Atlantic Theater Co

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Cornelia Street’ Review: A Musical With Local Ambitions

      by

      An affectionate elegy to a Greenwich Village restaurant, Neil Pepe’s production at Atlantic Theater orders everything on the menu.The midcentury novelist Dawn Powell, Greenwich Village’s great chronicler, wrote that there are three stages a person goes through when negotiating its twisty streets — first enthusiasm (“Bohemia — oh thrills!”), then cynicism (“Bah! Village theatricals!”), then resigned acceptance (“After all the Village is the Village when all’s said and done”).“Cornelia Street,” a fidgety, aimless new musical, is set on one of the Village’s quainter lanes. It goes through every stage, all at once. Written by Simon Stephens with music and lyrics by Mark Eitzel and directed by Neil Pepe for the Atlantic Theater’s subterranean space, the show is simultaneously celebration, deflation and a neighborhood elegy in a minor key. It plays out amid and atop the rickety tables and sturdier bar of Marty’s Café, a struggling Village restaurant. The show has deep affection for this (mostly) invented place and for the majority of its habitués. But like a lot of tourists who have walked these winding streets, it loses its way.At the play’s diffuse center is Jacob (Norbert Leo Butz), a onetime punk who has spent 28 years as the cafe’s chef. Jacob lives above the storefront with his teenage daughter, Patti (Lena Pepe, the director’s own daughter), and has recently developed higher culinary ambitions, trying to sneak orders for Iberico ham and venison under the crotchety nose of the cafe’s owner, Marty (Kevyn Morrow). How the empty restaurant has remained solvent long enough for Jacob to turn gourmet is one of the play’s many mysteries. Scott Pask’s set and Stacey Derosier’s lighting suggest a snug, homey, stay-all-day space of tin ceilings and mismatched wood. But no one frequents it, save for Mary Beth Peil’s former opera singer, Ben Rosenfield’s puppyish tech bro and George Abud’s preening cabdriver.The first act finds Marty’s suddenly threatened: The landlord wants to sell. Meanwhile, Patti has trouble at school. Philip (Esteban Andres Cruz), the sole waiter, has an audition. Misty (Gizel Jiménez), a woman from Jacob’s past, fleeing her own demons, turns up, too. Jacob embroils himself in a drug-dealing scheme that also demands embezzlement. If landlord disputes, lost souls and white-collar crime seem like too much story to stir into a chamber musical, well, yes. This is before the complications of the second act: a death, a disappearance, a musical number devoted to the glory days of Studio 54. (For some of us, this will conjure unhappy memories of the Atlantic’s last musical flop, “This Ain’t No Disco.”)Stephens doesn’t seem to believe in all this action, often stopping it cold so that characters can offer some blue-plate philosophizing.Here is Jacob’s: “You ever get one of those days when you really thought you knew where you were and what you were doing with your life and then you realize you had no [expletive] idea?”And here is Misty’s: “Life, huh?”This is the third collaboration between Stephens and the singer-songwriter Eitzel, the founder of the mordant alternative rock band American Music Club, following 2010’s “Marine Parade” and 2015’s “Song From Far Away.” Neither show has played New York, but reviews suggest that these previous partnerships have been successful ones. Which makes sense. Stephens’s enduring concern, in plays from “Punk Rock” to last year’s “Morning Sun,” is with people who don’t feel at home in the world or who must learn that any home they thought they had was made of straw and sticks. And the characters in Eitzel’s songs are very rarely anything like satisfied or secure.Scott Pask’s set and Stacey Derosier’s lighting suggest a snug, homey, stay-all-day space, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut here, under Pepe’s makeshift direction, the songs and the book scenes feel at odds. (Pepe is another frequent collaborator of Stephens, though only his straight plays.) Whatever its contrivances, “Cornelia Street” is ultimately a work of naturalism, whereas the dreamy, gloomy musical interludes suggest something more abstract and symbolic. Instead of swelling during the musical numbers, the show seems to shrink, embarrassed. The arrangements and orchestrations are expansive and surprising, but the staging feels apologetic. Butz, with his rocker voice and dad vibes, and Jiménez, an ingénue with edge, are supple performers, singing as casually as they might speak. They manage these tonal shifts with ease. The rest of the cast, moving to Hope Boykin’s swishing, slashing choreography, seem to struggle. That their characters feel less like people and more like types can’t help.The Atlantic has a productive history of investing in small, off-center musicals — “The Bedwetter,” “Kimberly Akimbo,” “The Secret Life of Bees,” and most significantly “The Band’s Visit” and “Spring Awakening.” This wants to be one more. (In its more creditable moments, it also gestures toward another intimate, single-set musical, “Once.”) Here, the approach feels tentative. Sometimes offstage voices are used, sometimes not. Lighting transforms the space during a song or remains constant. Pepe seems like a man who is not enjoying what he has ordered, but can’t bring himself to send it back.“Cornelia Street” owes an obvious debt to the Cornelia Street Cafe, a Village institution that shuttered in 2019 because of rent hikes. (This homage had apparently upset Robin Hirsch, one of the cafe’s founders. But Hirsch, invited to lead a storytelling event alongside Stephens and Eitzel on one of the show’s dark nights, has since been brought into the fold.) Friendly and unpretentious, the place made you feel like a local, even if you could never afford an apartment nearby. If only “Cornelia Street” could offer some of that same welcome and sense of purpose. If ever a musical needed to stop and ask for directions, it is this one.Cornelia StreetThrough March 5 at Atlantic Theater Company Stage 2, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘The Far Country’ Brings a Neglected History Closer

