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      Michael R. Jackson on the Soap Opera Origins of ‘White Girl in Danger’

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      The musical’s creator and creative team discuss their influences, including “Days of Our Lives,” “Showgirls” and D’Angelo.Hearing Michael R. Jackson, the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright of “A Strange Loop,” speak about soap operas is like getting lost in a Wikipedia wormhole. With nary a pause, he rolls through the details of characters’ yearslong arcs, including every stolen identity, forbidden romance and vicious backstabbing — literal and figurative.He’s amassed decades of knowledge: He became hooked at 5 years old, when he started camping out in front of a “gigantic” wooden television set with his great-aunt. “I would watch ‘The Young and the Restless’ at 12:30, ‘Days of Our Lives’ at 1, ‘Another World’ at 2, ‘Santa Barbara’ at 3. And I would do that every day — Monday through Friday,” Jackson, 42, said in a recent interview. “The more I sat and watched with her, the more engrossed I got in these characters’ lives and the story lines. I sort of grew up obsessed with them.”So it’s not surprising that these shows, which he began recording on VHS when he was older, would eventually become a source of inspiration for Jackson: His new musical, “White Girl in Danger,” is rooted in soap opera themes and tropes. It’s now in previews in a joint production of Second Stage and Vineyard Theater, and is scheduled to open April 10 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater.Latoya Edwards, center, as Keesha, a character who is trying to transcend racial stereotypes and get a more prominent story line.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show takes place in Allwhite, a world defined by soap tropes and ruled by three white teen-girl stereotypes: Megan, Meagan and Maegan (pronounced MEG-an, Mee-gan and MAY-gan, FYI). Much of the show’s action takes place in and around Allwhite’s high school, where “the Megans” are preparing for a battle of the bands competition. Then there’s a Black girl named Keesha, who is trying to get her own story line and level up from being a forgettable Blackground character, forever stuck in slave narratives and police brutality stories. Meanwhile, the town’s residents are reeling from a mysterious spate of murders.In separate interviews, Jackson, along with the director, Lileana Blain-Cruz; the choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly; the set designer, Adam Rigg; and the costume designer, Montana Levi Blanco, spoke about the show’s many influences (including romance novels, Lifetime movies and Black girl groups) and how those influences were reimagined for the stage.Gothic melodramaJackson described “Days of Our Lives” as the soap opera that most shaped his understanding of and love for melodrama — specifically a 1993 episode in which the rich socialite Vivian Alamain (Louise Sorel) drugs her nemesis, Carly Manning (Crystal Chappell), and buries her alive. Jackson gushed about the scene, which begins with Vivian plucking the petals from a bouquet of roses, maniacally chanting “She loves me, she loves me not” atop Carly’s grave; he called Sorel’s “incredible” performance downright Shakespearean. “I was 12 years old and it was, to this day, one of the most seminal soap moments; it’s burned into me because I had never seen something so Gothic and terrifying happen,” Jackson said. “I was like ‘This is my form.’”There are many other iconic soap moments that are alluded to in “White Girl in Danger”: Adam Rigg designed a curtain inspired by a pink beaded rhinestone gown that Joan Collins, as Alexis Carrington Colby, wears in “Dynasty,” and looked back at a famous fight scene from the show between Alexis and Diahann Carroll’s Dominique Deveraux that leaves both characters — and the room they’re in — in tatters. Rigg used some of the background details of that scene — a vase, the peach and coral color palette of the room and furnishings — in the show’s set design.When it comes to characters and their roller-coaster arcs, Jackson’s favorites are Viki Lord (Erika Slezak), the “One Life to Live” matriarch with dissociative identity disorder whose alter egos emerge to dictate her romantic life, blackmail people, murder people and trap her enemies in secret rooms, and Kristen Blake (Eileen Davidson), the good-girl-turned-bad girl who also kidnaps and hides her enemies in secret rooms.Jackson’s love of these soaps runs deeper than the cloak-and-dagger plots and mustache-twirling villains. He even layered in musical references: The show’s opening number includes musical