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    How to Squeeze a Feminist Farce Into an English Country House

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    The new Broadway comedy “The Cottage” begins with a pair of lovers in an English country house in 1923, the morning after their annual illicit tryst. Sylvia, played by the “Legally Blonde” star Laura Bell Bundy, is aflame with passion for her paramour, Beau, played by Eric McCormack of “Will & Grace.”On an afternoon in mid-June, the cast wore street clothes as they did a stumble-through of the show at a rehearsal studio in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. When Beau, in a fit of desire, sank his teeth into Sylvia’s foot, McCormack was in fact gamely biting into Bundy’s sneaker top.Ah, the glamour of acting!There is a certain borrowed elegance, though, to the play itself. Arguably a farce — though the playwright, Sandy Rustin, rejects that term, which to her suggests stock characters and clowning — “The Cottage” is a feminist twist on witty British comedies in the Noël Coward mold.“The Cottage” cast rehearsing, from left: Eric McCormack, Laura Bell Bundy, Dana Steingold, Lilli Cooper and Alex Moffat.OK McCausland for The New York Times“I’m really a huge fan of that whole genre of upper-crust British style,” said Rustin, whose best known play is the murder-mystery comedy “Clue,” adapted from the 1985 movie. “But the female characters often leave much to be desired. They’re often just there to serve the men. I was interested in finding a way into that genre where the women ruled the roost.”It’s no accident that Rustin, an actor who learned sketch writing and improv at Upright Citizens Brigade, set “The Cottage” in the 1920s, as British women’s rights were gaining traction. But the feminism, for much of the play, is more insinuated than overt.Only gradually does it become apparent that Sylvia, Bundy’s character, is the heroine of this ensemble piece, which starts previews on July 7 at the Helen Hayes Theater. Cheating with Beau, Sylvia is married to Clarke, who, in turn, is deep into an affair with Marjorie, Beau’s wife. All of them, and a couple of other lovers besides, turn up at what is, by Act II, a very crowded cottage.The cast of six includes Lilli Cooper — a Tony Award nominee for “Tootsie,” seen most recently on Broadway in last year’s feminist farce, “POTUS” — as the heavily pregnant Marjorie. Alex Moffat, late of “Saturday Night Live,” plays Clarke, a role that taps Moffat’s talent for falling down stairs. Jason Alexander, of “Seinfeld” fame, directs.“Comedy’s hard,” Alexander said, though at rehearsal he was an exuberant presence, watching from behind his music stand. “To make something light is heavy lifting.”In the days after the stumble-through, he, Rustin and some of the actors spoke individually by phone about what it takes to pull off this nouveau-throwback play, in period style. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.Alexander with the playwright Sandy Rustin on the play’s set at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan. Victor Llorente for The New York TimesIt’s all about precision, darling.SANDY RUSTIN Every single actor is walking onto the stage as if they are in a legit Noël Coward play, they’re in an Oscar Wilde play. And then it kind of comes off the rails. That reality sort of unravels.LAURA BELL BUNDY I’m in, like, 140 out of 147 pages [of the script]. And let me tell you, these words, they are not normal to my vernacular. Remembering where all the “rathers” and the “darlings” go, I swear that has been the most difficult thing. If you don’t get the exact wording, it’s like, that’s not the style. And also you have to speak it so quickly, because that’s the rhythm.‘Pace becomes a character.’ERIC McCORMACK As Jason has said many times, these are all great words, but without the pace, without the absolute synergy of the six of us, they’ll just sit there. This becomes its own thing when the six of us are firing on all cylinders, and the pace becomes a character, virtually. The urgency of the play isn’t just the jeopardy of “Oh my God, somebody’s coming to the door,” as much as it is, we’re all kind of running for our lives. We’re dancing for our lives.BUNDY There is a rhythm to comedy, especially stage comedy. The comedy is inside the way that some of those lines are being delivered, the pace in which they are, the volume in which they are. That is essentially the same as musical theater, or the same as multicamera comedy. Which is why I think Eric is nailing this. That’s also why Jason is nailing this.At a rehearsal last month, from left: Steingold, Alexander and Nehal Joshi. OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe play is like a musical. Or Whac-a-Mole.JASON ALEXANDER I call it the sort of nonmusical musical. With a musical number, everybody in it, even if they’re wildly separated from each other, they all understand the tempo, the intonation, the mood of the piece, the movement of the piece. This play and this cast require that in a very similar way, but there’s nobody keeping a drumbeat, and there’s nobody playing a melody. So they have to feel it internally with each other.LILLI COOPER We’re all kind of cogs in this wheel. And there are six of us onstage sometimes. But, you know, the focus has to be on something very specific. So we need to learn how to blend in with the scenery in moments and pop forward in moments. In rehearsal the other day, I compared this play to a Whac-a-Mole. We need to figure out which mole, and when, do we pop out of the hole.The script is a kind of score.BUNDY When I lost my voice the other day, it was hard for me to convey all the tonality that, when you shift the tone of voice, can hit a punchline. No matter what the format is, whether it’s musical theater comedy or whether it is absent of music, there’s still music to it.McCORMACK This role is literally a three-octave role. You need all of those notes to just sort of surf the wave of that very highfalutin English conversation.From left: Joshi, Bundy and Steingold. “Every single actor is walking onto the stage as if they are in a legit Noël Coward play,” Rustin said.OK McCausland for The New York TimesPoses are drawn from the past.ALEXANDER Can we find a common language of behavior and action and movement and playing style that is clearly rooted in what we now think of as the over-the-top styles of acting from the ’30s and ’40s? There’s a sort of a posing there that is just behaviorally different. I’ve said to Eric once or twice, “Eric, that arm gesture that you just made is very 2023.”BUNDY The body language of [Sylvia] being this fairly well-to-do woman from the 1920s in Great Britain: How does that body hold itself? I’m figuring that out. Then as she begins to transform and become a more authentic version of herself that isn’t wrapped up in the niceties of the time and what a woman should be, how a woman should be behaving, how does the body language change? All of that is stuff that I’m having to be really calculated about.Bodies are comedy fodder.RUSTIN I tend to write really physical comedies, where it’s equal parts text and what’s happening to the bodies onstage. The two things for me are married. The humor comes from how these people are inhabiting their space.COOPER I was fairly recently pregnant, a year and a half ago. It is so crazy how putting that [costume pregnancy] belly on truly brings me back. It’s like this sense memory. When I was pregnant, I kind of couldn’t believe it; it’s pretty wild that we grow humans inside ourselves. So there’s this absurdist element to it. There’s comedy in spatial awareness. Like, I physically take up more space when I have this belly on.“I call it the sort of nonmusical musical,” Alexander said. It’s all about timing. Victor Llorente for The New York TimesPies, no. Stairs, yes.McCORMACK Besides just being a hundred years old and not really wanting to fall down stairs anymore — I’ll leave that to Alex — what’s hard about physical comedy, mostly, is doing something that feels in the moment. We’ve all seen pies in the face and all that stuff. But finding an original moment, particularly in a moment of high angst or high anxiety, is just a great reward.ALEX MOFFAT I’m interested to get into the theater and see what the stairs look like. Currently in our [rehearsal] space, it’s just a few stairs. I can [fall down them] six or seven times a day, as we have been doing. But if it’s like 12 stairs coming down from the upstairs of the cottage, we’ve got a lot of figuring out to do.The political message? Sneak it in.BUNDY I was very attracted to this play because of this epiphany this woman [Sylvia] begins to have — that her joy does not need to revolve around the love of a man. Women’s sexuality is so stigmatized. And the thing is, these truths about what it means to be a woman with sexual drive, that’s also making us laugh.MOFFAT Hopefully it’s just a barreling freight train of guffaws. But absolutely it might surprise people with how the play has such a great, strong, feminist point of view. Just doing a really funny thing and taking people along for that ride, it can work as long as people get swept along in the comedy of it, in the story of it. And then maybe at the end they go, “Oh! That made an interesting point.”COOPER One of my favorite lines in the show is [paraphrasing], “Well, maybe she doesn’t need a man.” It’s such a revelation to these people that they truly ponder it. That concept being so unfathomable to this generation is funny in itself. And feminist. More

