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    ‘I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan’ Review: What Are You Waiting For?

    Mona Pirnot’s comic ode to the downtown artist doubles as a meditation on the precariousness of playwriting as a creative life.Nothing has made me regret Atlantic Theater Company going dark for more than two months this year like “I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan,” the absolute tonic of a show that reopens the company’s second stage.Written for and performed by the downtown wonder David Greenspan, who has collected a half-dozen Obie Awards over his singular career, it was originally scheduled to open the day after Inauguration Day. But when previews were about to start, the stagehands went on strike, Atlantic Theater indefinitely postponed the production and we, the public, temporarily lost out on a source of comfort and delight in a time of chaos.With a union contract ratified, we have it now, and frankly the abrupt suspension of this comedy by Mona Pirnot (tonally a complete departure from her play “I Love You So Much I Could Die”) has only enhanced its effect, adding a stratum to what was already a multilayered affair. Because this clever, funny play is both an attentive ode to Greenspan’s extraordinary artistry as a playwright-performer and an unsparing meditation on the psychic and financial precariousness of playwriting as a creative life.It is, then, very much insider theater — yet it generously serves, too, as an initiation for the unfamiliar: into Greenspan’s exquisitely expressive whirlwind solo performance style as he plays a small gaggle of millennial women, and into the costs and payoffs of pursuing artistic ambition at full tilt.Theatergoers can witness Greenspan’s expressive whirlwind solo performance style as he plays a group of millennial women onstage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSet in Brooklyn in the summer of 2022, the action takes place in the apartment of Emmy, a playwright freshly cognizant of the danger of being too broke to afford health insurance. She has invited a few writer friends over to do a reading of her new work in progress — a litmus test that, no pressure, will tell her whether to give up theater forever. Mona, a fellow playwright obsessed with Greenspan ever since she saw him perform “The Patsy,” is the first to arrive, followed by Sierra, who writes for television and consequently has gobs of cash to throw around.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Brings a Beloved Song to Life on Broadway

    One night in 1984, Compay Segundo, the Cuban singer and guitarist, heard in his dreams what would become his signature song.“I woke up hearing those four sensitive notes,” Segundo recalled later on. “I gave them a lyric inspired by a children’s tale from my childhood, ‘Juanica y Chan Chan.’”A hypnotic account of peasant life in Cuba, “Chan Chan” has a peculiar power, with four circular, mesmerizing opening chords that make it instantly recognizable. It gained a regional following when it was cut by the guitarist and singer Eliades Ochoa. But a recording of the song, in 1996, by a group of celebrated Cuban musicians who had been assembled for an album to be called “Buena Vista Social Club,” would become a phenomenon.Now more than 25 years after its release, the best-selling world music album of all time has made it to Broadway in a new musical also titled “Buena Vista Social Club.” “Chan Chan” is among eight of the album’s 10 songs featured in the show and, perhaps not surprising for such a dramatic and mysterious track, it plays a crucial role in a pivotal moment in the story.During the “Chan Chan” number, the young singer Omara (Isa Antonetti) is deciding whether to leave Cuba with her sister or remain in Havana and perform the traditional music that has a hold on her heart.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs the album of mostly older Cuban standards became a global sensation upon its release in 1997, Segundo’s song — about sifting sand by the sea and clearing a straw path along a journey to Cuban towns — became a standout all its own. “Chan Chan” was never released as a single, but the opening track has been streamed more than 250 million times on Spotify, almost three times more than anything else on the album. (That number is roughly the same as Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart” and Hanson’s “MMMBop,” both No. 1 hits in 1997.) More

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    ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Brings the Thrill of Music Making to Broadway