allusions to Peabo Bryson’s “One Life to Live” and the opening of “Another World,” sung by Gary Morris and Crystal Gayle.Three sides of Mark-Paul GosselaarMark-Paul Gosselaar, right, as the mischievous Zack Morris, with Mario Lopez as Slater, left, and Dustin Diamond as Screech, in “Saved by the Bell.”NBCThere are footprints of the late ’80s and early ’90s high school sitcom “Saved by the Bell” all over the musical, from Rigg’s kitschy Memphis-style design of the Allwhite school to Keesha’s colorblock windbreaker.And then there’s that show’s beloved Zack Morris, played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar. In “White Girl in Danger,” Jackson pulled from boyfriend tropes — not only Zack but also some of the other roles Gosselaar has played in his career — to mold a boyfriend character (known as Matthew Scott, Scott Matthew and Zack Paul Gosselaar, and played by one actor) opposite “the Megans.” Jackson cited as inspirations Gosselaar’s roles as a frat boy who sexually assaults a college freshman played by Candace Cameron in the TV movie “She Cried No” and as a loving, supportive brother in “For the Love of Nancy.”“This concept of three different boyfriends in one was born out of that, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar specifically, because he played all these parts really well,” Jackson said.Teen queen dreamsFrom left, Tara Reid, Rachael Leigh Cook and Rosario Dawson as small town musicians vying for a big break in the 2001 film “Josie and the Pussycats.”Universal Pictures, via Associated PressThe female clique atop the teen social hierarchy is a well-loved trope. For Kelly, the groups of alpha it-girls in movies like “Clueless,” “Jawbreaker” and “Heathers” greatly influenced how he choreographed “the Megans.”“The opening number, for me, is kind of like ‘Josie and the Pussycats,’” he said. “Everything they do is super cute and super meticulous.” There’s duality to their gestures, Kelly added, which can “flip from being really cute to being insidious.”Blain-Cruz mentioned “My So-Called Life,” and shows “about young women trying to navigate that in-between space of childhood and adulthood, but also claiming their own space.”“And those spaces generally tended to be occupied by white women or white girls,” Blain-Cruz said, noting that one of her favorite scenes to develop was a band rehearsal in which each of the girls’ performance styles recalls that of ’90s pop starlets.‘Hollywood, sex and murder’Gina Gershon, left, and Elizabeth Berkley in the 1995 film “Showgirls.”Murray Close/United ArtistsAffairs, dalliances and general sexcapades are hallmarks of soap operas, so “White Girl in Danger” follows suit with kooky seduction scenes, surprising bedfellows and sprays of bodily fluid. For the choreography of a scene featuring a sudden sexual reveal, Kelly enthusiastically references one of his favorite movies, the erotic 1995 drama “Showgirls.” He described it as “the wild and crazy cat-fight-love-festival that was between Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon.”For Jackson, it wasn’t just the sexy daytime and prime time dramas that left an impression, it was also the work of the romance writer Jackie Collins.“I was like 10 years old and my older cousin gave me a copy of ‘Chances,’” Jackson said. “I devoured it, because it was so dirty. It was like my form of pornography, because I lived in a pretty strict religious home,” he continued. “That took me into this world of Hollywood, Vegas, gangsters, sex and murder.”Black music in the BlackgroundThere’s no “White Girl in Danger” without the Black characters who try to escape the racist, stereotypical Black stories in the Blackground. Three of the show’s Blackground women — Florence, Caroline and Abilene — serve as a kind of Greek chorus. For their fashion and choreography, Blanco and Kelly channeled the Pointer Sisters, the Mary Jane Girls, the Dreams, the Ronettes, even the trio of singer-narrators in “Little Shop of Horrors.” Kelly said the Blackground women represent “the trope of the three women 30 feet from stardom on the outskirts of every story.”For Tarik, a Blackground character whose roles are exclusively getting killed and going to jail, Black music was also prominent influence. “Tarik is every Black male stereotype from ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ to its counterpart; he’s also D’Angelo. He’s also Ginuwine. He’s also Usher,” Kelly said, specifically calling out D’Angelo’s bare-chested video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” Though Tarik has his own deliberately underdressed jacket-open moment, Blanco’s costume design for him includes a “Fresh Prince”-style cap and Hammer pants. More

