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Hillary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai Toast Their New Broadway Show ‘Suffs’

by Eliana Willis 19 April 2024, 22:27

Dozens of theater, film and media stars turned out on Thursday night for the opening of “Suffs,” a new musical about women’s suffrage.“This is thrilling,” Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, said on a chilly Thursday night outside the Music Box Theater on 45th Street, as women in strapless gowns walked a purple carpet.Ms. Clinton, a noted Broadway superfan, was making her Broadway producing debut with “Suffs,” a new musical about women’s suffrage that traces the campaign for the right to vote from 1913 through the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which was celebrating its opening night.The show not only arrives in a presidential election year, as states attempt to tighten voting laws, but also as Broadway is bringing more female-centric stories to the stage. Audience interest in such stories has also been strong — in the previous week, “Suffs” ranked in the top 10 of the 36 shows on Broadway in the percentage of its seats filled.“I’m so excited that audiences are embracing this story,” Ms. Clinton said. “It’s historic and relevant, and it’s emotional, and it shows the relationships among these women who fought so hard to get us the right to vote.”Huma Abedin, at the opening night of “Suffs” at the Music Box Theater on Broadway.Lin-Manuel Miranda, right, with his father, Luis A. Miranda Jr.Anna Wintour, left, the global editorial director of Vogue, with Sara Bareilles, the performer. 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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Review: ‘The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,’ Uneven Yet a Powerful Draw
by Eliana Willis 5 May 2023, 14:00
Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan revisit Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 play on Broadway, following its sold-out run in Brooklyn.Lorraine Hansberry didn’t have the luxury of getting “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” right. In October 1964, days after the play opened on Broadway, a headline appeared in The New York Times: “Lorraine Hansberry Ill, Placed on Critical List.”She had been hospitalized before rehearsals started, but released in time to attend some of them. She saw previews; she attended opening night. Within two days, she was an inpatient again.A week later, another article: “Revisions Are Made in ‘Sidney Brustein,’” telling of “extensive script changes since its opening.”Then, on Jan. 13, 1965, a report of Hansberry’s death the previous day, from cancer, at age 34. “She was unable to help fashion the last play as it took shape in rehearsals,” the obituary read.All of which surely helps to explain the unwieldiness of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” a play that we might have looked back on as an early effort if only Hansberry had lived.Revised further by her ex-husband and literary executor, Robert Nemiroff, after her death, it has returned to Broadway, at the James Earl Jones Theater, with Oscar Isaac in the title role of a bloviating, early ’60s Greenwich Village intellectual. Rachel Brosnahan plays his wife, Iris, an actress manqué whose greatest feat of performance has been shaping herself into what he wants her to be.The leads’ considerable box-office appeal — Isaac perhaps most widely known for his role in the “Star Wars” sequels, Brosnahan for playing the title character in the Amazon series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — made Anne Kauffman’s production a scorching-hot ticket earlier this year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Rapidly transferring to Broadway, it opened last week on the final day of Tony Awards eligibility, while asking critics to stay away until this week. (I did not catch it in Brooklyn.)From left: Julian De Niro, Andy Grotelueschen, Brosnahan and Isaac as Village bohemians in Anne Kauffman’s production, a rare revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet this seldom-seen play itself is a powerful draw. Clamorous with the voices of men, who take up an awful lot of oxygen, it is most incisive and piercing in the voices of its women, whom Hansberry draws with exquisite fullness. As a piece of theatrical and cultural history it is fascinating. And despite some sluggish moments, it does not feel overlong at two hours and 40 minutes, trimmed from three hours at BAM.The script’s unevenness does make you wonder, though, how Hansberry might have reworked it if she’d had the energy, and the privilege of time — and to what degree she, a Black woman and closeted lesbian in the very white, very male, ostensibly straight world of midcentury American theater, felt pressure to conform in her playmaking.Because really? Sidney Brustein, whom she has placed at the center of this crowded tragicomedy, is not an interesting person. This is not Isaac’s fault, although he ignores Hansberry’s stipulation that Sidney “laughs at himself as much as the world.” Isaac’s performance is mostly unremarkable but fine, sparking fully to life only in Sidney’s scenes with Iris’s wealthy, conventional sister, Mavis — the best role in the show, and the best played, by a thoroughly captivating Miriam Silverman. (The play is a Tony nominee for best revival; Silverman is its only acting nominee.)As written, Sidney is ridiculous, and stubbornly oblivious to that fact. Terrible at business, he has just bought a local newsweekly without mentioning it to Iris, because theirs is nowhere near a marriage of equals. The title nods to that: It’s Sidney’s window, not Iris’s too, even though it is in their living room. (The set, framed by girders reaching up toward the sky, is a suitably impressive Broadway debut from the design collective dots, lately omnipresent Off Broadway.)Sidney finds a smidgen of purpose when he agrees to back his politician friend Wally (Andy Grotelueschen), and puts a campaign sign in the window, advocating reform. Mostly, though, he is a man of thought, not action. Blusteringly self-important, he flails through life, naïve and directionless and pontificating nonetheless.“I know it’s hard for you, Iris, to understand what I’m all about,” he says near the top of the show, but already the audience has his number. The line gets a giant laugh.Iris, on the other hand, whom Sidney does not take seriously as an artist or an adult, knows exactly what her ambition is — and it no longer involves pretending to embody his particular pastoral romantic fantasy. Iris, imbued by Brosnahan with a fragile strength and perfect comic timing, works as a waitress while scheming to break into the theater.