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    Review: In ‘Still,’ Confessions Doom Two Reunited Lovers

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    Despite a juicy premise, this Colt Coeur production, starring Tim Daly and Jayne Atkinson, never manages to take off.In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin hymned the bag as the proper shape for stories: it “is full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts.”One of the characters in Lia Romeo’s “Still,” a writer, carries just such a bag — a possible wink to her fellow novelist. The tote is large enough to house a ukulele, an avocado and a package of macadamia nuts — all of which are divulged in the play’s single moment of spontaneity — but its owner can’t seem to effect any Le Guinian “transformations” or “tricks.” There is a sense of stasis to the aptly named two-hander, which never ripens from a situation into a story.“Still,” a Colt Coeur production that opened recently at DR2 Theater in the East Village, begins with two characters, former flames, meeting in a bar. Mark (a suave Tim Daly) and Helen (Jayne Atkinson) are in their mid-60s and haven’t seen each other in years. Sharing a bottle of wine, they shoot the breeze about their children and recent divorce (him) and new book and cancer diagnosis (her).At first, they are content to pretend their past romance has subsided into a platonic relationship, but as the alcohol goes to their heads, they admit to carrying a torch for each other. A highlight of the show is their seduction scene: It’s the first I’ve seen onstage that unabashedly invokes the corporeal indignities of aging. The director Adrienne Campbell-Holt has Mark and Helen walk slowly toward each other while making sotto voce confessions: “I’m missing the nail on my right big toe,” “I have three fake teeth,” “I have arthritis in my knees.” Do I need to spell out what happens next?Alexander Woodward’s softly lit set spins to reveal a hotel room. Resting against each other in bed, Mark and Helen proceed, post-coitally this time, with their confessions. Mark, who lives in Colorado, is considering relocating to Washington, D.C., to run for Congress, as a “moderate” Republican. “I wish you’d told me that before we ——” Helen says, gesturing limply to the bed with rumpled sheets. She considers herself a liberal, but political differences aren’t the only thing on her mind.Part of the reason their relationship ended was because she had an abortion. Despite what Mark told her decades ago, he wanted Helen to have the baby. She, on the other hand, had felt — and still feels — that it would have been a mistake. “When we walked out of that clinic, I was — scraped out, and I was sad. But I felt so light, knowing that … all my cells were my own again,” she tells him. The stage is thus set for a real conflict.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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      ‘All the Devils’ Review: Patrick Page Investigates Evil

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      In this Off Broadway production, the actor is most fascinated by human fallibility and Shakespeare’s nuanced understanding of it.The events of the world trail us into the theater always. There is no separating a live performance from the moment in which we experience it, not even if the words an actor speaks were written hundreds of years ago.What a powerful time, then, to encounter Shakespeare’s Shylock in Patrick Page’s solo-show investigation of evil, “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain.”Because Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who infamously demands a pound of flesh in “The Merchant of Venice,” is, if a villain, a complicated one: persecuted, spit upon and scorned by Christians for being a Jew. But even in his bitterness, he recognizes that he and they are similar in almost every respect, because they are all human.“And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” he says. “If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”It is impossible, or it was for me, not to think of the horrors in Israel and Gaza with Page embodying Shylock there before us. In that context, Shylock’s words hit hard — yet his argument, like his “ancient grudge” born of humiliations, might have belonged to an ordinary person on either side of that conflict. Such is the prismatic nature of theater, that great instrument of empathy, and such is the capaciousness of Page’s performance.Rest assured, though, that most of “All the Devils” is much less fraught, and a lot of it is fun. Page, whose resonant bass helped make him such an entrancingly sinister Hades in “Hadestown,” practically twinkles here between scenes of malevolence.Directed by Simon Godwin at the DR2 Theater in Manhattan, Page begins the show by channeling a bloodthirsty Lady Macbeth. But when the monologue ends and the lights go up, Page snaps back to himself, looking absolutely delighted.“Do those words frighten you?” he asks, his inviting warmth immediately banishing my fear that “All the Devils” might be a tough-guy exercise like the British actor Steven Berkoff’s “Shakespeare’s Villains,” a solo show that once traversed some of the same terrain.Page is a friendlier guide, charmingly unintimidating and even a little dishy about Shakespeare, tracing the playwright’s game-changing development as a writer of psychologically complex evildoers. Referring to a leg injury he suffered while taking a bow early in the run — Page has been temporarily using a cane — he jocularly blamed the curse of “Macbeth,” a superstition much cherished in the theater.On a set by Arnulfo Maldonado that blends the lush and the austere, “All the Devils” doesn’t always have the precision that it might. As Page slips into role after role, depth sometimes goes missing.But the show, an earlier version of which was presented online in 2021, is smartly structured and frequently fascinating, as in a scene between Othello — honorable, deep-voiced — and Iago, feigning guilelessness, whom Page gives a lighter tone. His Malvolio, more narcissist than villain, is comic, then moving; his Ariel, not villainous at all, is ethereal and excellent.Hamlet’s murderous uncle, Claudius, appears in his most conscience-stricken moment; Angelo, from “Measure for Measure,” in a confrontation that, to my mind at least, is utterly conscience-free.“Who will believe thee, Isabel?” Angelo says to the young woman whom he is trying to power play into having sex with him.Page is interested in the intersection between evil and sociopathy, which he began considering when he first played Iago. But human fallibility — and Shakespeare’s nuanced understanding of it — grips him even more.Quoting the line from “The Tempest” that gives the show its title, Page says: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”At that “here,” he places a hand softly on his heart. Where there is evil, it lies within.All The Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented The VillainThrough Jan. 7 at DR2 Theater, Manhattan; allthedevilsplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet’ Is Missing a Few Notes