      by

      Early 20th-century San Francisco and Guangdong, China, overlap in Lloyd Suh’s artful examination of the emotional price of immigration.A young man in a fine suit outlines the terms of the deal: The ocean crossing will be maddening, the detention that follows worse. Even assuming release, a person of Chinese descent will feel no welcome in America. The “Gold Mountain” that has been promised? It’s a mirage. And yet, if one wishes to pay for passage, the young man will offer — for a very high price — his American name and scant protection.This is the devil’s bargain at the center of Lloyd Suh’s fluid, artful “The Far Country,” at the Atlantic Theater Company. Set in the early decades of the 20th century, in both China’s Guangdong Province and San Francisco, it examines the cost — literal and emotional — of immigration. Those who have suffered in their pursuit of a larger, more prosperous life might, the play suggests, inflict that same suffering on others. Then again, they might also find redemption.The drama, directed with sensitivity and spirit by Eric Ting, begins in 1909. Han Sang Gee (Jinn S. Kim) sits at a table in an interrogation room. A more recent iteration of the Chinese Exclusion Act has made his citizenship tenuous, and Gee must substantiate his American birth. He has difficulty proving his status to a skeptical white interrogator (Christopher Liam Moore), as his papers have been destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake. But a sympathetic interpreter (Whit K. Lee) gives him subtle aid. (Translation is another interest of Suh’s.)Most spectators’ sympathies will incline immediately toward Gee, owing both to Kim’s sturdy affability and to our innate compassion for anyone demeaned or distrusted by officialdom. But Suh and Ting aren’t interested in easy answers; there’s a more sophisticated moral calculus at play here.Citizenship is, among other things, a moneymaking tool. Its possession will lead Gee to China, where he can offer others the chance at an American life, however constricted that life may be. In Guangdong, Gee encounters a widow (Amy Kim Waschke) and her teenage son, Moon Gyet (Eric Yang, in an impressive Off Broadway debut). Moon Gyet, in his turn, will make a vexed proposal to a young woman (Shannon Tyo, a Suh regular, always dynamic).Clint Ramos’s set, with shadowed illumination by Jiyoun Chang, appears simple at first: a square platform backed by a dark mirror. But no element — walls, floor, mirror — is exactly what it seems. Like our sympathies, the set shifts and shifts again. Fan Zhang’s rumbling sound design suggests layers below the surface.As with Clint Ramos’s shifting set, no element of Ting’s production is exactly as it seems.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAt the center of the play’s overlapping worlds is Angel Island, a detention center that opened in 1910 as a curb to immigration. The majority of its detainees were Chinese men, men like Moon Gyet, who undergoes his own interrogation there. Some eventually gained entry; others were deported. In 1970, nearly three decades after the center had closed, a park ranger discovered poems etched into its walls, lyrics of despair and love that had re-emerged from beneath putty and paint. Here is one: “Nights are long and the pillow cold; who can pity my loneliness?/After experiencing such loneliness and sorrow,/Why not just return home and learn to plow the fields?”Like Suh’s other plays (“The Chinese Lady,” “Charlie Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery”), “The Far Country” meditates on ethnicity and identity. It is also an act, loving and sorrowful, of reclamation, salvaging the history of early generations of Chinese Americans. These men left their fields for the same reason almost any immigrant does: the promise of a better life. Suh is specific in his imagining of the particulars of the Chinese American, but as America is a nation of immigrants, there is space here for others (including others like me, whose great-great-grandparents came from Eastern Europe) to trace vestiges of their own histories.“The Far Country” ends in 1930. That ending isn’t necessarily abrupt. But it does feel somewhat arbitrary. Why not 1950? Or 1970? There is so much more history to recover. More love. More promise. More pain. Moon Gyet claims that the strenuous physical labor required of an immigrant is nothing compared with the work of being Chinese in America. This takes patience and focus, he says. A serious mind and a necessary grace. Suh possesses these qualities in full. He has more work to do, more stories to tell.The Far CountryThrough Jan. 1 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      The ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Creative Team on Assembling Their Quirky Puzzle