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      New Musical From ‘Strange Loop’ Writer to Run Off Broadway

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      “White Girl in Danger,” a soap opera satire by Michael R. Jackson, will be staged in New York next spring by Second Stage and Vineyard theaters.As a child, Michael R. Jackson would religiously watch soap operas with his great-aunt. “Days of Our Lives.” “Another World.” “Santa Barbara.” “The Young and the Restless.”He kept watching through high school. He interned at “All My Children” in college. And then he moved to New York, hoping to become a soap opera writer.Instead, he became a dramatist, and an acclaimed one at that: His first musical, “A Strange Loop,” a meta take on a Broadway usher writing his own musical, won both the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best musical, and it’s now running on Broadway.Next spring, his sophomore musical will arrive Off Broadway. It’s called “White Girl in Danger,” and it’s a race-conscious sendup of the soap opera genre.“White Girl in Danger” imagines a soap opera set in a town called Allwhite, with a group of Black characters, called Blackgrounds, who are featured only in story lines about slavery and policing. One of those characters, Keesha, seeks to break that pattern by seizing a central story line from a trio of white protagonists, Meagan, Maegan and Megan, but in so doing she also risks running afoul of an Allwhite killer.“There’s a lot of genre elements coming from the soap opera, Lifetime movie, melodrama world,” Jackson said. “The idea for the show was going to be a broad satire, but then these conversations around representation, diversity, equity, inclusion started to happen in the theater world, and I started to think about those issues, and suddenly one molecule attached itself to another.”Jackson has been developing the musical since 2017, and last summer the incubator New York Stage and Film presented a two-day, concert-style reading of it in the Hudson Valley.The musical, with a 12-person cast, will be jointly produced by two New York nonprofits, Vineyard Theater and Second Stage Theater, and will be staged next spring at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater. The show, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz and choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly, is scheduled to start previews on March 15 and open April 10. More

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      ‘Dreaming Zenzile’ Review: A Tribute to Mama Africa

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      The musical is Somi Kakoma’s thank-you note, written across generations, to the South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba.If you want to see a performer in full command of her instrument and her powers, take the F train to Second Avenue and walk the few blocks to New York Theater Workshop to savor Somi Kakoma in “Dreaming Zenzile,” her tribute to the South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba, born Zenzile Miriam Makeba.Makeba, a star from the 1960s through her death in 2008, pioneered the form broadly known as world music. Singing in Xhosa, Swahili, Sotho, Zulu and English, Makeba popularized African songwriting among American and European audiences, earning the nickname Mama Africa. Throughout her life, she lent her voice to social justice causes, particularly that of Black South Africans living under apartheid. Onstage, at New York Theater Workshop, in collaboration with the National Black Theater, Kakoma, in a marigold dress, with a voice like a sunrise, plays her through 76 years of her eventful life.Makeba was a vocal shapeshifter who could triumph in practically any genre — folk, jazz, American songbook, Afropop. Vocally, Kakoma has that chameleonlike quality, too, varying her big, bright voice with husky breaths, vivid ululation and the Xhosa clicks for which Makeba was famous. Her singing seems as effortless as it is varied, as easy as it is virtuosic. “Dreaming Zenzile,” directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz with music direction by Hervé Samb, is best understood and enjoyed as Kakoma’s gift of love and dignity, across generations, from one artist to another.The set, by Riccardo Hernández, suggests a concert stage, illuminated by Yi Zhao’s vibrant lights.