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      ‘Oliver!’ Review: Tunes, Glorious Tunes, in a Grimly Cheerful Revival

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      The Encores! production, directed by Lear deBessonet, looks to deepen and darken a musical that resists the change. But it’s still delightful.Though the orphan boys at the workhouse are beaten regularly and fed only gruel, the sign looming above them reads “God Is Love.”That grim irony, underlining the practice of child labor in the supposedly advanced society of 19th-century London, is echoed in the spooky sounds you hear as the Encores! production of “Oliver!” begins: brass murk, woodwind rasps and stringy insectlike buzzing. Has Lionel Bart’s musical, based on the Dickens novel “Oliver Twist” and first seen on Broadway in 1963, been turned into “Sweeney Todd”?The version that opened a two-week run at City Center on Wednesday, directed by Lear deBessonet, is certainly grimmer than any “Oliver!” I’ve seen, which isn’t many; it’s seldom done professionally, for both casting and structural reasons. But the underlying high spirits of Bart’s adaptation, stuffed with tunes that are merry even when they’re sad, cannot long lie dormant. Soon the boys — a wonderfully uncloying ensemble — are bursting with mirth as they sing and dance to “Food, Glorious Food,” a number so irrepressible (with choreography by Lorin Latarro) that even a heavy concept can’t weigh it down.Which is not to say a serious approach is unwarranted. Recall that Dickens, who was himself sent to work in a boot polish factory when he was 12, refers to Oliver in the first sentence of the novel as an “item of mortality” — more a death-in-progress than a life. And Bart, at least in his lyrics, does not stint on bleakness; even the bouncy title song is violent, proposing various ugly fates for the boy who dares to ask for more food.“What will he do when he’s turned black and blue?” Mr. Bumble, the workhouse beadle, asks gleefully, in six-eight rhythm.Foreground from left: Lilli Cooper, Raúl Esparza and Pajak deliver terrific turns in Lear deBessonet’s production, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut deBessonet’s entertaining and beautifully sung production, featuring terrific turns by Lilli Cooper as the proud doxy Nancy and Raúl Esparza as the criminal den leader Fagin — as well as a touching one by Benjamin Pajak in the title role — is at this point still too muddy to be convincing as sociology, let alone drama.Partly that’s the result of the extremely short Encores! rehearsal period, which compresses what probably needs months into 12 days. The staging is sloppy in places, and the violent bits involving Bill Sikes (Tam Mutu), which in a rethinking like this should be shocking, aren’t. Spoiler alert: It appears that Nancy’s dress, not Nancy herself, is bludgeoned to death at the end.The other difficulty in reframing “Oliver!” for 2023 is built into the material. Like many musicals made from doorstop novels, it cherry-picks the plot so vigorously that what’s left can hardly support the songs. (The Encores! production uses a further abbreviated script.) Oliver’s transit from the workhouse to an undertaker’s establishment to Fagin’s hide-out, spread across eight chapters in the Dickens, takes what seems like a blink of an eye here. It becomes thin gruel indeed.And the songs themselves are problematic. Though there is barely a dud in the score, and many (like “I’d Do Anything” and “Oom-Pah-Pah”) are so hummable that the audience joins in almost subliminally, they are not so much dramatizations of the action as ditties vaguely suggested by it. “Consider Yourself,” the number in which Fagin’s pickpockets, led by the Artful Dodger (Julian Lerner), welcome Oliver to the gang, opens out illogically into a full-company number featuring buskers, laborers, flower girls and 20 extras — children from New York City schools — in a way that screams unreconstructed musical comedy.Julian Lerner, center left, as the Artful Dodger in a number with Pajak, other cast members and students.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou wouldn’t want to prevent that; there’s too much pleasure to be reaped. Bart was an untrained tune savant, a latter-day Irving Berlin; if the songs are so hummable it’s probably because his composition method was built on humming them to an amanuensis.For “Oliver!” that meant delightful numbers even where a modern musical would say none was needed. “I Shall Scream!,” served up with raucous good humor by Brad Oscar and Mary Testa as Mr. Bumble and Widow Corney, is utterly beside the point, as is “That’s Your Funeral,” a similarly bouncy number for Mr. Sowerberry and his wife (Thom Sesma and Rashidra Scott) even though they are funeral directors.However inapt as drama, and however much real estate they steal from the development of a richer plot, such songs serve an important function, like the witty prose of the novel. They make the darkness of the tale bearable, almost literally — bearing you through the story.Nor is it just the music that has that effect, though it’s always jaunty. (Except when, in songs like “Boy for Sale,” “Where Is Love?,” “Who Will Buy?” and “As Long as He Needs Me,” it’s show-stoppingly lovely.) The lyrics do similar uplifting work. Though deBessonet has referred to them as “harrowing,” that quality is often undermined by the intricate rhymes, many built on cockney pronunciations (uppity/cup o’ tea) that can’t help but produce a smile.That makes the project of darkening the show difficult. Though the busily atmospheric orchestrations by William David Brohn, created for a 1994 production at the London Palladium, expand the number of musicians to 21 from 12, I’m not sure that the originals, with more of a music-hall than a symphonic quality, didn’t match the material better. Likewise, the overlay of deBessonet’s vision sometimes obscures more than it reveals.But perhaps we do not need “Oliver!” to be a Gesamtkunstwerk. Dickens intended the tale, after all, as popular entertainment, serialized over the course of two years and highly indulgent of gaudy melodrama.Also, of course, in its presentation of Fagin, indulgent of antisemitism. Compulsively referred to as “the Jew” in the novel and often played with a prosthetic nose and a Yiddish accent in earlier productions, Fagin is an awful caricature even though Bart, born Lionel Begleiter, was Jewish.Esparza — sallow-eyed, greasy-haired and perpetually sniffly, but without prosthetics — dials that down almost to zero, though the music still bears traces of Fagin’s religion in the klezmerlike violin-and-clarinet accompaniment to the song “Reviewing the Situation” with which deBessonet thoughtfully ends this production.The song asks: “Can somebody change?” Fagin’s doubtful answer is “S’possible.”I too am doubtful about the possibility of change, at least for musicals like “Oliver!” (And keep in mind that in the Dickens, Fagin is eventually executed.) They can’t all be “Sweeney”; they don’t have the bones for it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reinvesting in what made them meaningful in the first place, if dividends of delight keep coming. For that, I’d do anything.Oliver!Through May 14 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Oliver!’ Returns, With Darker Twists Intact