      by

      The toilets wouldn’t stop flushing. The playwright David Lindsay-Abaire was trying to talk about his collaboration with the composer Jeanine Tesori and the director Jessica Stone on their musical, “Kimberly Akimbo,” and in the background, the janitorial staff members of the Booth Theater were cleaning the bathrooms.“I said to Jeanine,” he said, trying to keep a straight face as another toilet flushed, “I wish we could write a musical the way that I write a play, where there’s not a team of other people involved.”Another flush.Tesori stood up, muttering, “I have to close that door myself.” Which prompted Stone to bend over in laughter.“Thank you,” Stone said, as Tesori returned to her seat in the basement lounge of the Broadway theater.“It is on theme,” Lindsay-Abaire said. “Nothing better.”“Isn’t that enough?” Tesori responded. “Doesn’t that say everything?”For the creative team behind “Kimberly Akimbo,” the chaotic energy of this morning fit the musical itself, whose concept seems — on the page, at least — too off-kilter for a shiny Broadway marquee.Victoria Clark, center, as Kimberly with Alli Mauzey, foreground left, and Steven Boyer, foreground right, who play her parents.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA musical dramedy set in New Jersey, “Kimberly Akimbo” tells the story of a teenager named Kimberly (played by Victoria Clark) who has a disease akin to progeria, which causes her to age at a hyperspeed. At 16, she looks 72.It’s far from a tragedy, though, thanks in part to the quirky characters: Kimberly’s pregnant mother is a hypochondriac; her best friend, Seth, loves anagrams and plays the tuba; and her aunt is trying to persuade her to commit some white-collar crimes. Through it all, even though people with her condition have an average life expectancy of 16 years, Kimberly learns to be young and unafraid after years of taking on adult responsibilities.“I love stories that weave together pain, and hilarity and absurdity. And that, to me, is David and Jeanine, and their work and their sensibility,” said Stone, 52, who has been attached to the musical since 2019. “It’s exhilarating.”When the show premiered Off Broadway last winter at Atlantic Theater Company, Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called it a “funny and moving new musical.” Led by the producer David Stone (no relation to the director), the show sold out its run, and a Broadway transfer was quickly announced. (As the producer of musicals like “Next to Normal” and “If/Then,” Stone is no stranger to an out-of-the-box concept.) Now “Kimberly Akimbo” is in previews, and scheduled to open on Nov. 10.Tesori, 60, and Lindsay-Abaire, 52, first worked together on “Shrek the Musical” in 2008, and for the past seven years, transforming Lindsay-Abaire’s 2001 play “Kimberly Akimbo” into a musical was their passion project. The focus and intimacy of that partnership, he said, made the musical “the easiest thing I’ve ever written.”He compares writing a musical to working on a puzzle. (He loves puzzles and word games; the show’s title is an anagram.) “It is like dumping a bunch of puzzle pieces onto the table,” he said. “It’s hard when you say, ‘Hey, 20 people, come on in and let’s do this puzzle together.’ But if it’s just the two of you — ‘I have this corner’; ‘I’m working on the edges; let’s get to the middle’ — then it comes into focus. And seldom does that happen with a musical.”Stone, Tesori and Lindsay-Abaire gathered to discuss their process on the first day of previews. These are edited excerpts from the discussion.Clark and Justin Cooley, who are reprising their roles on Broadway. “The two of them give each other really beautiful gifts,” the show’s director said of the actors.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDavid, what were the instincts that led you to write “Kimberly Akimbo” 20 years ago?DAVID LINDSAY-ABAIRE I was writing what I hoped would be a great part for an actress that I loved and adored: Marylouise Burke [who starred in the play Off Broadway in 2001]. I wrote a part for her because she and now Vicki [Victoria Clark] have such an amazing young spirit about them, even though they’re actresses of a certain age. And so I wanted to write an amazing part for a great actor. But I also wanted to explore mortality and what it means to truly live in the moment. What I probably didn’t know at the time was that I was also writing about my family in many ways, and things that I was afraid of and angry about.How do you mean?LINDSAY-ABAIRE Uh oh …JEANINE TESORI I don’t know if you can open that door.LINDSAY-ABAIRE Look, I love my family very much. And they messed me up just enough for this play to be what it is. [Tesori pats Lindsay-Abaire’s arm, remarking, “Wow.”] I don’t feel messed up by them. But I feel messed up just enough to be the writer and be the person that I am.TESORI That’s what makes you a storyteller. Healthy enough to write, damaged enough to want to write.The play didn’t have monologues for Kimberly, but it did have monologues for her parents. Was creating the musical a way to create more interiority for her?LINDSAY-ABAIRE During “Shrek,” I said to Jeanine, “I would love to write a musical the way that I write a play, where it would just be us figuring it out for as long as we needed to figure it out.” And then Jeanine said, “Well, how about one of your plays? I think ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ could be a musical. It has a really deep, complicated inner life. Those characters want to sing to me, their emotions are deep. And I like how funny it is.”By making it a musical, we had a way into the characters that the play did not have. We could crack open Kimberly’s heart, and let her express all of those feelings and emotions and fears and desires and longings, that are only subtext in the play.TESORI I feel it in my body when something sings, I can’t put it into words. And these characters, they reminded me of people I grew up with, they reminded me of people in my family — and not always people who are center stage, especially in a musical.Jessica, how did you direct Victoria Clark, who is 63, and Justin Cooley, who plays her boyfriend, Seth, who’s now 19? They come across as being the same age.STONE: It actually is thrilling because you have two people on opposite ends of the spectrum. The skill that Vicki brings to the process of exploration can’t be created in Justin. I watch him being elevated by the discipline and skill, and her surgical approach to figuring out Kim and mapping out Kim’s world and behavior. He starts to sort of mimic that work ethic and he starts to explore and basically copy that approach.His complete honesty, tabula rasa, complete truthful, youthful, wide-eyed innocence and sweetness — it’s really hard to create that once you’ve lived, you know, 35 more years. So the fact that she’s in his orbit, this beautiful, innocent, youthful presence also washes over her. So the two of them give each other really beautiful gifts.Speaking of teenagers, there’s a duality to the show. It’s about youthfulness, but it’s also about mortality. As experienced artists, how do you keep that youthful tone intact?TESORI It’s part of being of a certain age, and what we have all experienced at this age. I’m older than these two. We share the same sensibility of humor. But there’s also this sense, like, we’ve been through some [expletive]. And our friends have been through some [expletive], and we’ve lost people. And if you’re lucky, you’re able to bring both of those things to an audience so they can recognize it. Because I think sometimes because musicals have artifice, they can seem artificial. And they’re not. They are the greatest art form.STONE We’re all parents. And we all have been close observers to adolescents. That adds a little bit to the glaze of authenticity, and a little understanding of the behavior, needs and pitfalls.LINDSAY-ABAIRE The first time in, I was really accessing my teenage years and stuff about my parents and my family, but really homing in on the Seth character who is very close to me in very many ways. I’m now the father of teenage boys, and I just had access to the parents in a way that I didn’t have when I wrote it. I understand much more acutely the fear of losing a child. The whole dynamics between parents and teenagers that I was sort of making up 20 years ago, now I know it deeply and personally. And I also got the chance to put all of my high school friends up onstage. Those four kids in the show choir were not in the play.“If you can have a gaggle of teenagers skipping out of the show, and then this grumpy old man with tears in his eyes — that’s victory,” said Lindsay-Abaire, right.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesDo you imagine this as the kind of show that parents can take their teens to?STONE ​​My kids, 13 and 15, were here, and they loved it. Because I’m so invested in the parent side of the story, and in the mortality side of the story, and in the how-do-you-choose-to-live-your-remaining-days-on-this-planet side of the story, I forget about the delight, the tremendous luxury of hope and time, that teens have. And that enables so much in terms of imagination and promise. [My sons] think it’s hilarious. They love Deborah [Kimberly’s aunt, played by Bonnie Milligan], because they love a rule breaker. They also thought it was really moving. They were really intrigued by the relationship between Kim and Seth, not because it’s a traditional love story. But they really responded to that deep friendship.LINDSAY-ABAIRE Nothing has made me happier than seeing gaggles of teenagers really love the show. But at the same time, at the end of the Atlantic run, a grumpy old man was walking up the aisle and he looked at me and I thought he’s going to criticize the piece. And he said, “I just want you to know that I’m going to go out and live life more fully tomorrow.” My eyes welled up and then he was gone into the night. If you can have a gaggle of teenagers skipping out of the show, and then this grumpy old man with tears in his eyes — that’s victory.In the musical, Kimberly’s aunt sings an upbeat number about how to commit mail fraud. Jeanine, how did you write a catchy song about white collar crime?TESORI [laughs] It’s exposition, which is generally not great for a song. But then I thought, “Oh, if we make it really sort of furtive, and it’s got a little bit of a muted guitar thing, and it’s sort of like Peggy Lee, but maybe on a very, very off day …” It’s having it be fun, so that she can convince the teens to be part of it.LINDSAY-ABAIRE It’s a teaching song. We were talking about “The Rain in Spain” [from “My Fair Lady”], but it’s about check washing. It’s just messed up enough. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      In ‘Heart Strings,’ the Ties That Bind a Family (and a Culture)