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut as a work of theater, “Dreaming Zenzile” struggles among the competing forms of recital, dream play, memory play and biography. The bare set, by Riccardo Hernández, suggests a concert stage, illuminated by Yi Zhao’s vibrant lights and backed, less helpfully by Hannah Wasileski’s banal projections of waves, flowers and rainbow abstractions. Is this an auditorium or some astral way station? Is it the afterlife? Lacking the style and thematic force that defines Blain-Cruz’s best work, the show feels less like a narrative than a tone poem, which can make time hang heavy in the first half; it takes an hour just to bring young Miriam to her professional debut.Amplified by a four-person chorus (Aaron Marcellus, Naledi Masilo, Phumzile Sojola and Phindi Wilson) and a four-person band, the music feels electric, often joyful, a sharp shock of pleasure that Marjani Forté-Saunders’s supple, elegant choreography enhances. But the interplay between book passages and Makeba’s songs, which are not subtitled, rarely feels essential. Why these songs, in these moments? By contrast, Kakoma’s emotion-heavy, jazz-inflected songs are too on the button. Really, they’re all button. Those who arrive without a working chronology may feel lost.Though it touches briefly on some central themes — exile, responsibility — and limns, however elliptically, most of the major life events of its subject, “Dreaming Zenzile” withholds what most of us desire from a work of this kind: a greater understanding of how a performer’s life shapes and impacts her art, the relationship between experience and oeuvre. This desire isn’t necessarily fair or sensible. Sometimes that relationship doesn’t exist. Sometimes it is too oblique to parse. But because “Dreaming Zenzile” too often favors symbol and abstraction, the audience is denied this connection.Only in its closing moments, which occur shortly before Makeba’s death, does the show achieve a kind of cohesion and vigor. Throughout, Makeba has taken up the burden of activism with sturdiness and poise, freeing her voice in the hope that others might be made free. Finally, she announces the cost.“Do you know what it is to be the first?” she says, choking on the words. “Do you know the weight of that? The loneliness?”To ask one woman to stand in for an entire continent was always too great a burden. Mama Africa? It was impossible. That Makeba bore it for so long, and with such grace, is a wonder and a gift. At its best, “Dreaming Zenzile” is a thank-you note, written with deep and abiding gratitude.Dreaming ZenzileThrough June 26 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      ‘The Skin of Our Teeth’ Review: A Party for the End of the World

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      Thornton Wilder’s antic play, from 1942, packs in an ice age, a deluge and midcentury décor. This Lincoln Center Theater production is the maximalist revival it deserves.No fossil evidence suggests that a giant ground sloth ever composed a symphony or that a Devonian fish split the atom even once. And yet, have human beings really proved their worth? We have brought the world calculus, the sonnet, no-knead bread. But think of what we have inflicted: environmental devastation, species collapse, atrocities of various complexions. Humans keep surviving. We’re fit that way. But when you think about it — should we?Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” a formally inventive, constitutionally melancholy Pulitzer Prize winner from 1942, usually ticks the box for yes. An antic ode to human resilience, written as America was entering World War II, it follows the Antrobus family as they face down an ice age, a deluge and a very human catastrophe. Somehow, they always come through.“We’ve come a long ways,” George Antrobus, the dad, says. “We’ve learned. We’re learning. And the steps of our journey are marked for us here.”And yet the revival that opened at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater on Monday, which is to say somewhere in the mid-Anthropocene, isn’t so sure. Under Lileana Blain-Cruz’s gorgeous, restive direction, this production sides not so much with George, the inventor of the wheel and alphabet, but with Sabina, the Antrobuses’ vampy maid, who maintains a healthy skepticism toward the whole of the human race.“I used to think something could be done about it,” Sabina says. “But I know better now.”We meet Sabina at the top of the play, in the living room of the Antrobus family’s flower-bedizened home in Excelsior, N.J. (The exuberant design, by Adam Rigg, with radiant lighting by Yi Zhao and climate-disaster projections by Hannah Wasileski, suggests a midcentury postmodern aesthetic.) She resents her work as a maid, and because Wilder never met a fourth wall he couldn’t smash, she resents the play, too.