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      The emphasis Encores! puts on words and music rather than spectacle allows the cruel realities of Dickensian London to stand out amid the bouncy tunes.It was 10 a.m. on a recent morning in a rehearsal room at New York City Center, and nine boys scurried around the space, clutching parasols of red and white lace, tin cups and jaunty pocket squares.“OK, everyone!” said Lorin Latarro, the choreographer of the show, a new staging of “Oliver!,” the Lionel Bart musical opening at City Center on Wednesday for a two-week run as part of the Encores! series. “Today we’re going to work on ‘I’d Do Anything.’”The boys gathered around Raúl Esparza, who is playing Fagin, the lovable London crime lord, in a battered brown hat with a buckle, tan overcoat and black fingerless gloves.“Would you risk the ‘drop’?” he sang, his eyes bugging as he grabbed his scarf and mimed a noose tightening around his neck. (Translation: Are you willing to go out and commit robbery and possibly face the gallows if you’re caught?) All nine pickpockets in training nodded enthusiastically.“Oliver!,” based on the Charles Dickens novel “Oliver Twist,” is the story of an orphan’s search for belonging in that band of young pickpockets in 1830s London. It mixes fun, candy-coated musical theater crowd-pleasers like “Food, Glorious Food” and “Consider Yourself” with darker Dickensian themes including poverty and domestic violence.“The show has these really harrowing lyrics even in songs that are upbeat,” said the production’s director, Lear deBessonet. “And I think that in some productions, you may just be bobbing along with the rhythm of the song, and you might not really hear those words.”But that’s generally not the case in the concert-like stagings that Encores! is known for. Although there is an orchestra onstage, props and sets are minimal.“Because you strip away some of those other production elements, it really puts a new focus on the lyric,” deBessonet said. “It’s meaty work for me as a director to figure out how to tell the story with so few elements.”When deBessonet, now in her third year as the artistic director of Encores!, was setting the season lineup in late 2021, just before the Omicron surge of Covid-19, she was struck by the parallels between the uncertain present and the perilous world of Dickens’s day.“It’s interesting that ‘Oliver!’ is generally thought of as a family musical,” she said in a recent conversation in her office at City Center. “It certainly has these very winsome tunes, and the cast of children is delightful beyond measure, but there are dark edges of the story that we’re very much leaning into and exploring in this production.”Lilli Cooper, left, as Nancy, and Angelica Beliard, right, dancing with Benjamin Pajak, who plays Oliver in the musical.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesMANY OF THE SONGS FROM ‘OLIVER!’ have become well known, thanks to the popular 1968 film adaptation, which starred Ron Moody as Fagin. This crowd-pleasing musical is a staple of school stages across Britain, where it debuted in London’s West End in 1960, and the United States, where it opened on Broadway in 1963 and won three Tony Awards, including one for the score. But “Oliver!,” like many of the shows staged by Encores!, whose mission is to offer revivals of seldom-seen work, is rarely produced in full.It hasn’t been professionally staged in its entirety on a New York City stage in nearly 40 years, since the short-lived 1984 Broadway revival that starred Patti LuPone as Nancy. In fact, neither deBessonet, nor any of the five main cast members except for Benjamin Pajak (“The Music Man”), who plays Oliver, had ever seen a live performance of the show.David Jones as the Artful Dodger (in top hat) and Georgia Brown, beside him, in a number from the musical “Oliver!” on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesIn addition to Esparza (“Company”), the show also stars Lilli Cooper as Nancy, the romantic partner of the brutal Bill Sikes (Tam Mutu, recently of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”), and Julian Lerner, who plays the Artful Dodger, the leader of the gang that takes Oliver in.Underscoring the musical’s darker bits, deBessonet said, like the fear and loneliness the orphaned Oliver experiences, was a matter of subtraction rather than addition. Without elaborate sets or showstopping production numbers there are fewer elements competing to divert the audience’s attention from the words of the actors.But neither did the production need to amp up the grim with foreboding lighting or a fog machine, she said — the darkness is already inherent in Dickens’s text, and in Bart’s book, score and lyrics.“We’re trying to have those words be heard with the belief that the complexity is in the lyric itself,” she said.One example, she said, is the titular tune “Oliver!,” a song familiar to many, even those who haven’t seen the show, for its high-spirited chorus.“It’s this really bouncy song,” deBessonet said, “but the actual lyrics are:There’s a dark, thin, winding stairwayWithout any banisterWhich we’ll throw him down and feed him on cockroachesServed in a canister.The show does preserve many of the musical’s more lighthearted elements. Every song from the original Broadway production remains, including bouncy numbers like “I’d Do Anything” and “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two.” The dreamlike sequence “Food, Glorious Food,” with its visions of sausages and mustards, jelly and custard. And 20 additional performers, all New York City public school students, will join the company onstage for “Consider Yourself,” the boys’ full-voiced embrace of Oliver into their ranks — the first true family he has known.“The show is incredibly challenging — the domestic violence, the treatment of children at that time in general is truly harrowing,” deBessonet said. “And yet there’s this buoyant joy about these numbers.”And the emotional core is still the camaraderie that springs up between the striving, working-class characters.“The whole narrative question of the show is ‘Where is the love?’ and Fagin is one answer,” deBessonet said. “But it’s complicated.”Even though the Fagin of the Bart musical is more of a lovable curmudgeon than the child-exploiting criminal in the Dickens novel, deBessonet and Esparza said that they wanted the audience to remain cognizant of the less-savory context of his mentorship.“I fully believe Fagin loves those children, and he is exploiting them,” deBessonet said. “He’s sending them out to rob for him, to keep him alive, and he knows that every time he sends them out, there’s a possibility that they could get caught or killed.”Less complex is Bill Sikes, who is objectively the show’s most loathsome character.“Bill Sikes is a sociopath, and there is no end to his cruelty,” deBessonet said of Nancy’s abusive boyfriend. “The show ends with him murdering her brutally in front of us and in front of a kid.”A model of the stage set of “Oliver!”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut Mutu knew he didn’t want to play a one-note villain. Instead he searched for the humanity within the character, to add nuances to his portrayal without offering redemption.“People aren’t black and white,” he said. “There are levels to each of us. Yes, I am playing a sociopath who has violent tendencies —”“— but he has redeeming qualities,” Esparza interjected. “Which are?”They both laughed.“The love between Nancy and Bill is genuine,” Mutu said, referring to their codependency as fascinating. “I’m trying to find the sense of the complexity of our relationship, which I think gets brushed under the carpet.”Normally, deBessonet said, she would have no interest in doing a production that includes violence toward a woman — “I’ve already seen enough of that for a lifetime” — but she was impressed by Nancy’s bravery, how she risked everything to save the life of Oliver.And Cooper and deBessonet said they wanted to make sure Nancy’s murder was not the final word on her story. “Her life is about her heroism and choosing to lay down her life to save this child who not too long ago was a stranger to her,” deBessonet said.Though Nancy allows others to see her as a passive player in her own life, Cooper wanted her performance to underscore the power Nancy wields in moments like the “Oom-Pah-Pah” number, in which her lively and somewhat risqué dance is actually a means of distracting Bill Sikes and Fagin so she can help Oliver escape.“She has this innate maternal nature to her,” Cooper said, “especially with all the boys in Fagin’s den and wanting to protect them. Even with Bill, the man that she loves, she feels needed by those who are wounded and fragile and need help.”“She herself was a child thief, and she’s managed to grab hold of life with this force,” deBessonet said. “In the face of all that difficulty, she’s been able to say, ‘I’m still going to love life.”BACK IN THE REHEARSAL ROOM, the boys continued their run-through of “I’d Do Anything.” Two stood on either side at the front, wielding red parasols, while two with white ones flanked them from behind. As the boys spun the parasols to imitate wheels, Nancy and the Artful Dodger walked to center.“Would you climb a hill?” she sang, as the human “carriage” began to roll.“Anything!” he responded.“Wear a daffodil?”He nodded. “Anything!”“Leave me all your will?”He nodded more vigorously. “Anything!”“Even fight my Bill?” she asked pointedly.He recoiled slightly.“Stop!” Latarro called. She walked over to Lerner. “Bill Sikes is really tall and really scary — he’s like a boxer,” she said. “So you all jump back like ‘No way!’”They tried again.This time when Nancy asked, all nine pickpockets sprung back as though they had just realized they were standing on the third rail. Their eyes hardened.“Anything!” More

