and More

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      For theatergoers who love uncrowded stages, the coming months bring a range of works, from musical comedies to Shakespearean dramas.Solo shows have been around as long as there has been theater — longer, actually, if we count storytelling by a campfire. There is an elemental intimacy about the format and, let’s face it, an economic appeal at a time of belt-tightening.Despite their seemingly restrictive approach, one-person productions come in many shapes and forms: tales told by a single narrator and ones in which the performer embodies many characters, for example; dramatic yarns; and comic efforts that can flirt with stand-up. The last hybrid seems to be enjoying a kind of golden age, illustrated by the successes of Mike Birbiglia (“The Old Man and the Pool”) and Alex Edelman, whose recent Broadway hit, “Just for Us,” will be at the Curran Theater in San Francisco, Oct. 26-28.The coming months are a boon for theatergoers who love uncrowded stages, starting with the fall iteration of the cornucopia known as the United Solo Theater Festival (through Nov. 19 at Theater Row). Here is a selection of notable shows.Interrogating biographySometimes, it takes one icon to take measure of to another. The French actress Isabelle Adjani (“The Story of Adèle H.,” “Camille Claudel”) engages with Marilyn Monroe, myth and woman, in “Marilyn’s Vertigo.” The show, presented in French with supertitles as part of the Crossing the Line Festival, is framed as a dialogue with the Hollywood star, and was written by Adjani and Olivier Steiner. Oct. 12-13; FIAF Florence Gould Hall, Manhattan.John Rubinstein in Richard Hellesen’s “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground,” adapted from Eisenhower’s memoirs, speeches and letters.Maria BaranovaIn a different register, John Rubinstein returns for an encore of Richard Hellesen’s “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground,” a dive into the life of the military leader-turned-president that has proved quite popular. Through Oct. 27; Theater at St. Clement’s, Manhattan.One’s a crowdThe formidable Patrick Page is a versatile actor, but let’s face it: He is best known for portraying antagonists, including the Green Goblin in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” and Hades in “Hadestown.” Maybe it’s his basso profundo voice? In “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain,” directed by Simon Godwin, Page — whose command of his craft our critic described as “stupefying, effortless” — scrutinizes those classic characters. This might be the only time we ever see his take on Lady Macbeth. Through Jan. 7; DR2 Theater, Manhattan.Following his acclaimed solos “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes” (2015) and “I Hear You and Rejoice” (2018), the Irish writer and actor Mikel Murfi is bringing to New York the trilogy’s conclusion, “The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey.” Murfi portrays a range of characters from County Sligo, and performs all three pieces in repertory. Audiences can see any of the shows, or all of them. Oct. 24-Nov. 18; Irish Arts Center, Manhattan.Lameece Issaq has written for ensembles in works like “Food and Fadwa,” but her new piece, “A Good Day to Me, Not to You,” is a solo. In the show, presented by the Waterwell company and directed by Lee Sunday Evans (“Oratorio for Living Things”), Issaq plays a 40-something former dental lab technician reconsidering her life as she moves into a rooming house run by nuns on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Nov. 8-Dec. 9; Connelly Theater, Manhattan.Stand-up or theater?The comedian Caitlin Cook returns to SoHo Playhouse with her show “The Writing on the Stall.”Mindy TuckerGabe Mollica and Caitlin Cook are usually called comedians, but their work blurs the line with theater. Both performers are returning to the stage with encore runs of pieces that have been building a buzz. In “Solo: A Show About Friendship,” Mollica explores his realization that he has buddies but no close friends, and tries to dig into the reasons for that. Our ideas and hangups about masculinity may well play a part. Oct. 10-28, Connelly Theater Upstairs, Manhattan.Cook’s “The Writing on the Stall” is inspired by the gold mine of comic material found on the walls of bar bathrooms. She has turned graffiti spotted over the years into a show integrating songs (a nice micro-trend among comedians; see also Catherine Cohen), bits of anthropology and autobiographical sharing. Oct. 16-17, SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan.Birth of a performerEdgar Oliver, a longtime fixture of the downtown New York theater scene, revisits his days at the Pyramid Club in his new work, “Rip Tide.