“I hate this play and every word in it,” she says, before throwing down her duster like a mic drop. Sabina is played by Gabby Beans (“Marys Seacole,” “Anatomy of a Suicide”), a ferocious actress and a Blain-Cruz regular who demonstrates her comic gifts here. Those gifts are ample. And they come beribboned and frilled.Gabby Beans as Sabina, the Antrobuses’ vampy maid. Richard Termine for The New York TimesShe and Maggie Antrobus (Roslyn Ruff, eternally excellent) await the return of George (James Vincent Meredith, solid), commuting home from the office as an ice sheet descends on the Eastern Seaboard. (It’s the 1940s, but as the pet dinosaur and mammoth suggest, it’s also the Cretaceous period. Or possibly the Paleolithic. Just go with it.) In the second act, set in Atlantic City, the Antrobuses have survived, only to encounter a Genesis-style flood. The final act shows them and their children, Henry (Julian Robertson), who used to be called Cain, and Gladys (Paige Gilbert), back in Excelsior, picking themselves up after a seven-year war.In most productions, the particular conflict is left ambiguous; here Montana Levi Blanco’s shrewd costumes intimate that this is the Civil War. And in most productions, the Antrobuses are white, but here they are Black, which lends that choice particular resonance, twisting the knife of human cruelty. This strategy doesn’t warp the play so much as deepen it. (The playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has contributed just a few lines — trading a reference to the Broadway classic “Peg O’ My Heart” for a shout-out to “Bootycandy” — to make all of this work.)The play takes place in the 1940s, but as the pet dinosaur suggests, it’s also the Cretaceous period. Just go with it.Richard Termine for The New York Times“The Skin of Our Teeth” is a big play. It has to be. The whole of humanity doesn’t fit tidily into three acts, even assuming as much frame-breaking foolery as Wilder allows. In Blain-Cruz’s maximalist hands, it gets even bigger, the stage overflowing with flowers and lights and dazzling, playful puppetry. She favors a high femme aesthetic — luxuriant, Instagrammable — and no other serious director working now has such a profound interest in visual pleasure and delight. She also has a killer playlist (Rihanna, Dua Lipa). Because this is the way the world ends: all bangers, no skips.For some, this too muchness, married to Wilder’s bookish mischief, will pall. The intermission doesn’t come until nearly two hours in, and as I walked out into the lobby, an usher asked me if I planned on leaving. Apparently a lot of people do. But if you stick it out, you can find real power in the way the lush design garlands a profound suspicion of human endeavor. Blain-Cruz relegates Wilder’s emphasis on endurance for something more questioning, mostly by giving space to the questions that are already there.“How do we know that it’ll be any better than before?” Sabina asks, as humanity prepares to pick itself back up again. “Why do we go on pretending?”When the curtain rises on the third act, the furniture lies ruined. But the natural world has revived. The stage blooms with a thousand flowers, and when characters traverse that meadow, it feels like a dream. Do we really want to wake from it? When “The Skin of Our Teeth” first opened, in 1942, the world wobbled on the threshold of disaster. Now, it seems, we are wobbling again. Maybe it always seems that way. Human life could continue indefinitely. Or the end of the Anthropocene might be nigher than you think. And that would be terrible, wouldn’t it? But look how the flowers grow.The Skin of Our TeethThrough May 29 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 55 minutes. More

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      ‘Only Child’ Review: A Magnetic Performer Without a Story to Match

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      The autobiographical solo show from Daniel J. Watts shows off his skill with spoken word and dance, but doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts.What’s your name? What’s your story?In classrooms and job interviews, on dating profiles and first dates, we’re often asked to craft an abridged narrative of our lives, to single out the events and characteristics that best define us. It’s a lot of pressure, and an impossible task, so we settle for formulaic prompts and cheesy icebreakers.The chasm between the raw material of a life and the manipulation of facts into a coherent narrative is wide enough that a writer too shaky on his feet may very well fall right in.That’s where we find Daniel J. Watts, the magnetic creator and star of “The Jam: Only Child,” a filmed rendition of his one-person show, presented for streaming by the Signature Theater in Arlington, Virginia. (The show also had a brief run at the Public Theater in 2020, as part of the Under the Radar festival.)Watts, who earned a well-deserved Tony Award nomination for his performance as Ike Turner in “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” has the irrepressible energy and timing of a stand-up comic, and his bouncy jabber-jawed delivery connects even through the screen.And while the production, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, is sleek, stylish and technically sound, the script finds Watts unable to transcend platitudes, relying instead on our current conversations about race and gender to shape his story and give it pertinence.