    A new musical inspired by the 1997 hit album gives a fictional back story to the veteran performers of the Havana music scene.The spirit of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is evident in its opening scene. Audience members have barely settled into their seats before a group of onstage musicians strikes up the number “El Carretero,” with the rest of the cast gathered around and watching. Some are leaning in from their chairs, others get up and dance on the side. The music is center stage, and we immediately understand its power as a communal experience that binds people.Therein lies the production’s greatest achievement. For a place where music so often plays a crucial role, Broadway hardly ever highlights the thrill of music making itself.Oh, there have been shows that have effectively pulled the curtain on the process — David Adjmi’s play “Stereophonic” takes place inside recording studios, and the most effective scenes in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” are set in one as well. But the interconnections between musicians, songs and a society have rarely been evoked as vividly, and as lovingly, as they are in “Buena Vista Social Club,” which opened on Wednesday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. (This improved version follows the show’s Off Broadway run at Atlantic Theater Company, which premiered in December 2023.)As its title indicates, this production, directed by Saheem Ali, is inspired by the 1997 hit album “Buena Vista Social Club,” on which veterans of the Havana scene performed beloved sons, danzones and boleros from the traditional Cuban repertoire. Many of those songs and others are in the musical (a booklet in the Playbill introduces each one, with illustrations by the flutist Hery Paz), along with most of those musicians and singers. Or at least versions of them are. Tellingly, the book by Marco Ramirez (“The Royale”) identifies the characters by their first names only, as if to underline that this is more of an evocative flight of fancy than a biomusical — Ramirez makes the most of musical theater’s notoriously loose relationship with facts.The action travels back and forth between 1956, in the tense time leading up to the toppling of the autocratic Batista regime, and 1996, when the young producer Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham) assembles a backing band for the older singers he’s brought into the studio. (The British executive producer Nick Gold and the American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder played important parts in the “Buena Vista Social Club” album and the Wim Wenders documentary that followed, but the musical doesn’t mention them. Instead it focuses on de Marcos’s role in putting together the band and singers.)The show toggles between 1996 and 1956, where the young performers Compay (Da’von T. Moody), Omara (Isa Antonetti) and Ibrahim (Wesley Wray) bond over their love of traditional Cuban music.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Striking Stage Crews Reach Agreement With Atlantic Theater

    The deal will be scrutinized by New York’s other Off Broadway theaters, which the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees has been working to unionize.Ending a two-month strike, the prestigious Atlantic Theater Company and the labor union representing its crew members said Monday that they had reached a tentative agreement that they anticipated would allow the theater to resume performances.The agreement will be closely scrutinized by New York’s other Off Broadway theaters because the union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, has undertaken a major drive to organize those stage crews. The crews include the stage hands who move scenery and the people working in audio, video, hair, makeup, wardrobe, props, carpentry and lighting.The union and Atlantic Theater announced the tentative agreement in a joint statement Monday afternoon but said it was pending approval by union members. The contract would cover nearly 100 workers, many of whom are not full-time staff but are hired to work on individual shows.The parties said they would not describe the details of the agreement until the workers were notified, but they said the agreement featured “significant compensation increases” as well as “comprehensive benefits,” which a union official said would include both health insurance and pension contributions.The workers are no longer picketing. Chris Boneau, a spokesman for Atlantic, called it “a fair agreement” and said the theater was hoping to soon announce a plan to resume producing shows later this spring.The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, commonly known as IATSE, has already reached agreements with the producers of two commercial Off Broadway musicals, “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Titaníque,” and is seeking labor contracts at two more Off Broadway nonprofits, the Public Theater and Vineyard Theater.The unionization push comes at a tough time for nonprofit theaters, and some producers fear that it will further drive up their costs as they struggle with inflation and diminished attendance. But workers say that times are tough for them too, and that they deserve better pay and benefits than have traditionally been provided Off Broadway.Atlantic, founded in 1985, is a midsize company with two theaters in Chelsea and the birthplace of several musicals that went on to win the Tony Award for best musical after transferring to Broadway, including “Spring Awakening,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo.” Atlantic also staged the first production of the stage adaptation of “Buena Vista Social Club,” which is now in previews on Broadway and opens next week.Atlantic and IATSE said in their joint statement that, if the contract is approved as expected, Atlantic would become “the first not-for-profit theater company producing solely Off Broadway in history to have a union agreement covering production classifications.”Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan Theater Club and Roundabout Theater Company, large nonprofits that have both Broadway and Off Broadway houses, have unionized stage crews.Jonas Loeb, the union’s communications director, called the tentative agreement “a step forward for Off Broadway” and said that “after over a year of discussions, it’s great that we have this agreement.” More