“I am 29,” she says, “and I want to begin to know that when I die more than ten or a hundred people will know the difference. I want to make it, Sid.”Brosnahan with Miriam Silverman, who plays Iris’s wealthy, conventional sister, Mavis.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIsaac with Gus Birney, who plays Iris’s younger sister, a baby-voiced Gloria.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn a Hansberry play, it pays to keep your eye on the women. “A Raisin in the Sun” is as much about the female characters as it is about Walter Lee Younger. Similarly, you could shift the kaleidoscope just a bit and see “Sidney Brustein” as being principally about Iris and her sisters, Mavis and Gloria (a terrific Gus Birney, all baby-voiced dignity) — with a supporting role for young Alton (Julian De Niro), a rare Black character in this largely white play, who is in love with Gloria.The matronly Mavis, everyday elegant in delectable period style (costumes are by Brenda Abbandandolo), is bigoted, complicated and startlingly wise about life. Gloria, a call girl who tells Alton that she’s a model, is a sweet open wound. And Alton emerges as more injured and more furious than he’d let on.There are other characters here — David (Glenn Fitzgerald), a gay playwright neighbor, and Max (Raphael Nash Thompson), a painter-revolutionary — and a swirl of social forces: racism, misogyny and homophobia among them. But the three sisters and Alton are the soul of “Sidney Brustein,” the ones who make its ending land so potently. They exist inside a work that’s crammed with people and ideas in the way that first plays often are, before writers learn to take their time.Hansberry didn’t have time. If she had, I like to think that she’d have cracked “Sidney Brustein” open and done some recycling, making more plays about Iris and her sisters and their friend.The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s WindowThrough July 2 at the James Earl Jones Theater, Manhattan; thesignonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More
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‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Takes Its Final Curtsy
by Eliana Willis 11 April 2023, 09:00
In its final season, the pioneering Amazon hit wanted to go out the way it came in: fabulously, in heels and with a dizzying words-to-minutes ratio.Rachel Brosnahan during filming for the final season of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” As the hit Amazon comedy wraps up, her character finally makes good.Heather Sten for The New York TimesOn a morning in mid-October, on the set of the Amazon comedy “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” set dressers readied the grimy Midtown office of Susie Myerson, the talent manager played with a newsboy cap and signature glare by Alex Borstein. An animal wrangler oversaw a flock of pigeons outside a false window as a scenic artist painted on their droppings. In a haze of herbal cigarette smoke, the actors — Borstein, Alfie Fuller and Rachel Brosnahan — ran the scene again, again, again, until the pauses vanished and the dialogue sang.If you have seen “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” the first streaming show to win an Emmy for best comedy series (one of 20 Emmys overall), you will suspect, correctly, that the lighting was gorgeous, the costumes sumptuous, the hair and makeup luxuriant. Each pigeon gleamed. (The fake excreta looked very nice, too.) A show that has never met a situation it couldn’t prettify and frill, that’s “Mrs. Maisel.”In this scene, Midge, Brosnahan’s exuberant comedian, receives news of a long-awaited break.“Are you serious?” Midge asks once Susie fills her in.“I’m ‘Antigone’ without the laughs,” Susie replies.As always, the final season features remarkably detailed production design. “We leaned into the vibrancy of the time,” said Amy Sherman-Palladino, the show’s creator.Heather Sten for The New York TimesHeather Sten for The New York TimesHeather Sten for The New York TimesSo yes, in its final season, which premieres on Friday and is set in 1961, Midge Maisel, the only Upper West Side doyenne to work blue, finally makes good. (Just when, where and how? You’ll have to ask a pigeon.) Amy Sherman-Palladino, who created the show, and her husband, Dan Palladino, an executive producer, always imagined that it would end this way — brisk and bouncy and dressed to thrill.“Everyone knew Midge was going to be famous,” Palladino said. “This would have been a very disappointing journey for people to take if she just decides to be a housewife.”“A very funny, fabulous housewife,” his wife amended. “But that wasn’t the ride.”The ride, instead, was an ascending swirl of jewel tones and kick pleats and a chirpy soundtrack (three of those Emmys were for outstanding music supervision), a midcentury fever dream in candy coating. Underneath that coating was the story of a woman — actually two women, including Susie — triumphing in a male-dominated industry through moxie and native skill.The pilot for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” was shot in 2016, not so long ago as the calendar goes but a lifetime in terms of streaming content. Even while making it, Sherman-Palladino and Palladino (“Gilmore Girls,” “Bunheads”) thought they might have a hit.“It was a show that was kind of popping off of our monitors while we were shooting it,” Palladino said. But a couple of decades in the business had taught him that all the popping in the world couldn’t guarantee that executives would OK it or that an audience would find it.The series tracked two women triumphing in a male-dominated industry: Midge and her manager, Susie Myerson, played by Alex Borstein. “It was exciting to see a three-dimensional female character and not just an empty sidekick,” she said.Heather Sten for The New York TimesBrosnahan, then 26 and best known for a multiepisode arc as a doomed call girl in “House of Cards,” also had doubts. After years spent, as she put it in a recent interview, “crying and dying,” she could hardly believe that the creators had trusted her to play a standup comic.“It felt daunting and impossible, petrifying and exhilarating,” she said. But she worried that a pilot about a woman who knew her way around a sweetheart neckline and a casserole dish would be perceived as too niche.“I remember finishing it and going, ‘But who’s going to watch it?’” she said.People did watch the pilot, though because Amazon keeps its viewing numbers secret, the creators have never known how many. Enough, anyway, for Amazon to give the show a two-season order, its first ever multiseason commitment. Its Prime Video service has gone through several paradigm shifts since, but year after year (and Emmy after Emmy), the company kept faith with “Mrs. Maisel.”