“Only Child” opens with Watts emanating such ease that you can’t help but want to be seduced by the beats and bops of the performance. In denim overalls, a matching jacket and red cap, he cruises out on what looks like the concert platform of the flyest club in town. There’s a mysterious depth to the intimate room, thanks to Adam Honoré’s lighting design, with DJ Duggz behind turntables in the back center, there to accompany the monologue with sounds as varied as Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” and perky, easy listening.With the lackadaisical swagger of the cool kid in school, Watts greets DJ Duggz with a choreographed handshake, then somersaults into a spoken word rhythm, the hybrid of theater and rap that recalls the master of the form, Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Watts gets the connection, declaring himself “somewhere between Sammy Davis, Dave Chappelle, Leguizamo and Lin-Manuel.”)He begins with his 1980s childhood in North Carolina, eating Gushers and Zebra Cakes, watching “ThunderCats” and discovering the fun of lighting things on fire in the bathroom while his single mother isn’t around. He grows up awkward around girls, perennially friend-zoned, and has a breakdown in college that has him question his relationship to masculinity and sexuality. All the while the shadowy absence of his father looms in the background.The show finds Watts describing his North Carolina childhood and struggling with his identity as a Black man.via the Signature TheaterAs a writer, Watts is enamored with metaphor, but his analogies get muddled. Within the first few minutes, he has already described the process of putting together this theatrical memoir, from scraps of poetry and raps and recollections, as unearthing skeletons in the closet, unpacking boxes in an attic and grabbing jars of jam from the pantry shelves.And where is he headed? Despite its title, the show never effectively captures how being an only child affected his development. He describes his admiration for his mother, but she isn’t presented as a fully developed figure. And he glosses over his relationship with his father, until, more than halfway in, he drops the briefest mention of abusive behavior, and refers to the rage he holds onto, before moving along.In casting about for shape to his story, Watts reaches for politics. He uses his college sexual experiences to talk about consent, but his attempt to hold himself accountable for a questionable drunken hookup — plus his regret at the loss of an idol in Bill Cosby after the comedian’s sexual assault allegations — come across as tone-deaf.Similarly, a section in which he shares his anger as a Black man in America, name-dropping many of the unjustly killed Black people in recent years, reads like a grasp for political relevance more than a personal tie-in. Because Watts fails to unpack — or even really mention — his relationship to race until this roll call of victims, it feels incidental, despite how poignantly these tragedies may ring true for him in real life.Late in the 90-minute show, Watts dons tap shoes to dance out a drunken spiral, a physical representation of his tumble down to rock bottom. He trips across the stage with his upper body slumped over, arms carelessly flailing in a pantomime of a man stumbling after one too many beers.It’s a cleverly conceived performance, shifting from spoken word to tap, another medium in which Watts tells us he found comfort. But Watts struggles to transition back to his story, making the routine feel more like a musical interlude set to the sounds of Bob Marley.So what’s the upshot of a show electrically performed yet sloppily composed? Watts seems to fumble for the answer himself, ending on a handful of clichés and bumper-sticker affirmations about living one’s truth and saying yes to life.“Only Child” is a reminder that translating a life into art can take time and distance. Watts has talent to spare, and as for the story — well, doesn’t the saying go that all writing is rewriting?Daniel J. Watts’ The Jam: Only ChildThrough May 7; sigtheatre.org. More