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      Jason Alexander Will Direct a Comedy on Broadway This Summer

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      “The Cottage,” written by Sandy Rustin, will star Eric McCormack, Laura Bell Bundy and Lilli Cooper.“The Cottage,” a farce inspired by and also sending up the work of Noël Coward, will come to Broadway this summer in a new production directed by the “Seinfeld” alum Jason Alexander.The play, which has had several productions in small theaters over the last decade, will star Eric McCormack (“Will & Grace”), Laura Bell Bundy (“Legally Blonde”) and Lilli Cooper (“Tootsie”).“The Cottage” is a British farce by an American writer, Sandy Rustin, whose murder mystery drama, “Clue” (adapted from the board-game-based film), is now among the most-produced plays in the United States.Set in England in 1923, the comedy is set off by the revelation of an extramarital affair that brings a group of interconnected people together at a country house.It was first staged in 2013 at the Astoria Performing Arts Center in Queens, and has since had productions in Massachusetts, Arizona, Colorado, Virginia, and Florida, as well as on Long Island, and it has been optioned for television.Alexander directed a reading of the play in 2016 and led a developmental workshop in 2017. This production will be his Broadway directing debut, but he has appeared on Broadway in six shows and won a Tony Award for starring in “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.”“The Cottage” is scheduled to begin performances July 7 at the Hayes Theater, with the opening scheduled for July 24. It is a commercial production, renting space from a nonprofit; the lead producers are Victoria Lang and Ryan Bogner, who last collaborated on the stage adaptation of “The Kite Runner” that ran on Broadway last year.This summer is shaping up to be an unusually busy one for Broadway: “The Cottage” is the fifth show to announce a summer opening thus far, joining the musicals “Back to the Future,” “Here Lies Love” and “Once Upon a One More Time” and the play “Purlie Victorious.” More

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      Review: In ‘POTUS,’ White House Enablers Gone Wild

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      Seven female farceurs bring Selina Fillinger’s new Broadway comedy about the president’s protectors to life.Keep your eye on the bust of Alice Paul.You remember Paul, the suffragist who helped secure the vote for women in 1920 and then went on to write the still-unratified Equal Rights Amendment? If not, you could head downtown to the Public Theater to see “Suffs,” the musical about Paul and her colleagues.But uptown, Paul is a projectile. Or rather, in “POTUS,” the snappy and intermittently hilarious farce that opened on Wednesday at the Shubert, a plaster sculpture of her face is. It’s Paul who brings down the first act curtain of Selina Fillinger’s rough-and-tumble feminist comedy — and with it, in a way, the patriarchy itself.I’d be giving away too much to say exactly how a sculpture undoes Fillinger’s nameless and unseen president, who may remind you of someone who in real life recently held the position and still thinks he does. The play, in any case, is happy to be rid of him. Its lumbering subtitle — “Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” — makes clear that “POTUS” is less interested in the incompetent man than in his hypercompetent enablers.“POTUS” is in fact an encyclopedia of enabling, a natural field guide to the various poses that women who subcontract their souls get into. The classic cases are Harriet, the president’s beleaguered chief of staff, and Jean, his constantly blindsided press secretary. What Jean (Suzy Nakamura) tells Harriet (Julie White) applies to them both: “You stand in for him every single day, you’ve done it for years. You clean up his messes, you make excuses, you do his job, and then you wake up and do it all over again.”Rachel Dratch, left, and White in Selina Fillinger’s rough-and-tumble feminist comedy, directed by Susan Stroman.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn the day “POTUS” is set, that means trying to keep the president on track as he faces a series of public engagements, including a nuclear nonproliferation conference, a political endorsement, a photo op with disabled veterans and a gala honoring a women’s leadership council with the apt acronym FML. By 9 a.m. he is already disastrously off course, having referred to the first lady, at his first appearance, with a word that should have been unspeakable and is at any rate unprintable here.Though there appears to be no love lost between the two, Margaret, the first lady, is no Melania Trump, except for the catlike smugness that’s the top note of Vanessa Williams’s sleek performance. Margaret is spectacularly accomplished: a graduate of Stanford and Harvard, a lawyer, an author, a gallerist and a taekwondo practitioner. She must nevertheless put up with and cover for her husband’s tawdry affairs, including one with a “woke powderpuff” named Dusty (Julianne Hough), who shows up at the White House vomiting “blue raz” slushies.How Dusty enables the president with her own spectacular accomplishments, which include both adventurous sex play and flax farming, I leave for Hough — who, like the play, is gleefully filthy — to reveal.In any case, Dusty introduces a new note to the proceedings, which until her arrival seem, in Susan Stroman’s prestissimo production, at least loosely tied to reality. You can imagine how a woman like Stephanie, the president’s secretary, who speaks five languages and has a photographic memory, might still be disdained as a loser in this environment, because she’s fainthearted and has no polish. The first lady calls her “a menopausal toddler” — a description that Rachel Dratch, with her repertoire of cringes and moues, fully inhabits.And Lilli Cooper, winning even when whining, makes it easy to imagine how a woman like Chris, a Time magazine journalist and a newly divorced mother, might be worried about her job despite her experience and expertise. There are always, Jean warns her, younger male colleagues who “can out-tweet you, out-text you, chug a Red Bull and work three days straight.” Whereas Chris, on hand to interview the first lady, spends most of the play multitasking just to keep afloat — coordinating with her babysitter, her ex, her editors and her subjects while either pumping breast milk or leaking it.Still, you would readily include her as one of the women about whom the play asks, in frustration and shock, “Why aren’t you president?”Dusty does not fit that bill, gifted though she may be. Nor does the seventh character, Bernadette (Lea DeLaria), the president’s exuberantly butch and frankly criminal sister. The only country you could imagine her as president of would be a despotic narcostate, the kind that DeLaria, having a ball in the role, suggests is not much different than ours.From left: Cooper, White, Dratch and Vanessa Williams on Beowulf Boritt’s turntable set.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf Dusty and Bernadette, as outside forces, are necessary for forwarding the farce, they gnaw at its underpinnings. The point of the satire, so perfectly sharp in the initial confrontations — with White and Nakamura making a terrific comedy team — begins to dull as the emphasis shifts from verbal to physical humor.That physical humor is not always expertly rendered. (Dratch does it wonderfully, but the fight choreography is unconvincing.) And the turntable set (by Beowulf Boritt) that efficiently rotates the early action from room to room, like a White House Lazy Susan, seems by the second act to be spinning of its own accord, signifying hysteria but not giving us much chance to absorb it. (The sitcom bright lighting is by Sonoyo Nishikawa.) As the women move from cleaning up men’s messes to making messes of their own, you may feel some of the air, or perhaps the milk, leaking out of the comedy.In a way, that’s a faithful expression of Fillinger’s belief, as she told Amanda Hess in The Times, that “if you take the man out of the room, patriarchy still exists and we still play by its rules.”But in extending that idea to comedy, Fillinger, like a politician, is trying to have it both ways. In this, her Broadway debut, the ways aren’t always working together. As a farce, “POTUS” still plays by old and almost definitionally male rules; farce is built on tropes of domination and violence. On the other hand, and more happily, “POTUS” lets us experience the double-bind of exceptional women unmediated by the men who depend on their complicity. “He’s the pyromaniac, but you gave him kindling,” Chris, the journalist, tells the others.Or as Harriet, the chief of staff, puts it in a line that Alice Paul might have appreciated: “He can’t last if you stop saving him.” Maybe that’s true of male-dominated farces as well.POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him AliveThrough Aug. 14 at the Shubert Theater, Manhattan; potusbway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      The ‘POTUS’ Playwright Is Making a Farce of the Patriarchy