“You would expect, at some point, someone to go, ‘Do they really need that many skirts?’” Sherman-Palladino said. “It never happened.”Heather Sten for The New York TimesHeather Sten for The New York TimesThe creators said they had been given whatever they needed to create the world of the series. “We felt a very strong sense of pride about this project that we never experienced before,” said Dan Palladino, an executive producer. Heather Sten for The New York TimesBut all skirts have to come to an end sometime. Palladino described the decision to conclude the show with its fifth season as a mutual one.“It became a mutual decision once we were told it was the last season,” his wife clarified. In these last episodes, while tying off any dangling plot strands, they wanted to give viewers a sense not only of how Midge finally breaks into the big time but also what that break ultimately means for the show’s main characters. The nine-episode final season is larded with flash-forwards, designed to show what becomes of Midge and her extended family.These time jumps lend the show a gravitas it has not always offered. “Life is a series of choices, and some of them are stupid choices and some great choices,” Sherman-Palladino explained. “Part of what those flash-forwards did for us is show the consequences of the choices that she did make.”Until now, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” has largely presented Midge’s arc as a dauntless upward climb. When her marriage shattered like so much dropped Fiestaware, she pulled herself onto a nightclub stage and she has stayed onstage ever since.Midge’s marriage ended early in the series but her former husband, Joel, played by Michael Zegen (left, with Joel Johnstone) remained a key character.Heather Sten for The New York Times“I have found her resilience inspiring and her courage to keep confronting change inspiring,” Brosnahan said. But did that resilience and that courage come at some cost? This final season, however breezy, confirms that it did.Earlier seasons have glossed over Midge’s neglect of her children. This final one strips some of that gloss away, even as it emphasizes the robust support system — an engaged father, a hypercompetent housekeeper, two sets of devoted grandparents — that the youngest Maisels enjoy.And yet, according to the creators, Midge’s success or failure as a mother wasn’t especially important. “I wasn’t setting out to do a story about a mother,” Sherman-Palladino said. “This was a story about a woman discovering her own ambition in a time when women were not supposed to have ambition.”Brosnahan echoed this. “I don’t know that it matters what kind of mom she is,” she said, noting that the go-getting men of prestige television have not been subject to the same critique. “We just didn’t have this conversation at this volume about Don Draper or even Walter White.”The show allowed many people beyond Midge to fulfill their personal ambitions. Borstein, who won two Emmys for the show, had nearly quit the business when she received the script for the pilot. She admired Susie’s toughness and also her vulnerability.Luke Kirby during filming. The final episodes will reveal both how Midge breaks into the big time and what that break ultimately means for the show’s main characters.Heather Sten for The New York TimesHeather Sten for The New York Times“It was exciting to see a three-dimensional female character and not just an empty sidekick,” she said. And she saw parallels between her own career and those of Susie and Midge.“It rang really true for me,” she said. “I’ve always had to machete my own path.”Palladino and Sherman-Palladino never had to resort to machetes. But they did describe “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” as the first project on which they had been given every resource that they needed, the chance to realize nearly every dream.“We felt a very strong sense of pride about this project that we never experienced before,” Palladino said. They are particularly delighted with the show’s exhaustive, spirited production design.“We leaned into the vibrancy of the time,” Sherman-Palladino said. “The cars were beautiful. The [expletive] toasters were gorgeous. People really did dress like that.”To walk through the production studio, even during the final weeks of the shoot, was to feel immersed in this fictional world. A bar set included custom-printed matchbooks on the hostess stand. There were coordinated dishes on kitchen shelves, signed photos and engraved awards in the offices of a late-night talk show.Reid Scott, who plays the host of that show, marveled at the level of detail. A new addition to “Mrs. Maisel,” he noticed during his first day on set that every piece of paper in every typewriter had custom letterhead.“The camera is never going to focus on what this person in the secretary pool is typing, yet they went all the way,” he said in a phone interview. “It infuses the entire production, and it makes everyone really step up.”Even stars of the show were surprised by the level of detail. “It infuses the entire production, and it makes everyone really step up,” Reid Scott said.Heather Sten for The New York TimesHeather Sten for The New York TimesHeather Sten for The New York TimesSaying goodbye to all of that letterhead wasn’t easy. The creators arranged for the final week to require the entire cast. Borstein said that there was a bet going to see who would cry first. (She lost.) There were tears in rehearsal, tears walking to rehearsal, tears at the coffee station.“Grown men crying all over the place,” Sherman-Palladino said. Brosnahan said that even on days when members of the main cast weren’t required, they would show up anyway, just to be together.The final day was especially wrenching. “We didn’t want to wrap,” said Tony Shalhoub, who won his own Emmy for playing Midge’s father, Abe Weissman. “We didn’t want to finish that last shot.”There were wrap gifts, too many. (“Because I believe in buying love,” Sherman-Palladino said.) And wrap parties. But it still hurt, though sometimes in a bittersweet way.“The end of the show, it leaves a hole in my heart,” Borstein said. “It’s difficult, but it’s also a wonderful empty space. Because I know what once filled it, and I know what I’m capable of.”Sherman-Palladino and Palladino feel that same poignancy, even as they’re working on a new show. (They might have talked more about it, but an Amazon publicist came on the line to politely dissuade them.) Mostly they feel grateful — for the cast, the crew, the skirts, the sense of shared endeavor.“Many people have lovely careers and never get to experience this kind of unity,” Sherman-Palladino said. “We’re very lucky. If we get hit by a bus right now, we’re fine.”She kidded that this was how “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” actually closes — with style, with flair and in multiple vehicular homicides.“Giant buses come out and run over everybody,” she cracked. “It’s just a blood bath.”“It’s the ending we dreamed of,” Palladino said.In the end, “this was a story about a woman discovering her own ambition in a time when women were not supposed to have ambition,” Sherman-Palladino said.Heather Sten for The New York Times More