      by

      Atlantic for Kids’ new play explores sibling relationships, using the delicate weavings of a Hawaiian craft.Every good story requires a thread. Some writers have difficulty finding theirs, but not Lee Cataluna. The line that runs through her latest play, “Heart Strings,” comes from the real knots and tangles of a centuries-old Hawaiian craft.That technique, known as hei (pronounced HAY), consists of creating figures and patterns by manipulating a single loop of string. Although often compared to cat’s cradle, hei is more than a children’s game; it is a symbolic language. Each design has meaning: for instance, a star, the moon or the night becoming day.Seated at an outdoor cafe table on a recent afternoon in Manhattan, Cataluna, who is of Portuguese and Indigenous Hawaiian ancestry, placed a cord around her hands. Deftly moving her fingers, she transformed the string into a narrow rectangle with two triangles at its center.“So this is the house, right?” she said of the rectangle. “Then it breaks apart, and the two children run away.” She pulled her hands wide, and the triangles shot in opposite directions, then disappeared. “That’s the story I have to write,” she said she thought when, during research, she discovered this traditional hei. “I have to figure out what that means.”Different characters create that hei and others in “Heart Strings,” which runs through Oct. 23 at the Linda Gross Theater in Chelsea. Presented by Atlantic Theater Company as the first Atlantic for Kids production since the pandemic lockdown, it welcomes young audiences — the public on weekends and school groups on weekdays — with a drama that is both culturally specific in its details and universal in its themes.“I thought about what kind of issues would resonate with kids and their parents,” Cataluna said. Sibling rivalry immediately sprang to mind.But in “Heart Strings,” the meaning of “sibling” is complicated by another cultural tradition. The play’s central characters — Hoku, 10, and Mahina, 6 — are sisters according to hanai (huh-NYE), a Hawaiian custom in which couples take in children who are not their own. Hoku’s grandparents are raising both girls, and the reserved, studious Hoku, who once welcomed the infant Mahina into the family, now resents the high-spirited, questioning kindergartner she has become.“You’re not my real sister,” Hoku says, shutting out the younger girl with a force that threatens to shatter their household as utterly as that hei collapsed in Cataluna’s hands.Born on Maui, Cataluna remembered hei, but she did not choose it as a recurring motif to dazzle New Yorkers. She originally wrote “Heart Strings” for her teenage son’s theater group in Honolulu. His school had requested a play incorporating something tangibly Hawaiian, much as Kathryn Schultz Miller’s “A Thousand Cranes,” which the students had previously performed, celebrates Japanese culture through origami.When the coronavirus pandemic ended the school’s plans to present “Heart Strings” at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Cataluna successfully submitted her work to ReImagine: New Plays in TYA. (TYA stands for Theater for Young Audiences.) Established by a consortium of theatrical organizations, ReImagine awarded grants in 2021 to playwrights who were Black, Indigenous or people of color. As a grant winner, Cataluna could also select a participating theater company to workshop her play.She felt immediately drawn to Atlantic, which was also eager to acquire “Heart Strings” and is now giving it its world premiere: Here was a play that highlighted a culture that was part of America but that was almost never explored onstage.“It’s so three-dimensional, the storytelling that happens in the hei,” Alison Beatty, the artistic director of Atlantic for Kids, said in a post-rehearsal interview. After the pandemic’s isolation, she added, “having something that was tactile — that you could feel with your hands, and that was such an integral part of how the story is told — really appealed to me. And then, I think, just the questions that are asked by the play: what it means to be family, what it means to be at home.”Aczon, far left, in a scene from the Atlantic for Kids production, with, clockwise from top left, Jeremy Rafal, Kristi Donna Ng and Un Joo Christopher.Julieta Cervantes“Heart Strings,” which is directed toward children over 6 — an older audience than most Atlantic for Kids offerings — also gave the company a rare opportunity to help shape a playwright’s vision instead of importing a finished production. Beatty, for instance, suggested adding hula gestures, another form of choreographed storytelling, to the production. John-Mario Sevilla, a hula scholar, then taught some movement to the cast.The script also evolved. Cataluna had set her earliest drafts in the present, but after her son’s classmates asked why the characters were playing with string when they had cellphones, she switched the action to the 1930s. She also wanted to highlight the pressure on Indigenous peoples to assimilate. Hoku, played by Sienna Aczon, doesn’t mind using an English name and words at school; Mahina, portrayed by Un Joo Christopher, rebels against those rules. (Almost all the actors in the Atlantic production have lived in Hawaii.)“In my father’s era, and before his, Hawaiian was not allowed to be spoken in the public schools,” Cataluna said. She drew on her family’s past again in a scene in which Hoku’s friend Josiah (Aaron Banes) reflects on his love for his Hanai sister, as Cataluna’s father once did.But she has resisted acknowledging another autobiographical detail as more than mere coincidence: She has a younger biological sister from whom she is estranged.“One of my best friends keeps calling me on it,” Cataluna said, noting that he pointed out parallels to her play. She and her sister haven’t reconciled, but, Cataluna added, “if she ever needed a kidney, I would give her my kidney.”Audiences, however, don’t need to have siblings to recognize how vulnerable — or how steadfast — the bonds of love are, Kat Yen, the production’s director, said in the same conversation.In families or friendships, “we delve into struggle, we delve into confrontations, but you never lose the love,” Yen said. “Somewhere in there is a message that I’m interested in for the audience.”But that isn’t all that children take home: The company provides instructions on how to make a hei. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘I’m Revolting’ Review: All About the Skin They Live In