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      “POTUS” will be the writer Selina Fillinger’s Broadway debut. “I really didn’t feel like I needed to do any research. I have been all of those women,” she said.Three days before the first preview performance of her first Broadway production, the playwright Selina Fillinger perched in the middle of the empty mezzanine of the Shubert Theater, peering down upon the set. “I’m sorry, I can’t look away,” she said. “It’s like a crew of fairies and angels, just making things happen.”Down below, the crew building the set was buzzing around a re-creation of a women’s restroom in the White House — star-studded carpet, cream and gold wallpaper, coin-operated tampon dispenser. “It’s so specific,” Fillinger said of the tampon machine. “And of course it would be paid.”Fillinger’s new play, “POTUS,” is a comedy about seven women in the inner circle of the president of the United States. It takes place on a day when the president’s various sex and sexism-related scandals are blowing up so spectacularly that the women in his life are prompted to take increasingly desperate measures to keep his administration afloat.The idea began developing in Fillinger’s mind during Donald Trump’s run for office. “I was fascinated by the women in his orbit,” she said. And she noticed that, with every new headline about a man abusing women — Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein — “there was always at least one woman, right there at the elbow.”The stars of the play include, from left, Vanessa Williams, Julianne Hough, Julie White, Suzy Nakamura, Lilli Cooper and Rachel Dratch.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe result is a farce about women’s relationship to male power — how they access it, what they are allowed to do with it, and who else they subjugate along the way. “I love farces, but they typically rely on sexist and racist tropes,” Fillinger said. So she wrote a comedy about women struggling to adhere to the rules of the patriarchy, which “literally causes a farce on a day-to-day basis.”In crafting the play’s characters, Fillinger wanted to create the most combustible combination — among them are the president’s weary first lady, Margaret (Vanessa Williams); his perfectionist personal secretary, Stephanie (Rachel Dratch); and his cocky convicted-felon sister, Bernadette (Lea DeLaria) — and dropped them onto a White House set that rotates dizzily like a turntable as the crisis mounts.As for the president, he is a cipher, appearing in the play only as limbs jutting occasionally into view. “I was interested in purposefully and consciously failing the Bechdel test,” Fillinger said, referring to the challenge popularized by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel that a movie ought to feature two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. “If you take the man out of the room, patriarchy still exists and we still play by its rules.”Also, she found the president character too tedious to actually write. “He’s an amalgamation of so many presidents,” she said, “and also several men that I’ve done group projects with in high school.” The play’s full title is “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive.”When Trump announced his candidacy, Fillinger was an undergraduate at Northwestern University. Now, at 28, she is building a notable body of work, and her farce is being lifted straight to Broadway without an out-of-town tryout. Even as she prepared to open “POTUS” in New York, she was writing for the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show” in Los Angeles; she joined the writer’s room for its third season and has managed both jobs by flying cross-country and back, sometimes every weekend.When I met Fillinger on a Monday morning, she was jet-lagged and unfed in a plum jumpsuit and pale purple face mask, a look she described as “chic mechanic.” We talked until she politely announced that she should probably locate the nearest Starbucks instant oatmeal or “I might pass out.” When I asked about her relationship to her own success, she said, “I really didn’t expect it,” then joked of an alternate life: “I thought I was going to spend my early 20s WWOOFing or whatever.” (WWOOFing: visiting farms through the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms program.) “It has been a dream, and also, it has been a tremendously steep learning curve.”News stories have become a tool for Fillinger, seen her on the “POTUS” set, who then takes them into unexpected directions.Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesFILLINGER WAS RAISED in Eugene, Ore., “by hippies in the woods,” she said. Her father is a sustainability-focused architect, her mother is a social worker who works as a partner in her father’s firm, and Fillinger grew up without television, except for the occasional “Sesame Street” episode and a VHS box set of Charlie Chaplin movies she watched when she was sick. “I read a ton and I wrote a lot of stories and I played a lot of pretend in the woods next to my house,” she said.When she arrived at Northwestern planning to study acting, “it was an intense culture shock,” she said. “There were all these kids from LaGuardia” — the New York performing arts school — “and they knew all the playwrights’ names, and all the directors’ names, and all the actors’ names, and they had all grown up going to Broadway shows, and I had no awareness of any of that.” But she now sees the upside to having waded into the theater world “when you don’t necessarily know what is being done, and what is not being done.”As a sophomore, Fillinger took an introductory playwriting class that she found so difficult she assumed it would be her last. But the professor, Laura Schellhardt, encouraged her to submit her work to a university-wide playwriting festival, and Fillinger was selected.The play was based on a 2013 news story about a Canadian bar that serves a shot garnished with a mummified human toe, and the American man who walked into the bar and swallowed that toe. At the time, “I didn’t know if I belonged at Northwestern. I didn’t feel, necessarily, good enough to be there,” Fillinger said. So she transplanted the story to a fictional Oregon town, and shaped the bizarro news item into a drama about a middle-aged woman fighting to save her bar from being bought by an outsider — a big-city guy whose initial display of dominance over her is to gulp her prized appendage.When Fillinger first entered that class, “she came in and identified as an actress, and she said that several times,” Schellhardt said. “The second she took ownership over the piece, her hold on the identity of being an actress began to loosen. She could tell her own story and not just to be an instrument for someone else’s story.”News stories became a tool for Fillinger — a snapshot of the culture that she could twist into new meanings and steer into unexpected directions. As a senior, she took part in a Northwestern program meant to simulate a play commission, and worked with the Northlight Theater in Illinois to develop “Faceless,” inspired by the story of a white woman in Colorado who is recruited to join ISIS through an online network. The simulation turned real when Northlight staged the play in 2017.Later, her 2019 play, “Something Clean,” a Roundabout Underground production, imagined the parents of a college student convicted of sexual assault in a scenario modeled after the Brock Turner case. After reading Turner’s parents’ statements in that case, “I was just fascinated by the cognitive dissonance that would have to go into their survival,” Fillinger said; the play imagines the mother shielding her identity so she can volunteer at a rape crisis center. The Times critic Ben Brantley called it a “beautifully observed, richly compassionate new drama,” adding that Fillinger “uses traditional forms to frame toxic contemporary subjects” and “keeps readjusting our point of view” along the way.Kathryn Erbe and Daniel Jenkins in “Something Clean,” an earlier work by Fillinger that Roundabout Theater Company staged in 2019.Maria Baranova for The New York TimesFillinger is still affected by current events, but “you don’t necessarily see the stitching as much” in her more recent works, she said. In “The Collapse,” commissioned through the Manhattan Theater Club’s Sloan Initiative for developing new plays about math and science, environmental devastation plays out in miniature in a California apiary, where a bee researcher is dying alongside her hives. When it came time to write “POTUS,” she said she didn’t focus on any particular political figures. “I really didn’t feel like I needed to do any research,” she said. “I have been all of those women at some point.”All of her plays bear certain imprints: they are interested in interrogating women in power, in finding human tenderness and absurd comedy even in great tragedies, and in placing several generations of women in conversation.“It’s a shame that people stop writing love, sex and violence for women after a certain age,” Fillinger said. But exploring women at middle-age and older, as she tends to do, is also a canny defense against those who might reduce a young woman’s work to mere autobiographical stenography. When she does write a 20-something woman, “everyone projects assumptions upon that character,” she said. “All of my plays have so much of me in them, but not necessarily in the ways that you would expect.”AT A TECHNICAL REHEARSAL the week before previews were to begin, the “POTUS” cast practiced on the rotating set for the first time. Under a bust of the suffragist Alice Paul, Dratch, wearing nude shapewear and a lace dickey, writhed on the floor in an inflatable pink inner tube as DeLaria stomped around in camo cargo shorts and a T-shirt that read “SHUT UP, KAREN.” Lilli Cooper, playing a White House reporter, was strapped to a portable breast pump affixed to bottles sloshing with milk; both Cooper and her character recently had a baby. As the set rotated, Suzy Nakamura, who plays the White House press secretary, raced among the rooms to hit her cue at the briefing room podium and stumbled over the president’s disembodied legs, which had accidentally been left splayed on the floor. The cast fell into laughter.“When it gets toward this time of night, they get tired and they get hysterical,” the director, Susan Stroman, said; it was 9 p.m. and nearing the end of the day’s second rehearsal stretch. “Sometimes we laugh so hard that we cry and we have to stop.”Stroman said that when she first read the play, she was startled to find a farce that put women not in secondary or tertiary roles but primary ones. “I couldn’t believe that it had all these things going for it, and that it was really funny,” she said. Then she met the playwright, and “I couldn’t believe she’s 28,” said Stroman, a five-time Tony-winner who directed and choreographed “The Producers.” “She’s an old soul. She carries the spirit of women who have come before her.”If Fillinger were to play a “POTUS” character, it would be Stephanie, the type-A personal secretary who is always subverting her own self-doubt into an exacting performance of perfectionism.She knows that her early success means that she is leaving a very public trail of the emotional and intellectual state of her 20s. Early works are “time capsules of you — sometimes in a good way,” she said. “But they also hold all of your blind spots, and all of your little work-in-progress moments, all of your ignorance and all of your youth. It’s so mortifying to have yourself, frozen at 22, out in the world, just being read.” But that’s been a gift, too: “I’ve been forced to become not so precious.”As “POTUS” nears its opening, she is still tinkering. “I’ve been reworking the ending a lot to try to calibrate the tone,” she said. “POTUS” drives frantically toward a shift among its seven women, who begin to question why they are working so hard in the service of male power. But how that change will shake out — and what it will cost — is somewhat open to interpretation.Fillinger’s relationship to optimism in her work, she said, is complex.“As a young person and a woman, I’m expected to perform hope for people, without having the luxury of expressing my rage,” she said. “But I feel like rage can be hopeful as well.” More