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFour years ago, Ben Brantley described Edgar Oliver’s body of work as a “singular series of elegiac performance pieces,” which essentially amount to an oral history narrated by one person. Oliver’s new piece, “Rip Tide,” revisits his days performing at the Pyramid Club, the East Village boîte where renegade drag, rock, spoken word and performance art thrived in the 1980s and ’90s. Through Oct. 28; Axis Theater, Manhattan.In her review for The New York Times, Laura Collins-Hughes pointed out how Melissa Etheridge turns Circle in the Square into an intimate music club for her concert-cum-memoir show, “My Window,” now on Broadway. Some of the rocker’s most fun anecdotes cover her early years playing lesbian spaces from her native Kansas to California. Through Nov. 19, Circle in the Square, Manhattan.Table for how many?Geoff Sobelle most recently performed his dinner party as theater spectacle at the Edinburgh Festival.Iain MastertonTechnically speaking, Geoff Sobelle’s “Food,” which is part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, involves a lot of people. Sobelle (“The Object Lesson”) is the host of a dinner party at which audience members sit at a very large table for what is described as “a meditation on how and why we eat.” Since “Food” was created with the magician Steve Cuiffo (“A Simulacrum”), it is no spoiler to mention it involves entertaining trickery. Nov. 2-18, Brooklyn Academy of Music.Repertory of onesPlaywrights Horizons is making smart use of its space by presenting three solos in repertory. Drawing from years as a tutor, Milo Cramer wrote and performs in “School Pictures,” a play with music that looks at our education system via a range of New York students. The comedian Ikechukwu Ufomadu, who opened for Catherine Cohen at Joe’s Pub this summer, brings more of his surreal musings in “Amusements.” And Alexandra Tatarsky’s “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” which involves clowning and nudity, looks to be the wild card of this bunch — emphasis on wild. Nov. 2-Dec. 3, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan. More

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      ‘Dicks: The Musical’ Review: Hitting High Notes, Going Lowbrow

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      Larry Charles’s musical comedy is so hellbent on being outrageous that it just ends up being tiresome.The funniest part of “Dicks: The Musical” sneaks in at the very end, when outtakes are interspersed with the credits. Nathan Lane, in particular, comes across as a living illustration of the words “game” and “trooper.” He and his co-star Megan Mullally, pros that they are, elegantly suggest hints of disbelief at just how they ended up in a movie in which his character spits pre-chewed cold cuts into the gaping maws of hideous puppet monsters and hers complains that her vagina has flown away (at one point it attaches itself to someone like the facehugger in “Alien”).On paper this sounds intriguing, in a Troma Entertainment kind of way, and maybe one day this musical comedy will turn into a cult film like that company’s “Surf Nazis Must Die” or some of the jetsam perpetually washing up at pop culture’s edges.For now this movie from the hip indie studio A24 simply exerts itself as it tries way too hard to join the hallowed ranks of exploitation favorites extolling schlock values.Directed by Larry Charles (“Borat”), the film was adapted by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp from a show they performed at Upright Citizens Brigade in the mid-2010s. The two writers also play the supposedly identical twins Trevor and Craig, who were raised separately after their parents (Lane and Mullally) split up. The siblings, whose straightness is too aggressive to not be conspicuous, coincidentally work at the same company, where they compete for the title of best salesman and the attention of their boss, Gloria (Megan Thee Stallion, who gets the movie’s single best number, “Out-Alpha the Alpha”).The new colleagues’ relationship is frosty at first: “You have long hair like a girl,” Craig tells Trevor; “you have short hair like a lesbian girl,” Trevor replies, expertly wielding the rapier wit of a peeved eight-year-old. But eventually, the pair team up to reunite their folks. One potential obstacle is that their father, Harris, is decidedly not heterosexual. Cue the song “Gay Old Life,” in which Harris details his fabulous queer existence and introduces the aforementioned creatures, his beloved Sewer Boys. (Jackson and Sharp wrote the passable songs with Karl Saint Lucy and Marius de Vries, and their staging is mostly anemic.)Once Lane and Mullally, who plays the lisping mom Evelyn like a 1930s movie’s idea of a Park Avenue eccentric, enter the story, they hijack it from Jackson and Sharp, which is not necessarily a bad thing but also destabilizes the movie.Despite brief instances when it spills into surreal madness, most notably in a scene set in a sewer, the film is rudderless — which is a polite way to say limp. Its only point is highly self-aware pseudo-gonzo provocation, peaking in a denouement that feels both surprising and inevitable, and looks as if it had been engineered to deliberately unsettle some viewers. Some keyboard warriors and craven politicians might take the bait, while the rest of us will be left wondering why Lane and Mullally didn’t get a song with Megan Thee Stallion.Dicks: The MusicalRated R for language, sexual single entendres, cartoonish taboo-breaking and offenses against musical theater. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Introducing Nathan Lane, the Hip New Face of A24