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    As Off Broadway Crews Unionize, Workers See Hope, Producers Peril

    Workers say the move is overdue, but theater companies fear it will drive up costs in a wounded sector that has yet to recover from the pandemic.A unionization wave sweeping across Off Broadway is poised to reshape the economics of theater-making in New York — for workers as well as producers.Striking stage crews have idled the nonprofit Atlantic Theater Company — the birthplace of the musicals “Spring Awakening,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” which all transferred to Broadway and won Tonys. The strike, which began last month, comes amid a drive to unionize stage hands and crews at Off Broadway theaters.Nonprofit companies and producers fear that the unionization push could drive up costs at a moment when many are running deficits and staging fewer, and smaller, shows. Second Stage Theater and Soho Rep both recently moved out of their longtime venues and opted to share space with other companies. Another measure of the sector’s shrinkage: In 2019 there were 113 shows eligible for the Lucille Lortel Awards, which honor Off Broadway work; there are just 59 eligible shows so far this season, which, for the Lortels, closes at the end of March.Many workers see the unionization of stage crews as long overdue, noting that the sector has come a long way from its scrappy origins. Now that many Off Broadway theaters have become mature institutions with elevated production values, workers say, it is time for them to pay better wages and offer benefits to their crew members.“The stakes are incredibly high,” said Casey York, the president of the Off-Broadway League, which represents theater owners, managers and producers, “not just for those directly involved, but for the future of this vibrant sector, which has always been a cornerstone of New York’s cultural identity.”“Grief Camp,” a new play by Eliya Smith, had begun previews at Atlantic when it was shut down by the strike. It has since been canceled, along with Mona Pirnot’s “I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Welkin’ Review: A Strong Ensemble and a Story That Resonates

    A somber yet witty play set in 18th-century England is a clever perversion of a courtroom drama that features strong performances from an ensemble cast.The final word of “The Welkin” — a soft “oh” of realization that left the theater breathless — is more of an utterance, the coo of an innocent young babe. But the speaker isn’t a child; she’s a grown woman.And she’s accused of murder.It’s England in 1759, just around the time everyone is buzzing about the arrival of Halley’s comet. This woman, Sally Poppy (played by Haley Wong), and her lover are accused of the murder and dismemberment of the young daughter of the rich family for which Sally worked. She’s set to hang, but there’s a hitch: Sally claims she’s pregnant.“The Welkin” is a kind of courtroom drama or, rather, a clever perversion of such; technically we don’t see the courtroom, just a dim, dungeonlike room nearby where a forum of 12 matrons has been convened. They’re not Sally’s final adjudicators (that job is for the men, after all), but the jury ruling on the women’s issue in this case: whether Sally’s actually pregnant.A little bit “The Crucible” and a lot bit the 2022 film “Women Talking,” in all the best ways, “The Welkin,” which opened on Wednesday at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, is a somber yet witty examination of how women labor — with housework, with children and with a society of men that doesn’t serve them — and how they negotiate their assumed responsibilities with their desires.“The Welkin” successfully depicts these women as unique individuals, representing women from different strata of society, and with different prejudices and viewpoints. Each one is memorable, from the stately outsider, Charlotte Cary (Mary McCann), a colonel’s widow in a stylish crown of a hat, to Mary Middleton (Susannah Perkins), an awkward, superstitious young woman who is worried only about getting home to her crop of leeks.Sandra Oh (center) is a standout of the ensemble cast. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘El Otro Oz’ Review: There’s No Place Like (Your Ancestral) Home