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      Julianne Hough and Vanessa Williams to Star in Broadway Farce 'POTUS'

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      “POTUS,” by Selina Fillinger, will star Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams and Rachel Dratch are among the stars of “POTUS” on Broadway.Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images, Caitlin Ochs/Reuters, Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Add one more curveball to this unusual Broadway spring: a political comedy by a 28-year-old writer whose previous New York production took place in a 62-seat basement theater.The new play has a mouthful of a title — “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” — and is a farce about a group of women doing damage control for a problematic president.Selina Fillinger, the playwright, is working with the Broadway veteran Susan Stroman, who will direct. The cast will include Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Previews are scheduled to begin April 14 and the opening date is set for May 9, which will most likely make it part of the next Broadway season, not the current one, if the Tony Awards stick to an expected late April opening deadline for eligibility for this season’s awards. The “POTUS” run, at the Shubert Theater, is limited, and scheduled to end Aug. 14.Fillinger, an Oregon native who has been working in Los Angeles as a writer on “The Morning Show,” said she started “POTUS” six years ago. (POTUS is an acronym for president of the United States.)“For years we’ve had this endless cycle of headlines about powerful men abusing their power, and each time I was fascinated by the women orbiting the men and enabling them,” she said in an interview. “The more I started to think about these women, the farce started to write itself.”And is the show about a particular president, such as, say, the last one?“It is an amalgamation of many men in power,” she said. “I set it in the White House because that’s the highest office in the land, but you could set it in any company and any institution and many homes.”Fillinger’s previous work, “Something Clean,” was staged by Roundabout Underground in 2019 and was praised by the New York Times critic Ben Brantley as “a beautifully observed, richly compassionate new drama.”Fillinger said there is some thematic overlap between “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” which was about a mother grappling with her son’s conviction for sexual assault. Her first play, “Faceless,” was about an American jihadist.“I think I am interested in complicity,” she said. “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” she noted, “are both centered on somebody who is never seen onstage, and that is because I am interested in who we give airtime to, and who we don’t give airtime to, and flipping the switch on that.”Stroman, who over the last 30 years has won five Tony Awards for choreography and direction, including both categories for “The Producers,” is best known for musicals. This will be her first time helming a play on Broadway; Off Broadway she directed a Colman Domingo drama, “Dot,” in 2016.In an interview, Stroman said an agent sent her the “POTUS” script, and she was immediately interested. “It’s very funny, and it has an important message within the comedy. At some point there’s a reckoning about what it’s like to keep these people in power who are not worthy.”The play’s lead producers are four companies: Seaview, led by Greg Nobile; 51 Entertainment, founded by Lynette Howell Taylor; Glass Half Full Productions, managed by Gareth Lake; and Level Forward, co-founded by Abigail Disney. The production is permitted to raise up to $6.75 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but a spokeswoman said the play’s actual capitalization would be $5.9 million. More