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Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan to Bring Hansberry Play to Broadway
by Eliana Willis 4 April 2023, 12:01
The duo recently starred in a revival of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” at BAM; now the production is moving uptown.The current Broadway season is getting a surprise ending: Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan will bring to America’s most visible theater district their take on a long-overlooked Lorraine Hansberry play, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”The starry duo — he’s best known for the “Star Wars” sequels and she’s the title character in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — led a production of the play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that closed on March 24. Now they plan an unexpected and unusually quick transfer uptown: The show will start previews April 25 and open just two days later, on April 27, which is the final date on which plays and musicals can open and still be eligible for this year’s Tony Awards.“Who would’ve thunk it?” said the play’s director, Anne Kauffman. “It’s completely insane — the speed with which these producers are acting is nuts and completely admirable.”Kauffman first encountered the play as an undergraduate, and previously staged it in Chicago. “I have to say, because I’ve been thinking about and dreaming about this play for so many years, it has all felt like a hallucination, and I think the hallucination is continuing,” she said. “Nothing has sunk in — it just feels like it’s beyond my wildest dreams for the play.”“The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” which followed the enormous success of “A Raisin in the Sun,” is about a left-leaning couple (played by Isaac and Brosnahan) living in Greenwich Village in the 1960s and facing challenges to both their marriage and their political ideals. Hansberry, then 34, died in 1965, just two days after the original “Brustein” production closed on Broadway, and the play has long been overshadowed by “Raisin.”The revival received mixed reviews. “The play was, and remains, as brilliant and pugnacious a punch against liberal inertia as any thrown in real life,” the critic Jesse Green wrote in The New York Times. “What it isn’t, quite, is coherent.”No matter: Audiences flocked to BAM, where the seven-week run, in the 836-seat Harvey Theater, was 98 percent sold out, according to BAM’s outgoing artistic director David Binder, who also has a long history with the play and with Hansberry’s work — he produced the first Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.”The Broadway transfer was made possible by the collapse of another show, “Room,” which was scheduled to open this month, but fell apart when the producers were unable to raise the necessary capitalization costs. The Hansberry play will be staged at the James Earl Jones Theater, where the “Room” marquee had already been erected.The fact that the BAM run just ended makes the transfer simpler — the cast is still in the play’s “mind-set,” Kauffman said. Some parts of the physical set, however, had already been discarded, and will have to be reconstituted, she said, but otherwise the cast and the physical production are directly transferring, with some minor adjustments to the staging because the Broadway house is less deep than the BAM space. There will be just two days of rehearsals in a rehearsal room, followed by a tech period in the theater; Kauffman said she expects “a tweak here and there,” but no major changes.The Broadway run will be short — it is scheduled to last just 10 weeks. It will be produced by Seaview, a company led by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea that is also producing this season’s Broadway revival of “Parade”; Sue Wagner and John Johnson, longtime general managers who also worked with Seaview on this season’s Mike Birbiglia show, “The Old Man & the Pool”; the playwright Jeremy O. Harris; and BAM. More
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‘The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window’ Review: The Sin of Apathy
by Eliana Willis 28 February 2023, 00:00
Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan star as Village bohemians in a rare revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s indictment of liberal inertia.It’s hard to imagine how someone dying of cancer could write, as Lorraine Hansberry did in a hospital journal, that “comfort has come to be its own corruption.” Despite her condition, she thought she should be on the front lines again, resisting decline and fighting injustice.But actually, she’d never stopped doing those things. “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” which opened on Broadway in October 1964 and closed the following January, two days before her death at 34, is proof. An indictment of what one of its characters calls “ostrich-ism” — “the great sad withdrawal from the affairs of men” — the play was, and remains, as brilliant and pugnacious a punch against liberal inertia as any thrown in real life.What it isn’t, quite, is coherent, as the revival that opened on Monday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music makes clear in making just some of it work. Its hailstorm of ideas remains stunning — and aptly painful if, as a proud progressive, you’re struck in the face by the ice of its wit. But as human drama goes, and despite fine performances by Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan, it’s hard to discern a satisfying emotional shape in all the weather. It’s blurry.That might seem surprising, coming from the author of the almost translucently earnest “A Raisin in the Sun,” which five years before “Sidney” was the first play by a Black woman ever produced on Broadway. The follow-up, rarely seen onstage since its premiere, takes a much broader, and often satirical, view of the problem of living right in a world that’s wrong.The focus of the satire is Isaac’s character, Sidney Brustein, a progressive Jew who progresses from failure to failure. His ludicrous nightclub, called Walden Pond, has just gone under as the action starts in the cramped Village apartment he shares with his wife, Iris. And now, to her chagrin, he’s finagled himself the ownership of a neighborhood newspaper.