    A tender reimagining of “The Wizard of Oz” follows Dora, an angsty American teenager who initially rejects her family’s Mexican heritage.Every dramatization of “The Wizard of Oz” seems to offer a pilgrimage to the Emerald City. But “El Otro Oz,” the inspired and imaginative interpretation now playing at Atlantic Stage 2, introduces additional journeys that are ultimately more poignant and profound.When I first saw this Latin-flavored retelling of L. Frank Baum’s tale two years ago, I was most impressed by its comic inventiveness. (TheaterWorksUSA presented it then as a revised, more bilingual version of its own 2011 show “The Yellow Brick Road.”) That 2022 production, retitled “El Otro Oz” (Spanish for “The Other Oz”), included a pet Chihuahua named Toquito, a wizard who’s a disco diva and, in place of the withered Wicked Witch of the West, the sultry, flamenco-costumed Bruja del Oeste, whose magical castanets evoke a predatory rattlesnake.None of these creative flourishes have changed, but whether it’s because of world events or the nuances of Melissa Crespo’s direction, I found this new production by Atlantic for Kids (the young people’s division of Atlantic Theater Company) as tender and moving as it is ebullient and funny.With a book by Mando Alvarado and Tommy Newman, and music and lyrics by Newman and Jaime Lozano, the show focuses on Dora (Nya Noemi, passionate and clear-voiced), an angsty adolescent in contemporary Chicago. More an admirer of Beyoncé than of merengue, the American-born Dora deeply resents her Mexican immigrant mother’s plans for a quinceañera, the traditional celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday. After she reluctantly dons a voluminous pastel dress for the occasion, Dora wails, “I look like cotton candy!” (Stephanie Echevarria designed the vivid costumes.)Before long, a mysterious healer appears, telling Dora she is only “half of the whole.” (Christian Adriana Johannsen juggles this role expertly with that of the seductive bruja.) Then the teenager is swept into El Otro Oz, where, according to one of its residents, her family’s picnic table has crushed the witch’s sister “flat as a Dorito.”Once Dora acquires the enchanted ruby slippers, she must, of course, reach the wizard. But she’s also beginning to understand that she has embraced only part of who she is. As she explores El Otro Oz with new friends — the Scarecrow (Adriel Jovian); the Iron Chef (Eli Gonzalez), who travels with a food cart instead of an oil can; and the meek Mountain Lion (Danny Lemache) — she comes to appreciate the heritage that she has often cruelly rejected. The score, which blends mariachi-style melodies with emotive show tunes, offers ample opportunities for Dora to practice traditional dance, and young audiences may find that Alessandra Valea’s joyful choreography makes it hard to sit still.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Review: Bringing a Classic Record to Life