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      With Venues Reopening Across New York, Life Is a Cabaret Once Again

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      “Thank you all for risking your lives by coming out tonight,” Joe Iconis quipped, welcoming a socially distanced crowd to the June reopening of the cabaret venue Feinstein’s/54 Below in Manhattan.Iconis, a composer, lyricist and performer beloved among young musical theater fans, was joking, but before diving into an alternately goofy and poignant set with the actor and singer George Salazar — a star of Iconis’s first Broadway production, “Be More Chill” — he added, earnestly, “It’s the most incredible thing to be able to do this show for real human beings, not computer screens.”Moist-eyed reunions between artists and fans have been taking place across the city as Covid-19 restrictions are gradually relaxing. “I hope you’re prepared for how emotional it will be when you’re onstage, because it will be emotional for us, supporting artists we love again,” a fan told the band Betty. In the intimate spaces that house these shows, interaction between artists and those who love them is integral to what the downtown fixture Sandra Bernhard called “the in-the-moment, visceral experience.”Storied establishments like the jazz clubs Birdland and Blue Note, newer spots such as the Green Room 42 and City Winery at Hudson River Park (which both reopened in April), along with the East Village alt-cabaret oases Pangea and Club Cumming are once again offering food, drink and in-the-flesh entertainment, as cabaret veterans — along with other jazz and pop acts, and drag performers — return to the work that is their bread and butter.Fans at Feinstein’s/54 Below snap a selfie before Joe Iconis and George Salazar took the stage.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesAn emotional Salazar onstage at Feinstein’s/54 Below.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesSalazar mingles with fans after the June show.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“To see people physiologically responding to music again — toes tapping, heads bopping — that’s almost better than applause,” said the pianist and singer Michael Garin, one of many who used social media to stay connected with fans during the pandemic, and among the first to resume performances for live audiences.But, Garin noted, “It’s not like we’re flipping a switch and bringing everything back to normal.” Particularly in the spring, not everyone was ready to pick up where they left off. “There were some musicians who were ready to book as soon as possible, and others who said, ‘Let me see — I don’t know if I want to be in an indoor space right now,’” said Steven Bensusan, the president of Blue Note Entertainment Group.The producer and host Scott Siegel, creator of the virtual “Scott Siegel’s Nightclub New York,” said that trepidation is still shared by some patrons: “Everybody’s hopeful, but I hear people say they’re nervous. There are also many who come in from outside the tristate area, and it’s more of an effort to get in.”Iconis rehearsing for his return to the live stage.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“It’s the most incredible thing to be able to do this show for real human beings, not computer screens,” Iconis said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesWith regulations still in flux, both vigilance and adaptability are key. Before Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s mid-June announcement that the state could almost fully reopen, Birdland had planned to return at just 50 percent capacity on July 1. Instead, all 150 of its seats have been accessible from the start, with returning variety-show hosts Jim Caruso and Susie Mosher featuring theater and cabaret luminaries such as Chita Rivera and Natalie Douglas in the first week back. (The club’s downstairs space, Birdland Theater, will remain closed until September.) The Blue Note, which reopened in mid-June at roughly two-thirds capacity, has since made all of its 250 seats available. Proof of vaccination against the coronavirus is not required at either club, though masks are recommended for the unvaccinated at Birdland.By contrast, at 54 Below, where the plan is to build gradually back to a full crowd of about 150, proof of vaccination is necessary, as it is in the 60-seat cabaret room at Pangea, still limited to 80 percent capacity. Both venues were among those that developed streaming series while shuttered. “We originally got into it to remain active, but it became a way to pay staff, and expand the audience,” said Richard Frankel, one of the owners of 54 Below, which will kick off the new series “Live From Feinstein’s/54 Below,” offering live streams direct from the venue, on July 11. “Right now we’re focused on reopening live, but it’s definitely something to continue exploring after the dust settles.”Streaming a performance “broadens the spectrum of who’s able to see things, and that’s so important,” said the singer and actress Lilli Cooper.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesRyan Paternite, director of programming at Birdland, has been similarly encouraged by the response to “Radio Free Birdland,” though he added, “My feeling is that people are pretty burned out on watching shows on their computer or phone — especially if they have to pay for tickets.”Artists generally remain bullish on the opportunities posed by technology. “I’m very pro-streaming,” said the Tony Award-nominated singer and actress Lilli Cooper, who is set to appear at 54 Below on July 28 and August 15. “It broadens the spectrum of who’s able to see things, and that’s so important.” Caruso plans to continue streaming his “Pajama Cast Party” weekly; he noted that the virtual program has allowed him to diversify both his audience (“It has become more colorful, literally and figuratively”) and his talent pool (“I’ve delved into TikTok and Instagram and discovered some thrilling new artists”).Many are hopeful that diversity and inclusivity will be further emphasized in an art form that counts artists of color like Mabel Mercer and Bobby Short as historical icons. “My art is often based on what I’ve gone through, and being a Black man is part of that,” said the Broadway veteran Derrick Baskin, who packed R&B classics into his set list for recent dates at 54 Below.Garin, seen from above performing at the piano at the Roxy Hotel.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“It’s not like we’re flipping a switch and bringing everything back to normal,” Garin added.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesJustin Vivian Bond, scheduled to reopen Joe’s Pub in October, said, “The brilliant thing about cabaret is that you can react, if you’re capable, to what’s going on in the world.” For Bond, the pandemic posed challenges as sobering, albeit in a different way, as those faced by the L.G.B.T.Q. community during another plague: “When AIDS was happening, even when people were dying, you could be with them. What we’ve just been through was a very isolating trauma. I don’t know if I’ll have any brilliant insights about it, but hopefully what I’ll say will resonate with the audience.”Bernhard, who will return to Joe’s Pub in December for the annual holiday engagement she had to skip in 2020, still isn’t sure what insights she’ll be offering. “The head space that I’m in, I don’t even know what the next two months are going to bring,” she said. “I just want to perform, like everybody else does right now.”“My art is often based on what I’ve gone through, and being a Black man is part of that,” Derrick Baskin said.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“I cannot imagine any artist now taking any moment of what we do for granted,” Michael Feinstein said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesPerformers and fans will be greeted with renovations at certain venues, and other enticements. Birdland has reduced its ticket price to 99 cents in July, the fee when the club originally opened in 1949. 54 Below is offering a new menu, created by the “Top Chef” winner Harold Dieterle. The West Bank Café’s Laurie Beechman Theater is getting a “face lift,” said its owner, Steve Olsen — fresh paint, new carpet and bar equipment, upgraded sound and lighting — in preparation for a reopening after Labor Day. The Triad Theater also used its forced downtime to “improve the furnishings, repaint and get new equipment,” said the booking director Bernie Furshpan.But it is the love of performing itself, and the perspective gained after a year of lost shows, that is driving many artists’ emotional responses to returning to the stage. Michael Feinstein, the multitasking American songbook champion and namesake for clubs in San Francisco and Los Angeles as well as New York, believes “that anyone who is a performer is coming out of this in a very different place, with a deeper sense of connection and joy and gratitude.”“I cannot imagine any artist now taking any moment of what we do for granted,” he added. More