      by

      Gracie Gardner’s play about illness, the body and our health care system is just as impersonal as the waiting room where her story is centered.With another pandemic winter on the horizon, it’s hard not to imagine all of the ways our physical health determines the shape and quality of our lives and reveals the most intimate facets of ourselves.That’s what I suspect the playwright Gracie Gardner (“Athena”), who is also an E.M.T., was aiming to get at in her new play, “I’m Revolting,” which opened Wednesday night at the Linda Gross Theater. But despite the show’s attempts to tell a moving story about illness, the body and the U.S. health care system, this Atlantic Theater Company production fails to make a compelling work of theater out of the issues facing patients in the waiting room of a skin cancer clinic.Bookmarked by conversations between two doctors, Jonathan (Bartley Booz, with the same bumbling brand of comedy he perfected as the wacky butler in “The Play That Goes Wrong”) and the veteran Denise (a mechanical Patrice Johnson Chevannes), “I’m Revolting” initially seems to be a play about the struggles of doctors and health care workers. Then it seems as if it will be a play about physical and emotional health, but it veers off course, and never works its way to a clear statement.In the impersonal space of a waiting room are seven blue chairs lined up neatly in a row, a water cooler, a vending machine, some fake plants, and a table with a bottle of hand sanitizer on it (set design by Marsha Ginsberg). The doctors discuss the day’s patients, identifying them by their maladies, their race and gender, their medical history.The flesh-and-blood counterparts gradually appear, beginning with Reggie (a stiff Alicia Pilgrim), a young woman concerned about how her surgery will affect her appearance, and her self-involved older sister, Anna (a brusque, hilarious Gabby Beans). There’s also Toby (Patrick Vaill), a sullen young man convinced his cancer is a punishment, and his hippie New Age mother, Paula (Laura Esterman); the meek Liane (Emily Cass McDonnell), who’s endured multiple surgeries, and her degenerate husband, Jordan (Glenn Fitzgerald); and the oddball regular, Clyde (Peter Gerety), who dispenses unsolicited advice.From left: Laura Esterman, Patrick Vaill, Glenn Fitzgerald, Emily Cass McDonnell, Peter Gerety and Alicia Pilgrim in the playwright Gracie Gardner’s new work.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThey mostly talk among their groups — Anna tells Reggie to assert her rights as a patient, Liane and Jordan discuss the merits of a particular lotion — and occasionally to one another. Paula’s suggestion that meditation and positive thinking is all the cure her son needs leads to a waiting room debate about science and alternative medicine.And yet there’s little to no depth to these patients, or anything novel in their conversations, which occur while they wait to be called on by Jonathan and Denise. It soon becomes clear that the thin plot is in desperate need of a raison d’être.The direction, by Knud Adams (“English”), is unremarkable; the actors not only lack chemistry but also deliver stiff readings of their lines. And for a play about the Big C, there’s no sense of urgency or threat. Even with a spare 90-minute running time, and the occasional laughs Beans, Booz and Gerety generate through their characters’ particular quirks and expressions, “I’m Revolting” drags like the hours in waiting room limbo.In those moments when the script rolls out some visceral details (describing the repurposing of a flap of forehead skin, or the archaeological dig into an eye socket), it feels like an empty attempt to have the audience squirm.During the play, I kept thinking of my neighbor who recently told me about his own battle with skin cancer. His story wasn’t just about the skin on his nose but his path to the malady — from a childhood running in the sun and several years working under the cloudless sky in the Caribbean — and his ongoing recovery.We are more than our afflictions, and the story of our nation’s medical care over the past few years warrants more than a few drive-by conversations in a waiting room. As it is, “I’m Revolting” only skims the surface when what it really needs is to perform a thorough examination.I’m RevoltingThrough Oct. 16 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Bold Enough to Go Full-Tilt’: Gabby Beans Is Playing to the Balcony