    A new Off Broadway musical adds the thrill of intimacy and the weight of history to the Cuban songs popularized on a 1997 album.The boleros, sons, danzóns and other popular Cuban song forms captured on the hit 1997 album “Buena Vista Social Club” — and in a 1999 Wim Wenders documentary about the musicians who made it — are a marvel: diabolically catchy, lively yet poetic, mesmerizingly complex beneath their seeming simplicity.Those are qualities that few jukebox musicals have going for them. Usually, if the borrowed tunes are catchy, they’re prosaic. Or if poetic then dreary. Or if complex then irrelevant.But the full-of-riches jukebox musical “Buena Vista Social Club,” which opened on Tuesday at the Atlantic Theater, avoids all those problems. Particularly in its rendition of the “Buena Vista” songbook — including eight numbers from the original album and seven from later iterations — the production, directed by Saheem Ali, enhances (instead of merely exploiting) the music with the thrill of its liveness. The social dancing that accompanies some songs is often just as exciting. And if the narrative draped over those high points is a bit droopy, and the staging a bit choppy, they also give contour and context to what would otherwise be just a concert, albeit a joyous one.Like the documentary, the musical’s book, by Marco Ramirez, uses the “Buena Vista” recording sessions, at a Havana studio in 1996, as its framework. There we efficiently meet the veteran musicians who have gathered under the direction of a young Cuban producer, Juan De Marcos (Luis Vega), to make an album of “songs from the old days.” These musicians include the singer-guitarist Compay Segundo (Julio Monge), the pianist Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling), the tres player Eliades Ochoas (Renesito Avich) and the singer Ibrahim Ferrer (Mel Semé). Together they will prove, as De Marcos puts it, that “Mozart’s got nothing on us.”So far, so semi-true. But Ramirez soon begins his departure from the facts by establishing the singer Omara Portuondo (Natalie Venetia Belcon) as the star of the sessions and thus of the show. (In reality, though she was already a Cuban national treasure, she sang just one track on the original album.)Accurate to life or not — and perhaps it’s better to think of the musical as an adjacent story in the Buena Vista universe — she’s a fine theatrical creation: a musician of great emotion (Compay calls her “the Queen of Feeling”) and a woman of commensurate hauteur. When Juan tries to introduce an unexpected woodwind riff to her “scorching rendition” of the song “Candela,” she cuts him right down — and you don’t want to get cut down by the regal Belcon. “No one ever recorded a ‘scorching rendition’ of anything with a flute,” she says.Omara is the musical’s portal to the past, which Ramirez, best known for another quasi-historical work — “The Royale,” inspired by the prizefighter Jack Johnson — traverses at liberty. We thus meet Omara not only in 1996 but also 40 years earlier, as a young woman on the edge of stardom in a double act with her sister, Haydee (Danaya Esperanza).But while the Portuondo Sisters perform kitschy numbers for American tourists at the Tropicana nightclub, musical and political changes are brewing beyond its palmy grounds. Both can be found at the namesake Buena Vista Social Club, “a space where smoke and sweat fill the air,” according to a stage direction, and “where beer bottles keep clave rhythm.”The musical’s fizzy club dances, choreographed by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck, are a delight, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRamirez overburdens this past tense with heavy subplots: gunrunning, colorism, revolution, betrayal. The more contemporary scenes are correspondingly haunted by regrets and ghosts. (The main characters are all represented by younger versions of themselves; Omara and Haydee get dance doubles as well.) It’s too much story for a two-hour show, especially in the second act, when the weight of Cuba’s painful history threatens to smother the songs. They don’t need help to bare the sadness in their souls.Still, even if you don’t understand their Spanish lyrics, the songs prevail. Never forced into literal service as signboards for the plot but instead performed atmospherically by characters who would actually sing them, they lend coherence and depth to the story with their exquisite harmonies, delirious polyrhythms and raw brass. The exceptional music production — the work of a team led by Dean Sharenow and Marco Paguia — enhances that effect with arrangements appropriate to the new contexts and the intimate space of the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater. The blessedly live-sounding sound design is by Jonathan Deans.And though I was less impressed by a series of balletic duets for the young sisters, which feel labored, the fizzy club dances are a delight. As choreographed by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck, they match and heighten the music with intricate close partnering as limbs find ever more intricate ways of closing the space between bodies.Ali’s staging, on a unit set by Arnulfo Maldonado that aptly suggests some of the cramped spaces in which the story transpires, does not yet reach that level. It is too often difficult, with 17 cast members and nine core musicians on the small and flatly lighted stage, to tell which location we’re in: studio, club, hotel, esplanade. Sometimes which era, too, though Dede Ayite’s taxonomy of caps and fedoras, high-waisted pants, flowy tunics and sock-hop skirts (not to mention showgirl kitsch) offers delightful clues.Cramped, too, is much of the action between the songs, lending a hectic feeling to material that wants more thoughtfulness or less bulk. Seeming to acknowledge that, the show ends weirdly and abruptly, as if cut off in mid-thought by a proctor’s stopwatch.But when the staging, singing and playing come together, whether in exuberance or sorrow, I was happily reminded of another musical about music that originated at the Atlantic: “The Band’s Visit.” (David Yazbek, that show’s songwriter, is credited here as a creative consultant.) In such moments — the hypnotic “Chan Chan,” the ear-wormy “El Cuarto de Tula,” the heartbroken “Veinte Años,” the gorgeous “Drume Negrita” — you really do feel the past harmonizing with the present. What Compay says is true: “Old songs kick up old feelings.” Even, as in the showstopping and, yes, scorching “Candela,” with a flute.Buena Vista Social ClubThrough Jan. 21 at the Atlantic Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More