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      The Play Is Coming From Inside the House

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      Three new virtual productions, set in haunted homes and an interactive hotel, give you the excitement of exploring spaces that are off limits.Exploring a home that isn’t your own carries a voyeuristic thrill, a feeling that you’re intruding on a private space. This excitement holds even if you have paid for your admission, even if no one has lived there for decades. A rare upside of the pandemic — at least until people discovered decent virtual backgrounds — was the opportunity to peer into (and immediately judge) colleagues’ rooms.Back when interior spaces weren’t so perilous, I was a fiend for a historic home tour. Summer palaces, period rooms at the Met, living history installations with basket-weaving how-tos — yes, absolutely, all of them. Last summer, during the pandemic’s darker days, I spent some happy hours “visiting” Newport’s cottages online.Recently, digital theater has gotten in on this domestic act, offering virtual tours of spaces imagined and actual, in works such as Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s “A House Tour of the Infamous Porter Family Mansion With Tour Guide Weston Ludlow Londonderry … At Home!”; Jared Mezzocchi’s “Someone Else’s House”; and Blast Theory’s “A Cluster of 17 Cases.” They may not provide the frisson of walking through actual spaces — and surreptitiously fingering the occasional embroidered tablecloth — but the latter two offer the shivery pleasure of entering a space where you clearly don’t belong.“A House Tour,” directed by Jason Eagan, began in 2016 in San Francisco as an in-person event, which took an audience from room to creatively rendered room. It has been re-envisioned as an audio-only drama, accompanied by a deluxe mailer. (Mailers are another pandemic upside; sometimes they include wine.) This one contains two figurines that you are invited to decorate with feathers and pipe cleaners — I dragooned my children for this part — and a number of cunning packages.Danny Scheie in the original 2016 production of “A House Tour of the Infamous Porter Family Mansion With Tour Guide Weston Ludlow Londonderry.”Julie SchuchardThe Broadway actress Lilli Cooper provides the introduction, a flawless parody of a museum audio guide. Her voice informs us that the Porter Family Mansion has doors, windows, rooms and “some of the finest world collections of many different things.” (The house is wholly imaginary.) Danny Scheie’s Weston takes over. Scheie was also the star of the in-person version, and his Weston has a strange and malevolent energy. He delights in sharing the most scandalous details of the lives and sweaty loves of Hubert and Clarissa Porter, the fictional one-percenters who built the mansion.The monologue leans heavily on innuendo and smutty puns. This salaciousness extends to the participatory elements, as when Weston tells us to fold up a card and put it in our “undies.” Let’s just say that even an obedient audience member — I had, as directed, mashed the figurines together in a simulation of sex — has her limits. (The children, thankfully, had already gone to bed.)More frustrating than the lewdness is how incompletely the creators have reimagined this experience for at-home consumption. The house never really comes into mind’s eye view and the items in the box, almost entirely irrelevant, don’t help. Also, the audio runs nearly two hours, which is an awfully long time to sit at your computer, headphones in, staring at concupiscent dolls. And the humor is beyond juvenile. I had hoped that “A House Tour” would create a kind of memory palace, a mansion of the mind, but it just loiters, endlessly, in the gutters.“Someone Else’s House,” produced by Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, is an altogether shorter, tauter and shrewder work. Developed for an online audience and running just under an hour, it’s a chiseled piece of at-home horror, ostensibly based on a colonial-era New Hampshire house that Mezzocchi’s parents and siblings once inhabited. “This isn’t just a ghost story,” Mezzocchi says. “It’s real. It happened to my family.”“Someone Else’s House” also has an accompanying box. This one contains items relating to the house’s history, like a family tree and antique sketches and photographs. It also includes a candle, scented for some reason like decomposing vanilla.Mezzocchi, in flannel shirt, wool beanie and quarantine beard, makes an appealing narrator. The story he tells, from a location that becomes clear as the tale proceeds, is an extremely creepy one. (The short version: Maybe don’t buy a house with a former slaughtering cellar in the basement?) The design is meticulous, the archival photos unsettling, the “are they or aren’t they?” Zoom glitches unnerving. And if you have ever suspected that your furniture is out to get you, this is the digital work for you.Mezzocchi, who also wrote “Someone Else’s House,” makes an appealing narrator of this taut and shrewd work. via Geffen PlayhouseWhat’s strange, though, is how Mezzocchi doesn’t fully trust the theatrical form. If you have seen his previous work, like “Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy,” you know that he’s an absolute wizard at making online theater feel live. “Someone Else’s House” ends in a frightening digital coup-de-theatre, but none of the multimedia effects are more uncanny than the low-tech vision of Mezzocchi sitting in front of his laptop, spinning a tale in a slowly darkening room.And yet, the scariest online house tour may be the brief one offered by the experimental English theater Blast Theory, which has produced a virtual version of its 2018 work, “A Cluster of 17 Cases.” Created when Blast Theory were artists in residence at the World Health Organization, the piece explores the transmission of the SARS virus to 17 people on the 9th floor of Hong Kong’s Metropole Hotel. The company has built a scale model of the hotel, in lightweight aluminum. An interactive site allows you to take the elevator up and explore it.“Some people will leave unscathed, and some people will die. It’s time to choose your room,” a narrator says, coolly. There are only three rooms to discover, plus trips back down to the lobby to learn how many other people the rooms’ occupants infected once they left the hotel and flew home. (As Covid-19 has taught us, aerosolized particles are no joke.) The nerve-shredding experience lasts perhaps 15 minutes. Like “At Home” and “Someone Else’s House,” it’s ultimately a cautionary tale. For more than a year most of us have been told to stay indoors, but as these shows argue, inside isn’t so safe either.A House Tour of The Infamous Porter Family Mansion with Tour Guide Weston Ludlow Londonderry … At Homeporterfamilymansion.com.Someone Else’s HouseThrough July 3; geffenplayhouse.org.A Cluster of 17 Casesblasttheory.co.uk. More