      by

      The actress, a Tony nominee for “The Skin of Our Teeth,” is bringing her sharp eye for comedy to Atlantic Theater Company’s production of “I’m Revolting.”Onstage in Lincoln Center Theater’s maximalist revival of “The Skin of Our Teeth” last spring were a giant brontosaurus puppet, a full-scale amusement park slide and a stage-spanning verdant field in full bloom. But it was the towering performance from a 5-foot-3 force of nature named Gabby Beans that made the production a must-see.Taking on the role of Sabina in this messy epic by Thornton Wilder, nebulously set between prehistory and the end of the world, is a hard enough task for any actor. And though Tallulah Bankhead, who originated the role in 1942, left big shoes to fill, Beans, in her Broadway debut, stuffed them with a gargantuan presence and a knowingly ridiculous voice, picking up a Tony nomination for lead actress in a play. (Alexis Soloski, in her review for The Times, described Beans as a “ferocious actress” whose “ample” comic gifts “come beribonned and frilled.”)While growing up, Beans said her mother, a fan of classic Hollywood actresses, would call her “Tallulah Bashula” and, because of her early comedic flashes, liken her to Lucille Ball — apt comparisons for anyone who saw Beans darting around the stage in Lileana Blain-Cruz’s production, pausing to flash her expressive eyes and deliver a big, vaudevillian one-liner.Beans, with James Vincent Meredith, in “The Skin of Our Teeth.” In her review, the critic Alexis Soloski called Beans “a ferocious actress” whose ample comic gifts “come beribboned and frilled.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesShe later added Eartha Kitt to that list of brassy acting inspirations during an interview at a coffee shop in Chelsea a few weeks ago, before a dress rehearsal of Gracie Gardner’s “I’m Revolting.” (The Atlantic Theater Company production, currently in previews and scheduled to open Oct. 5, is Beans’s first show since “The Skin of Our Teeth” closed in May.) “She is the brightest star in my artistic constellation,” Beans said of Kitt. “She had a way of relating to the audience, and it’s really special to see someone hold everyone’s attention with their presence.”The operative word is “presence,” which Beans has plenty of. Seemingly unafraid to make bold choices, and bolstered by pure charisma and a sharp eye for comedy, hers is a type of performance that hearkens back to when theater was the only way to see personality writ large.One of her “I’m Revolting” co-stars, Patrick Vaill, put it this way: “The acting style of the time we’re in is rooted in doing less; a glance, a shift in physicality. We don’t have actors playing to the balcony, so when someone does that, it’s invigorating.”In Gardner’s dark comedy, about patients at a skin cancer clinic, Beans’s comedic chops are tighter, this time blended with the forceful compassion of the type-A older sister she plays.Beans, left, and Alicia Pilgrim as her sister in Gracie Gardner’s dark comedy “I’m Revolting,” which opens Oct. 5 at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“She understands the tone of storytelling very well and can throw herself into that, whatever it is,” the director, Knud Adams, said. “With confidence comes that transformational fearlessness where she knows what needs to be served and dives in headfirst.”Both collaborators referenced Beans’s presence, onstage and off, with Vaill noting that “the performance is happening before you even realize it’s a performance,” and Adams, who said the role was hers as soon as she expressed interest, praising Beans as seeming “boundless in what she can take on.”That limitlessness is a trait that also comes through in conversation, even if Beans is unaware of it, half-joking that she was grateful that she’d had no faith in herself for her “Skin of Our Teeth” audition.“I got the audition through Lileana, because we’d worked together quite a bit, and she’s a friend,” explained Beans, who has appeared in several Off Broadway productions directed by Blain-Cruz, including “Anatomy of a Suicide” and “Marys Seacole.” “I read the play and, I’m going to be honest with you, thought, ‘OK, this play is weird, but this part! How are they going to cast someone who’s not famous?’ It made me go into the audition with a lot of freedom, so I did the craziest version I possibly could. It empowered me to make really big choices, and I felt free in a way I’d never felt before as an actor.”Blain-Cruz said she first starting “keeping tabs” on Beans after seeing her in a non-equity showcase production of Sam Shepard’s “Curse of the Starving Class” at Williamstown Theater Festival in 2017, and has since cast her in four productions.“I was excited, but not sure, about Gabby for ‘Skin,’ because it is such a particular role,” Blain-Cruz said. “But she came in and blew it out of the water. Her alacrity with language is stunning, and her moving the character between an exhausted lady-of-the-stage into this zany character voice revealed somebody who is willing and bold enough to go full-tilt.”The director noted that, along with the other productions on which they’ve collaborated (including “Girls” at Yale Repertory Theater), Beans has excelled at “existing in different realities and times.” Blain-Cruz commended her as a “dramaturgically intelligent actor” who has become her muse, and whose “humor and intensity” she believes would perfectly suit a Yorgos Lanthimos film like “The Lobster.”But before Gabby Beans became a performer, she was Gabby Beans, Army brat. Born in Georgia to a physician mother and a father who was in the military, she “kind of grew up in Northern Virginia,” also living in Louisiana and Hawaii before settling in a German ski town in the Bavarian Alps, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, for high school. She was accepted to Columbia University, which brought her back stateside to study neuroscience and theater.After three years of working at a neonatal intensive care unit and doing student plays at Columbia, she decided against medical school, instead opting for a master’s degree in classical acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, a city she fell in love with while growing up in Europe. She credits seeing Fiona Shaw in a 2009 production of “Mother Courage” at the National Theater, and Kristin Scott Thomas in the Old Vic’s 2014 production of “Electra,” as formative theatrical experiences.The actress, who opts for “a monastic life” whenever she’s working, has a passion for the city’s house and techno music scene.Desmond Picotte for The New York Times“It’s really nurturing as a young actor to be in a country whose most famous writer is a playwright,” she said. “There’s just a different sensibility around theater, an awareness of and value for the work of actors that I think is not quite true here unless you’re incredibly famous.”Though she has a deep knowledge of actors past and present, it becomes clear, listening to Beans discuss her other interests, that she has a life beyond the stage. She loves the structure and discipline required of acting — a holdover from her upbringing, she said she opts for “a monastic life” whenever working — but she lights up with an insider’s passion when describing her love for New York City’s house and techno scene.“I’m into the beep-beep-boop music,” she said, smiling. “I grew up in Germany, so how could I not be?”Back in Bavaria, she and her friends would travel to Munich for its “debaucherous” club scene. Here, it’s electronic music hot spots like Elsewhere and Nowadays in her Bushwick neighborhood, where she’s lived since 2016. What first drew her to the scene was footwork, a type of electronic music out of Chicago that she’d hear in grungy Brooklyn warehouses. But she hasn’t kept up with that scene lately, she said, because of the pandemic, her busy schedule and the effects of gentrification.“A lot of my favorite parties went away,” Beans said. “The small record labels throwing them were priced out of the spaces. There used to be all these D.I.Y. venues on Kent Avenue before they turned into the Vice offices. That was my scene: fast-paced Black electronic music in a warehouse, where the bar would be a cart table with a handle of Everclear and a bottle of Sprite. Once those places went away, I wasn’t as present in the clubs.”Warehouse parties, acting, Eartha Kitt adoration, her recent turn toward writing and directing short films with a magical realism bent: “It’s all the same, all just about being alive and feeling free,” she said. “It’s all me.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Review: Sarah Silverman’s ‘Bedwetter’ Musical Has Sprung a Leak