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      When you’re pondering actors associated with the indie-film company A24, your thoughts may run to the young, hot and impossibly tousled.In years past, this stable of dewy ingénues has included the likes of Robert Pattinson (“Good Time,” “The Lighthouse”), Riley Keough (“American Honey,” “Zola”) and Lucas Hedges (“Lady Bird,” “Waves”). But it’s time to make way for the studio’s newest muse, a three-time Tony winner whose key roles this year in a pair of A24 films — Ari Aster’s trippy “Beau Is Afraid” and the gleefully silly “Dicks: The Musical” (opening Friday) — offer the delightful opportunity to turn to your cool nephew and exclaim, “Oh, he’s in this?”Rest assured, the he in question is just as surprised. “I’m now the poster boy for A24,” said Nathan Lane, 67, over a recent morning coffee date in Los Angeles. “Who would have guessed?”One of Broadway’s most beloved actors, Lane had his breakout moment on the big screen in 1990s studio fare like “The Lion King” and “The Birdcage,” which mined his musical-theater talents and expansive comic sensibility for all they were worth. But though Lane has worked continually in the theater and on TV ever since, the film industry hasn’t always known what to do with him, which makes his current renaissance all the sweeter: He was the first choice for his roles in both of those A24 envelope-pushers, even though they’re utterly unlike anything he’s done before.Take “Beau Is Afraid,” released in April, a three-hour mind-bender about filial anxiety that had Lane come in for a midmovie face-off with an intense Joaquin Phoenix. (SAG-AFTRA strike rules prohibit Lane from talking about it, but the guild gave him a waiver for the new film.) Or sample “Dicks,” a proudly filthy queer musical that asks Lane to spit deli meat at puppets and ensures that for the rest of his life, he will share an IMDb page with the rapper Megan Thee Stallion.“Don’t you love show business, when these things can happen to a little boy from Jersey City?” Lane quipped.Lane’s co-star Aaron Jackson said, “Now that people like us are coming of age and getting to write stuff, it’s like, what about casting one of the most brilliant actors we’ve ever had?”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesThe Lane-aissance could either be a feat of timing or the beginning of a trend. But it’s also a reminder, not long after Michelle Yeoh found Oscar-winning acclaim in A24’s “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” that the studio’s coolness can come from more than the minting of new stars: It can be just as rewarding to pluck well-known veterans and toss them into a world that’s unexpected and wild.“To me, he’s the foundation,” said Aaron Jackson, who co-wrote and co-stars in Lane’s new film musical with his comedy partner, Josh Sharp. As a child, Jackson would do an impression of Lane as the “Lion King” meerkat Timon to make his grandfather laugh; when he was older, he got a DVD of Lane in a filmed version of the 2000 play “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and watched it on a near loop. “Now that people like us are coming of age and getting to write stuff, it’s like, what about casting one of the most brilliant actors we’ve ever had?”Though Jackson, Sharp and the director Larry Charles were eager to get Lane into their movie, the actor wasn’t initially sure what to make of the project. A hard-R spin on “The Parent Trap” that Jackson and Sharp based on a play they used to perform in the basement of a Gristedes, their film casts the New York comedians as long-lost twins who conspire to reunite their daffy parents. Hayley Mills never had it so hard, though: Here, dear old Mom (Megan Mullally) is an eccentric shut-in with a detached vagina, while Dad (Lane) is a newly out bon vivant who’s uncomfortably devoted to the two disgusting sewer creatures he keeps caged in his living room.“When I read it, I said to my agent and manager, ‘Are you serious with this?’” Lane recalled. The script had made him laugh, but he worried the comic situations were too outrageous, even for him. To assuage his fears, Lane met Sharp and Jackson at an Indian restaurant near his house, where their comic sensibilities clicked and cosmopolitans were served until the house lights came on.“It went on for four hours, and I fell in love with them and wanted to adopt them,” said Lane, who was ultimately won over by the eagerness of Jackson and Sharp to fly in the face of decorum at a time when “Don’t Say Gay” bills were being written into law. “We’re going to say whatever we want,” Lane said, channeling the duo’s brio. “And you’ll have to live with it.”Still, it’s one thing to read those out-there scenes and quite another to actually perform them, as Lane found when he showed up on set. Many of his big moments revolve around those unnerving sewer creatures, a pair of diapered reptilians that his character dotes on like an attentive mama bird. (Hence the regurgitated deli meats.) Though the filmmakers considered hiring Cirque du Soleil gymnasts to play the sewer boys, they ultimately settled on two puppets, which may be an even creepier touch.Lane, left, with Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Ryan in “Beau Is Afraid.”Takashi Seida/A24Lane with, clockwise from top right, Josh Sharp, Aaron Jackson and Megan Mullally in the new film. “When I read it, I said to my agent and manager, ‘Are you serious with this?’” Lane said.Justin Lubin/A24“I’m not crazy about puppets — I’ve worked with them in the past, it’s nothing but trouble,” Lane said, adding under his breath, “I’ll be getting hostile letters from Basil Twist.” In order to play the scenes with true affection despite the twisted context, Lane endeavored to think about the sewer creatures as though they were his character’s pet corgis.