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      In this new musical, a singer’s future hangs on one song, but entrusting it to an inexperienced songwriting team is not, perhaps, the shrewdest choice.Once upon a time, Regina Comet was a pop star who filled arenas. Now that her career desperately needs a reboot, she and her team have a brilliant idea: They will come out with a perfume — sorry, a fragrance, called Relevance — and peg her comeback to it. Because of course listeners will just follow that scent all the way to Regina’s big concert.Adding a thick frosting of improbability to this far-fetched cake, Regina hires a pair of young songwriters so unhip that they idolize Barry Manilow — in 2021 — to pen the song her future depends on, the jingle for the fragrance.The focus of the story is not, as you might expect, Regina Comet, but rather the untried tunesmiths who simply, coyly, are called Man 2 and Other Man, and are portrayed by the show’s creators, Ben Fankhauser and Alex Wyse. Starring roles notwithstanding, Bryonha Marie Parham plays the title character in “A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet” with tireless zest and good humor.“Jingle” is mostly set in the office of the writers, where the walls are lined with so many notes, papers and photos that you might think they are TV detectives tracking a criminal. (Wilson Chin did the scenic design, which appears to have been labor-intensive.) But the object of their obsessive hunt is even more elusive than the Zodiac Killer: They desperately want to write “One Hit Song.” This would be a realistic goal only in a universe in which the Billboard cast-album chart decisively influenced mainstream pop culture.Man 2 and Other Man invite Regina (who always wears a shapeless ’80s-style tracksuit) to brainstorm. She’s open to a samba, or maybe some bossa nova, but the resulting song, “Say Hello,” sounds like a show-tune-ized single from Backstreet Boys or ’NSync. It is the most enjoyable number of the evening, yet it also reflects the production’s uncertain tone: Are we meant to laugh with the ingenuity of the Men or at their ineptness?The most frustrating element of the show is that despite a last-minute sort-of plot twist, Regina mostly serves as an unwitting wedge between the rookies. Their relationship gets so tense that in one particularly brutal dispute they chuck their notebooks to the floor in disgust.The production, directed by Marshall Pailet, moves at a steady clip, and Fankhauser and Wyse throw so much at the wall that once in a while, a joke acquires a bizarre kind of sheen through sheer surrealism.“I read she has an honorary degree in astrophysics,” Man 2 says of Regina. “That makes sense,” Other Man replies, “because her voice is so … good.”In the role of Other Man, Wyse, looking like an overgrown summer camper in his neat shirt and shorts — another costume decision that’s hard to parse — excels at this kind of exchange. Add his character’s penchant for borscht belt humor (“Take my Grandma, for instance,” one line starts, “no really, take her —”) and you’re halfway to an actual comic role.“A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet,” an Off Broadway production, is the first new in-person musical to open since Covid-19 shut down theaters last year, and it feels like the first pancake to come out of the pan: It’s a little undercooked, a little misshapen, but we’ll eat it anyway because hey, it’s still a pancake.A Commercial Jingle for Regina CometThrough Nov. 14 at DR2 Theater, Manhattan; 800-447-7400, reginacomet.com. Running time: 80 minutes. More