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.But The Village Crier, as it’s called, is no Village Voice. Disappointed in politics and convinced that his editorial stance should thus be apolitical, Sidney refuses to endorse anything. At the start of the play, he won’t even hang a sign in his window for Wally O’Hara (Andy Grotelueschen), a reform candidate for local office. Reformers, experience tells him, eventually turn into the bosses they’ve unseated.Aligned in various ways against that cynical view are his friends (all men) and his kin (all women). Alton Scales (Julian De Niro) is the most passionately anti-apathy; in part because he’s biracial, justice is no abstraction to him. “You don’t care if I’m ‘blue, green, purple or polka-dot,’ right?” he observes. But “those don’t happen to be the options.”Village bohemians: Isaac, center, with Julian De Niro, left, and Raphael Nash Thompson.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlso maintaining the struggle against the status quo are Max (Raphael Nash Thompson), a beatnik artist who designs the newspaper’s perversely inscrutable cover, and David Ragin (Glenn Fitzgerald), a gay playwright in the Edward Albee mode whose latest work takes place in a refrigerator. David is engaged “in the supreme effort of trying to wrest the theater from the stranglehold of Ibsenesque naturalism,” Sidney mocks.Anne Kauffman’s production, following one she directed in 2016 for the Goodman Theater in Chicago, is engaged in a similar effort. Especially in its treatment of the play’s women — three sisters representing three different maladaptations to male expectation — her staging moves the story toward its surreal edges in an attempt to give breathing room to Hansberry’s complexities.The approach is successful at first. Brosnahan hits all the right notes as Iris, a would-be actress whose quasi-mystical Appalachian upbringing constitutes an important part of the Brustein marriage’s erotics. (Sidney calls Iris, who is Greek, Irish and Cherokee, his “mountain girl.”) Brosnahan is also compelling when Iris’s autonomous ambitions emerge, and the domestic comedy (along with the lighting by John Torres) turns stranger.But as the contrasting energies that joined the Brusteins — Jew and gentile, sophisticate and bumpkin — begin to go haywire, Isaac, otherwise deft and charming, cannot find a way to merge Sidney’s laissez-faire liberalism with his period-typical yet vile sexism.And it’s not just Sidney who’s the oppressor; all the men are vile that way. “A woman’s place is in the oven,” one character jests.Nor is Iris the only victim: Her two sisters are belittled as well. Gloria (Gus Birney), who says she’s a model, is the object of salacious speculation and then cruel disdain. Mavis (Miriam Silverman), an uptown matron, is roundly jibed as a dopey square. True, she’s racist and antisemitic, but Hansberry allows the character humanity nonetheless — and Silverman, demonstrating that “everybody is his own hipster,” steals every scene she’s in.From left: Miriam Silverman, Isaac and Glenn Fitzgerald in the play, with period-nailing costumes by Brenda Abbandandolo.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou might have guessed that what’s under attack here is the patriarchy; Hansberry rewrote what she at first called “The Sign in Jenny Reed’s Window” so she could make the point more fully.And if the atavism of progressive men were her only target, however complicated and ornately she painted it, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” might land with a more satisfying thwack. But with so many other bull’s-eyes to aim at — political machines, Bohemian pretensions, the ethics of sex work and the false equivalencies of Black and Jewish despair — the play too often feels overwhelmed with itself. Kauffman literalizes that feeling during the production’s second half by having some characters leave the set — a multilevel marvel by the design collective dots — to watch the action as if they were part of an exhausted audience.Despite that touch of whimsy, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” is no surreal “refrigerator”; it’s an old-fashioned, Ibsenesque oven, working best when allowed to cook the original recipe. Perhaps that’s why the period-nailing costumes by Brenda Abbandandolo are so successful. So too is the period music, much of it specified by Hansberry, some of it played live by Isaac on banjo.But Hansberry was too sick during the original production’s rehearsal period to make revisions that might have accommodated the vastness of her vision to the clutter of her structure. And though Robert Nemiroff, her ex-husband and literary executor, did make revisions later, and the creative team of this revival has made additional ones as well, a satisfactory solution has not yet been found.Perhaps it’s a problem built into Hansberry’s point. The progressive slicing of identity into finer and finer factions eventually leaves you with factions of one. No traditional play, with its sofa and sink and succession of neat scenes, can house that story, at least not in three hours. If only Hansberry had lived (she’d be 92 now) to turn her tantalizing version of the “well made” drama into what it might have been: a great unmade one.The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s WindowThrough March 24 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 3 hours. More
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Oscar Isaac, Rachel Brosnahan and the Draw of a Neglected Hansberry Play
by Aurelia Butler 1 February 2023, 09:00