“It has to be very grounded and it has to be subtle,” Lane explained, “even when you’re spitting cold cuts at two ugly puppets in a cage.”The closing-credits blooper reel suggests that was a tough task: In more than a few blown takes, Lane wonders aloud how the hell he ended up in such a surreal situation. (Asked by the director to spit more deli meats into the puppets’ mouths, Lane playfully pronounces it the worst of “all the humiliations I’ve experienced in my years of show business, and they are legion.”) Even during our coffee, Lane was unable to describe an emotional clinch with the sewer creatures without bursting into laughter.“You can’t even explain it!” he said. “I was crying and holding these puppets and kissing them goodbye, thinking, I can’t believe this is happening.”Sharp praised Lane’s ability to still dial into those scenes and commit to something real. “There’s two or three sneaky little heart moments in the movie and Nathan drives all of them,” he said. “He’s a fabulous actor.”Lane just hopes people will notice. “I mean, this may have killed it,” he joked, “but if it led to other things in film, interesting stuff, that would be great.” A more robust movie career is something Lane wants but has always been wary of: Wouldn’t you feel skittish if you gave one of the most finely calibrated comic performances of the ’90s in “The Birdcage” and the only two film scripts you received afterward were for “Mouse Hunt” and “Mr. Magoo”?Though Lane felt the stage could offer him a more expansive suite of roles, including his most famous part, as Max Bialystock in “The Producers,” even there, the appearance of typecasting could make him bristle. In 2010, while playing Gomez Addams in a Broadway musical version of “The Addams Family,” Lane read an article in this paper by Charles Isherwood that deemed him the greatest entertainer to appear on Broadway over the past decade. While it was meant as high praise, the description rankled him.“Amy Sedaris likes to call herself an entertainer, but for some reason it really bothered me,” Lane said. “It’s not like I spent 48 years in Ringling Bros. — I had done plenty of plays, the work of Terrence McNally or Jon Robin Baitz or Simon Gray. I felt like I had shown a lot of different colors along the way, but you become known for a handful of things.”Determined to shake things up, Lane emailed his friend, the actor Brian Dennehy, who was mulling a new adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” Though that shattering drama wasn’t the sort of production he would immediately come to mind for, Lane pitched himself for the tricky role of Hickey, the salesman who forces his fellow bar mates to confront dreams long deferred.Despite acclaimed performances in the ’90s in “The Birdcage” and “The Lion King,” Lane had trouble getting traction in Hollywood films.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesDennehy was intrigued, and the two men signed on for a production that played at BAM in 2015. “It changed the way I approach everything now,” Lane said. “I wanted to be scared again. I wanted to think, I don’t know if I can do this.” From Isherwood, Lane earned a “lusty bravo,” though the review that mattered most was the kind one he received from Dennehy, who died in 2020. “He was a very loving and supportive mentor, and I miss him very much,” Lane said, tearing up.He hopes more roles akin to Hickey are in his theatrical future, though he noted, “I don’t think they would be handing me that part in a film.” So why is it that Lane can be widely recognized as an unparalleled multitalent and yet good movie offers can be so hard to come by? I asked his new co-star Jackson, who replied with a mordant chuckle.“Well, Hollywood does hate gay people, even still,” he said. “I mean, they pretend that they don’t, but they do.”Still, he hoped that Lane’s A24 hot streak indicates that a younger generation of people, raised on Lane’s performances, have more exciting ideas of what do with him than the old guard Lane initially encountered: “He’s so good at acting that now they’re like, ‘Maybe we should let a gay person be a star.’”In the meantime, there’s “Dicks.” “Our little baby is going out to the real world where people can’t wait to be offended,” Lane said. “When I saw it, I just said, ‘Well, either it’s going to be this cult hit, or we’ll all be deported.’”Though he isn’t sure how the film will be received — “I’d like to show this to Mitch McConnell, then he’d really freeze” — Lane still offered some marketing suggestions. He told Sharp and Jackson they should record a video to warn that watching the film in a theater could make the audience gay, then ask a few willing football players to serve as the guinea pigs: “You send in Aaron Rodgers and a couple of others, and then they come out of there in caftans.”The idea was vetoed when they heard that the recent comedy “Bottoms” might also be planning a turn-you-gay marketing angle, but Lane was just happy to have the company. “If you can get away with ‘Bottoms’ — if you can have a high-school comedy about teenage lesbians starting a fight club — you certainly can have ‘Dicks: The Musical,’” he said.With that remark, our coffee date was over. And though we had met in the early morning, at an hour when some party-hearty A24 stars might finally be crawling into bed, Lane assured me it was no trouble at all.“This was like therapy,” he said. “I cried, I laughed, I talked about ‘Dicks.’” More