      by

      The comedian’s memoir was funny. But when the new show based on it tries for something deeper, it sinks into bathos.Zingy, 10-year-old Sarah Silverman (Zoe Glick) isn’t a natural fit for the town of Bedford, N.H., where sour, flinty fatalism is the norm. “May all your dreams come true,” one local says at a birthday party. “Mine did not.”The Silvermans, who anchor the new musical “The Bedwetter,” are defiantly nonconformist: all id, all the time. Sarah’s lately divorced father, the proprietor of Crazy Donny’s Factory Outlet (Darren Goldstein), encourages her to wow her new classmates with the dirty jokes he’s taught her. Dipso Nana (Bebe Neuwirth) thinks Sarah’s bartending skills are a better bet to impress. And if Sarah’s mother, Beth Ann (Caissie Levy), expresses herself by spending days in bed watching old movies, Sarah, taking the family’s let-it-all-out mojo perhaps too far, does so by wetting hers at night.Still, she is cheerfully resigned to being a misfit, taking no offense even when her sister, Laura (Emily Zimmerman), wanting nothing to do with her in public, sings a song called “I Don’t Know This Person.” And to beat her new fifth-grade classmates to the punch, Sarah pre-emptively tells them, in “I Couldn’t Agree More,” that she’s “eww-y” and “Jewy.” Not only are her arms “so hairy,” but “You should see my back.”The musical depicts one year in the life of 10-year-old Sarah, who quickly manages to make frenemies of three new classmates.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSatisfying as the standup rhythm is, “The Bedwetter,” which opened Tuesday at the Linda Gross Theater, is sometimes, like its title character, a bit of a misfit. Based on the real Sarah Silverman’s 2010 memoir, subtitled “Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee,” it works best when it aims for the comic highs of that charming if gangly book. As long as it sticks close to young Sarah’s resilience as she tries to make friends without revealing her mortifying condition, “The Bedwetter,” an Atlantic Theater Company production, is a potty-mouthed pleasure. But in jimmying the original into a more serious musical format as it proceeds, it achieves only a middling geniality.It starts out promisingly enough, establishing the main characters efficiently and with good humor. The songs, with music by Adam Schlesinger and lyrics by Schlesinger and Silverman, have the cheesy irreverence and synth-y disposability of period television jingles — the period being the early 1980s. Donny’s numbers, performed with schlubby insouciance by Goldstein, are a highlight, including one, whose refrain can’t be printed here, that explains how he knows all the other girls’ mothers. Perhaps you can imagine what rhymes with “along.”But a little of that sound goes a long way, just as Silverman’s naïve inappropriateness, so effective in her standup, works only the first few times onstage. When Sarah, introducing herself to her class, mentions a brother who died, her reflex not to seem piteous makes her explanation weirdly funny: “He was just like a baby, so it wasn’t sad or anything.” But when that death — and a lot of other dark material — comes to the forefront, the laughs wear thin.If such moments don’t feel out of place in Silverman’s memoir, that’s in part because its episodic narrative leaps froglike through 40 years of her life, quickly dispensing with even the most disturbing events. And though it makes sense that the musical’s authors would narrow the focus and shorten the time span, the book by Joshua Harmon (“Bad Jews”) and Silverman overreaches; in attempting to backfill the story with drama to justify the addition of songs, they put too much pressure on the one year it depicts.That’s the year in which Sarah arrives at McKelvie Middle School, manages to make frenemies of three classmates and, at the end of the first act, in an unconvincing scene involving diapers, finds the one thing she had hoped to keep private revealed. The second act deals with Sarah’s resulting depression — a state uncomfortably reminiscent of Beth Ann’s — as well as Nana’s mortality and a minor character’s suicide.The music, and especially the lyrics, cannot support this turn toward “Fun Home” territory. (In her black wig, Glick, a very talented 14-year-old, looks like she’s already playing the young lead in that show.) What works well in the lighter material — like the earwormy title song, which sounds like “Day Tripper” being covered by the Partridge Family — feels flimsy in the heavier material, especially Beth Ann’s overdramatic arias. (Levy sings them beautifully, though.) As a result, the show seems to spring a leak, losing all its giddy energy as it sinks into the serious.That’s a shame — the more so because Schlesinger, having died from Covid-19 complications in 2020, was not able to finish developing the musical with his collaborators. (The songwriter David Yazbek joined the team as a “creative consultant.”) Schlesinger’s songs for the 2008 stage version of “Cry-Baby” (written with David Javerbaum), as well as his experience in the pop-rock band Fountains of Wayne, demonstrated a quick ear for neat hooks but not yet the kind of complexity needed to carry theatrical emotion. And his lyrics with Silverman too often wander in search of a rhyme, then, sighting one in the distance, botch it.Glick, outnumbered by her meds, in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMuch of this might have been improved had Schlesinger lived. And much could still have been camouflaged by a strong staging. But “The Bedwetter” doesn’t get that, at least in this incarnation; the usually acute director Anne Kauffman, working on an awkward set by Laura Jellinek, seems to be going for a middle-school aesthetic to match its milieu. Even at two hours, the show feels needlessly elongated by switchovers from one vague locale to another — and by numbers, including one about Xanax, that extend well past their welcome.About that Xanax: It’s a bizarre omission in the musical that it does not highlight, as the book clearly does, the role the massive over-prescription of that drug played in Sarah’s depression. (By age 14 she was taking 16 pills a day.) Perhaps this was a choice to make the drama more emotional than pharmaceutical but, in any case, it further burdens what is already a weak plot about a weak bladder. But then many of the show’s choices, like the promotion of a Miss New Hampshire character (Ashley Blanchet, suitably lovely) from cameo to mascot, seem similarly random. That’s true of Silverman’s comedy in general, built as it is on apparently aleatory mismatches of tone and content.If that kind of randomness can be a convincing aesthetic in some art forms, I’ve never seen it work in musicals, where “that seems weird enough to work” never does. A show that operates on that principle may still hit a few highs; Neuwirth, dry and suave, certainly knows how to find them. The song in which she tells Sarah, warmly but practically, “You’re beautiful — to me,” is one of the few serious numbers that lands. Too often the rest of “The Bedwetter,” at least when aiming for tears, feels merely wet.The BedwetterThrough July 3 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Musical Comedy ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ to Open on Broadway Next Fall

      by

      The new musical, by David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori, will star Victoria Clark as a teen girl who ages too quickly.“Kimberly Akimbo,” a musical comedy about a young girl with a medical condition that causes rapid aging, will transfer to Broadway next fall.The show, based on a play by David Lindsay-Abaire, had an initial Off Broadway run that opened late last year at the Atlantic Theater Company, where it ran through the peak of the Omicron surge of the coronavirus and was greeted with strong reviews. Jesse Green, in The New York Times, called it “funny and moving.”The musical stars Victoria Clark, a 62-year-old actress playing a 15-year-old girl who is managing not only her affliction — a condition that limits her life expectancy — but also life with a ludicrous family.“It’s a coming-of-age story, but an unusual one because the clock is ticking from the get-go,” Clark said in an interview. “She has a limited amount of time left, and what draws me to her is her joie, and watching how someone can triumph who you least expect to succeed.”Clark, who stars alongside a company of much younger actors, said playing an adolescent had deeply affected her.“There is a boldness and a rawness to adolescence, and at the same time a balance between holding back and going for it that is so beautiful,” said Clark, who won a Tony Award in 2005 for “The Light in the Piazza.” “This character has taught me the beauty of impulse, and the beauty of being present, and not just accepting one’s fate. After the show I just wanted to run and find everyone I loved and tell them how much they meant to me.”The show features music by Jeanine Tesori, the Tony-winning composer of “Fun Home,” and a book and lyrics by Lindsay-Abaire, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play “Rabbit Hole.” It is directed by Jessica Stone, a longtime actress making her Broadway directing debut, and choreographed by Danny Mefford (“Dear Evan Hansen”).The Broadway cast will feature the same actors as the Off Broadway production, including Steven Boyer (“Hand to God”) and Alli Mauzey (“Cry-Baby”) as the protagonist’s parents, Bonnie Milligan (“Head Over Heels”) as her aunt, and Justin Cooley making his debut as one of her classmates.“Kimberly Akimbo” is scheduled to begin previews on Oct. 12 and to open on Nov. 10 at an unspecified Shubert theater. The lead producer is David Stone, who is also the lead producer of “Wicked”; other producers include the actress LaChanze and the theater owner James L. Nederlander, as well as Patrick Catullo, Aaron Glick and the Atlantic Theater Company. More