The first major New York revival of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 Broadway play, comes to BAM this month. What took so long?Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” began performances on Broadway in the fall of 1964. It closed the following January, days before Hansberry’s death, having run 101 performances.It was hardly a flop. The reviews were generally admiring, and the support of the theater community, who rallied to keep the show going, was unstinting. Of the new plays that opened that fall, only a few ran so long. But unlike “A Raisin in the Sun,” Hansberry’s earlier Broadway show, which remains a staple of regional theaters and high school classrooms, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” has been occluded, all but forgotten.“Isn’t that insane?” the director Anne Kauffman asked.This was on a recent afternoon in a rehearsal room of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Kauffman and her stars, the actors Rachel Brosnahan and Oscar Isaac, were preparing for the play’s first major New York revival since a 14-performance run in 1972. Combining the published script with earlier drafts, Kauffman’s production is scheduled to begin performances on Saturday. She directed a revival of “Sign” at Chicago’s Goodman Theater in 2016. But she didn’t feel finished with it.Rita Moreno and Gabriel Dell as the play’s divided married couple in the 1964 Broadway production of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”Billy Rose Theater Division, The New York Public Library“I loved that production. I really did,” she said. “But I had no idea what I was doing compared to the depths that we’re going to on this one.”A couple of days earlier, I’d watch a half-dozen actors, mostly off book, dip their toes in, negotiating a brisk scene that touched — sardonically, sincerely — on issues of race, gender and sexuality. The sign itself, a campaign poster for a local politician, had yet to be hung, which led to jokes: The Sign on Sidney Brustein’s Balcony, The Sign on Sidney Brustein’s Fire Escape. The actors navigated the scene’s particular rhythms and its many props: cigarettes, ashtrays, a fruit bowl, liquor bottles.“I don’t know where this will go,” Brosnahan, holding a glass, said.Kauffman responded: “That’s the fun of rehearsal.”“Sign” is set in Greenwich Village in 1964, territory more or less familiar to both Isaac (“Inside Llewyn Davis”) and Brosnahan (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”). Dedicated to “the committed everywhere,” the script moves between naturalism and a more heightened, poetic style. At its center is the fraught marriage between Sidney (Isaac), a small-business owner and onetime idealist, and Iris (Brosnahan), a would-be actress. All around them are the tumults of the time, which are also the tumults of our time, as each character measures the gulf between who they were, who they are and who they would like to become. In exploring Sidney’s allegiances, some of them misplaced, and Iris’s bid for self-determination, the play opens up questions of competing loyalties, identities and habits of mind.James Baldwin, who was Hansberry’s friend, described himself, in a speech that he gave to raise funds for it, as deeply moved by the play. “If it cannot survive then we are in trouble,” he said, “because it is about nothing less than our responsibility to ourselves and each other.”Why was the life of “Sign” so brief? “Very simply put, it’s not a play about Black people,” said Joi Gresham, the director of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust and an adviser on this production. “She was seen as going out of her lane.”“I want people to be exposed to these words at this moment and to know Lorraine Hansberry in a different way,” said Anne Kauffman, seated on the couch. She directed a 2016 revival of “Sign” in Chicago but felt there was more to explore.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesOnly one character in “Sign” identifies as Black, which surprised white critics who had buttonholed Hansberry as a writer devoted to Black characters. They had expected another “A Raisin in the Sun,” and not a protest play about Village bohemians.All these decades later, the play can be understood as a prescient work about apathy, action and mutual aid. David Binder, the outgoing artistic director of BAM and a longtime champion of Hansberry’s oeuvre, sees it as a work whose time has come. “It’s a play about folks trying to do well in the world, in an incredibly turbulent time,” he said during a recent interview. “They’re trying to do right, personally, politically, socially. There’s never been a better time than now to do this play.”Isaac agreed. “I want it to feel very alive,” he said. This was on that recent Saturday afternoon. Isaac, curled, beside Brosnahan, into a corner of a prop sofa, with Kauffman just opposite. They had stayed after rehearsal to discuss commitment, change and the ways in which a nearly 60-year-old play can still surprise us. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Are you sign people? Are there signs that you hang in your own windows?OSCAR ISAAC My mom’s house is in Vero Beach. Trump country. During the election I put a bunch of Biden stickers on the golf carts.RACHEL BROSNAHAN My husband and I drove cross country in an RV in 2020. There was signage everywhere. Lawns filled with hundreds of Trump flags. I put a tiny Biden sticker in our window. It couldn’t be too big. We had to sleep there. If we did the play now it would be, “The Post on Sidney Brustein’s Instagram.” It’s all signs and not a lot of substance. You can hang a sign about anything. It’s maybe why I’ve always been a little bit allergic to signs.ISAAC Makes you feel like a hypocrite.BROSNAHAN But I go back and forth all the time. I sit on the board of a charitable organization, and I’ve learned how powerful it is to make a post on my Instagram. I guess the answer is you have to do both. You can say what you want, then you have to do it.What made you want to do this play?ISAAC It’s around the corner from where I live, a really easy sell. But I tried to get out of it. It’s nights. It’s a big commitment, energetically. I was like, ‘I’m going to read it just to make sure.’ I started reading the first pages. And I was like, ‘No, of course, I’m doing this.’ There’s something about the music of it. It’s undeniable. The draw is just too strong.Kauffman, center, with Isaac and Brosnahan. “It’s like this lost Bach piece,” Isaac said of the play, which begins preview performances in Brooklyn on Saturday. “People should hear this music.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesBROSNAHAN I had a similar experience. And it couldn’t be further from my house. I’ve spent the last 10 months shooting and really needed a break. But there is a magnetism to this play. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and dreaming about it.ISAAC It’s like this lost Bach piece. People should hear this music.Who is Sidney, and what does he believe in?ISAAC I don’t know. I don’t know if he knows. He is a feeler and someone who’s trying to stop himself from feeling. He’s committed to a lot to things that haven’t panned out. So his hope has dried up. He has a very broad mind and a really keen aesthetic. He’s steeped in the culture of the moment and in the culture of the Village but it’s all starting to dissolve and change. There’s a wave coming — the civil rights movement, the psychedelic movement, Dylan plugging in. And at the heart is this relationship that’s also mutating and shifting. He can’t hold on to anything.Who is Iris?BROSNAHAN Iris is also a feeler. And a dreamer. But she doesn’t know how to achieve the dreams. She has a clear picture of what the dream is and no road map. She’s caught between two different waves of feminism. She’s caught between wanting to be cared for and wanting to take care of herself. When she entered into this relationship, she was really happy to be whatever he wanted her to be, to do whatever he wanted her to do, to go wherever he wanted. That was enough. But the world is changing, new conversations are happening. She is in a moment of tremendous change.The play is nearly 60 years old. What has surprised you about it?ISAAC The way she talks about identity, that feels eerily prophetic. What’s surprising to me is that this queer Black young woman, in the ’60s, wrote this play that has so much freedom. Every character has moments of extreme selfishness, ignorance and ugliness. Then, within a sentence, they say something that breaks your heart. You don’t see that kind of bravery these days.BROSNAHAN She gives each and every character the grace to be exactly who they are. She’s extraordinary. And so much of her extraordinary self is in this play. She could hold so many prophetic ideas in her head at once. We are revisiting a huge conversation right now about white apathy and the consequences of that in our political system and world. She explores that with such nuance in this play.Oscar, you mention identity. Sidney is Jewish as written and you were not raised Jewish. Does that make you feel any particular responsibility?ISAAC We could play that game: How Jewish are you? It is part of my family, part of my life. I feel the responsibility to not feel like a phony. That’s the responsibility, to feel like I can say these things, do these things and feel like I’m doing it honestly and truthfully.Has the play made you reflect about your own commitments, your own beliefs?BROSNAHAN I’ve been very inspired by the play’s criticism of inaction. As someone who can be an absolutist, very all or nothing, it feels like a very hopeful and healthy reminder that you can do something, even something small, even something local. If that’s all you can do, that is enough. If we all do a little bit, we have the ability to make great change. Lorraine believed deeply in people’s ability to make change.ANNE KAUFFMAN Doing this play and having people come watch it and making sure that it’s accessible, that’s my mission. People need to hear her voice and they need to see this play.BROSNAHAN We need her in this moment.KAUFFMAN In every moment. We haven’t even caught up to her. The way that she thinks.What do you want the audience to experience?ISAAC I want it to feel very alive. I want it to feel like a happening.BROSNAHAN I want it to come off of the page. Hopefully people will consider where they do or don’t see themselves in this play and how that moves them.KAUFFMAN I want people to be exposed to these words at this moment and to know Lorraine Hansberry in a different way. I want to have this be part of the canon. This is not a well-made play. You come expecting to see a Lorraine Hansberry play and this colors way outside the lines. My goal is to let it be wild, not try to tame it. More
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Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan to Star in Hansberry Revival
by Eliana Willis 6 October 2022, 18:00
“The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” a rarely revived play by Lorraine Hansberry, will be presented at BAM starting in February.Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan will star in a rare revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” starting in February at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.The play, about a pair of bohemian artists struggling to preserve their marriage at a time of political upheaval, was first staged on Broadway in 1964, five years after the arrival of Hansberry’s far better known work, “A Raisin in the Sun.” In 2018, writing in The New York Times Book Review, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins called “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” “a shattering study of liberal self-delusion and whiteness as an existential crisis” and declared the play “criminally neglected.”The revival, which is scheduled to begin performances Feb. 4 and to open Feb. 23, will be directed by Anne Kauffman, who previously directed it in 2016 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Reviewing that production for The Chicago Tribune, the critic Chris Jones called the play “a masterpiece lost in plain sight” and “a drama so infused with emotional intelligence, linguistic treasures and the human conditions of dread and longing that it keeps you bolt-upright in your seat for nearly three hours.”The artistic director of BAM, David Binder, said he read “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” while he was working as the lead producer of a 2004 Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” He and Kauffman have been talking about mounting a New York production ever since.Isaac and Brosnahan are best known for their work onscreen — he for “Star Wars” sequels (he played Poe Dameron) and she for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (she plays the title character). But both have stage credits as well; Isaac played Hamlet at the Public Theater in 2017, and Brosnahan played Desdemona in a production of “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop in 2016.Before the pandemic, Isaac had been planning to appear in a new production of “Three Sisters,” directed by Sam Gold at New York Theater Workshop. That production, which has been repeatedly postponed, now appears on the theater’s website as part of the current season, but with no date, and the note, “We are working hard to confirm the cast for the 2023 production of ‘Three Sisters’ and we hope that the full original cast will be available to continue on with the production.” (Representatives for Isaac and New York Theater Workshop offered no further details.)Hansberry died in 1965, at the age of 34, and in recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in her life and work, with productions and books, a documentary and even a sculpture that is touring the country. A new revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara, is now in previews at the Public Theater. More
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When Is a Comedy Special Also a Corporate Synergy Message?
by Aurelia Butler 30 December 2020, 15:00
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn ComedyWhen Is a Comedy Special Also a Corporate Synergy Message?Two year-end shows from Amazon and Netflix deliver some laughs, yes, but also serve as veiled ads for the streaming services themselves.Samuel L. Jackson in “Death to 2020,” a new Netflix comedy special.Credit…Saeed Adyani/NetflixDec. 30, 2020, 11:00 a.m. ETAt the start of “Death to 2020,” a reporter played by Samuel L. Jackson sits alone in an abandoned office listening to a disembodied voice explain he’s looking back at the past year. “Why would you want to do that?” Jackson responds, with an additional curse for emphasis.The question haunts the next hour. One reasonable answer is that hearing Samuel L. Jackson swear is one of the finest pleasures in popular culture. Another: Where else are you going to go for some new jokes by famous people right now? The last week of the year is traditionally rich with live comedy events, but the pandemic has sidelined beloved annual shows from Sandra Bernhard and Dave Attell. Two streaming services have tried to fill the void by creating their own new genre. With talent-rich one-off specials, “Death to 2020” (on Netflix) and “Yearly Departed” (on Amazon) are comedy’s answer to journalism’s year-end lists.“Death,” slickly produced by Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones, the pair behind “Black Mirror,” is a fake documentary starring a fantasy team of actors, while “Yearly,” a more stripped-down affair hosted by Phoebe Robinson, imagines a funeral for things lost in 2020 attended by a cast of superb female comics. But both conceits are essentially thin pretexts to throw a bunch of jokes together recapping recent news under socially distanced conditions. Some of the bits are solid, others aren’t. But they never add up to more than fine diversions.“Death to 2020,” which lists no fewer than 18 writers, presents an array of talking heads, all caricatures, quipping about a highlight reel of news events: Tom Hanks getting Covid-19, Trump talking about injecting bleach, Biden in the basement and more of the greatest hits. There isn’t a strong perspective here outside of ugh, this year, can you believe it? And there’s fun to be had with these performances, including Hugh Grant playing a foppishly pretentious academic with impeccable condescension.Phoebe Robinson is the host of “Yearly Departed,” on Amazon.Credit…Nicole Wilder/Amazon StudiosGrant, who has aged into a masterful player of villains, always begins in seriousness before veering into dumb absurdity. Describing the fires that ravaged many parts of the world early in the year, he states: “It left these areas utterly inhospitable,” before pausing for the punchline: “Even to Australians.” Then there’s: “People think democracy is permanent and unchanging,” he says. “In truth, it’s something you must perpetually nurture like a woman. Or a professional grudge.”Many of the actors don’t play new characters so much as version of ones that have been popular elsewhere. As Dr. Maggie Gravel, Leslie Jones alternates between abrupt rage and pleading lustfulness. And in a turn that will delight fans of “The Comeback,” Lisa Kudrow turns a pathologically lying White House aide into hilarious cringe comedy.My favorite is Cristin Milioti’s Kathy Flowers, the ultimate Karen, whose series of monologues add up to the closest thing to a fleshed-out character arc here, starting in placid suburban normalcy before the internet radicalizes her, shifting into eye-bursting, conspiratorial madness. It’s silly sketch comedy performed with the commitment of an elite actor. More often in this special, the joke takes precedence over character, and the monologues have the feel of a collection of punch lines doled out like cards at a table.“Yearly Departed” also looks back in anguish, but instead of actors playing types, standup comics act as eulogists, taking turns at a lectern to pay their respects. Tiffany Haddish bids farewell to casual sex, and Natasha Rothwell speaks about giving up on “TV cops.” Everyone appears to be together, watching each other, but they were all filmed separately and cut together with reaction shots. The resulting feel is oddly uncanny.Not only are there seasoned stars like Sarah Silverman, but they mix in some new breakouts like Ziwe Fumudoh and up-and comers like Patti Harrison, who delivers one of the funniest, most acutely observed eulogies on the obsolescence of “rich girl Instagram influencers.” With mock poignancy, she asks: “Who could forget your surface-level love for photography, which you tried to get people to call ‘memory remembering,’ a term you coined.”The guest “eulogists” include Patti Harrison mourning the loss of “rich girl Instagram influencers.”Credit…Nicole Wilder/Amazon StudiosThe comic Natasha Leggero has a sharp set on the death of her desire to have kids, where she speaks for many parents during the pandemic saying: “I love my daughter, but I love her in the same way I love LSD. In microdoses.”Along with the stand-ups, some actors made cameos including Sterling K. Brown, laying on the floor to illustrate the span of six feet, along with Rachel Brosnahan, perhaps to remind you that “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” can be seen on Amazon. Her flat set about the death of pants is a reminder that playing a stand-up is not the same as being one. “Yearly” is hit or miss, but so are most stand-up sets at clubs, and by showing us a well-curated collection of female talent, there were more good jokes than in “Death to 2020.” And fewer stale ones.And yet watching both these shows repeatedly bemoan the miseries of the past year, I couldn’t help but think how the streaming services producing them actually did very well. Just as the pandemic has disproportionately hurt marginalized and disadvantaged groups, it has devastated small theaters and clubs while benefiting digital behemoths.That Jeff Bezos made $90 billion during the pandemic goes unmentioned on Amazon’s “Yearly Departed.” And while the script for “Death to 2020” points out how people stuck at home during lockdown spent more time on Netflix, name-dropping the reality shows “Love Is Blind” and “Floor Is Lava” amid the tragic news events makes you wonder if this was self-mocking comedy or corporate synergy? Spoiler alert: It’s both.In our ever more consolidated culture, where product placement is the norm and only a few companies produce the vast majority of large-scale entertainment, Netflix covers all the bases, pumping out escapist content for an audience stuck at home, then poking fun at themselves for doing it. “Death to 2020” was billed as a departure for the creators of “Black Mirror,” a comedy instead of a haunting vision of technology gone awry. And yet, seen from a different angle, it might be their darkest dystopian production yet.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
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‘I’m Your Woman’ Review: On the Run With a Baby
by Aurelia Butler 3 December 2020, 11:00
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusClassic Holiday MoviesHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘I’m Your Woman’ Review: On the Run With a BabyRachel Brosnahan stars in this unconventional crime movie directed by Julia Hart.Rachel Brosnahan and Arinzé Kene in “I’m Your Woman.”Credit…Amazon StudiosBy More

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