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    In ‘Music City’ and ‘Babe,’ Existential Battles of the Heart and Soul

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    Bedlam’s country music show is a rollicking good time. But the New Group’s production of “Babe,” starring Marisa Tomei, is a frustrating one-act lacking cohesion.If country music has a superpower, it’s the ability to spin conventions and catchphrases into affecting narratives. The book for “Music City,” a terrific new jukebox show mining the JT Harding catalog, essentially does the same thing on a larger scale.While Harding’s name might not resonate, his songs have scored sizable plays on streaming services: He is a co-writer of Uncle Kracker’s “Smile,” Blake Shelton’s “Sangria” and Keith Urban’s “Somewhere in My Car.” All of those songs turn up in “Music City,” a rollicking good time that understands contemporary country music — the style and the lifestyle — in a way we don’t often see on New York theater stages.For this Bedlam production, the director Eric Tucker and the scenic designer Clifton Chadick have turned the West End Theater into the Wicked Tickle, a homey Nashville joint specializing in open mics (and evoking that city’s real-life Bluebird Cafe). One such session is underway as audience members file in and take their seats — ticket holders can sign up for a slot in that preshow section and basically warm up the room for the characters.The focus of our attention are the imaginatively named TJ (Stephen Michael Spencer), an outgoing singer-songwriter with a knack for upbeat tunes, and 23 (Casey Shuler), a soulful newcomer with a crack in her voice and a tear in her beer — largely because of the strain of dealing with her addict mother (Leenya Rideout). The two young strivers decide to try writing songs together, and Peter Zinn’s book goes exactly where you think it’s going to go, with antagonists (both played by Andrew Rothenberg) setting up some speed bumps along the way: Bakerman, a drug dealer TJ is indebted to, and Stucky Stiles, a behatted, creatively adrift country star reminiscent of Strings McCrane in “Hold On to Me Darling.”“Music City” is not lacking for earworms (which also include two numbers written for the show and four that had not been previously recorded), but it also understands that almost as important as the songs is how they came to be. TJ and 23 express themselves through music — it is who they are — so when Stucky comes fishing for new material, they must choose who will get to deliver these little pieces of their heart.The only caveat in this very effectively staged production is the superfluous, distracting choreography by John Heginbotham (Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!”), but it is kept to a minimum. “Music City” is a good example of a jukebox done well, highlighting an industry that values songwriting craftsmanship as well as its commercial value and even revisiting some of the questions that were raised in David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic”: What does music mean to the people who are passionate about it? How do you measure success?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: Cynthia Nixon Is Nowhere and Everywhere in ‘Seven Year Disappear’

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      A sleekly designed production, starring Cynthia Nixon and Taylor Trensch, aims to skewer the art world but falls flat.The problem with writing a play about absence: How to fill the void? When a performance artist known as Miriam (Cynthia Nixon) vanishes in “The Seven Year Disappear,” a two-hander by Jordan Seavey that opened Monday at the Signature Center, we know only that she is a narcissist who steals the air from any room she enters.“The Whitney is mine,” she exclaims in the opening scene, after her adult son and manager, Naphtali (Taylor Trensch), informs her that the museum has made some sort of offer to Marina Abramovic. After seven years off the map, when Miriam returns, she has the gall to ask Naphtali whether he will help turn his abandonment into her next piece.Scenes following Miriam’s reappearance, which occurs on the heels of the 2016 election, are intercut with a reverse chronology of Naphtali’s search for her, which is really a quest to find himself — in a change of careers, a series of sexual liaisons and a lot of hard drugs.“The Seven Year Disappear” has the ostensible trappings of an art-world satire, and this New Group production, directed by Scott Elliott, appears sleekly designed to deliver one. But satire calls for a more distinct point of view, discernible targets, and a greater measure of specificity and insight. The staging here, with an emphasis on style and high-tech mediation, appears keen to make up for their lack.The production includes a mix of live and recorded footage displayed on flat screens suspended above the set.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA mix of live and recorded footage of the actors is displayed on flat-screen TVs suspended above the slick, black set (by Derek McLane); at times, their faces appear in close-up stills (projections by John Narun) that could be digital ads for Jil Sander. Onstage, the actors are dressed in black-canvas coveralls and combat boots (costumes are by Qween Jean), and intermittently speak into standing mics (sound is by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen). The cumulative effect is one of performance-art cosplay, which could be funny if it didn’t seem so earnest.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: A ‘Seagull’ Airlifted to a World of Soy Milk and Prada Sneakers

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      Parker Posey stars in “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” as Chekhov comes to the Catskills.With so many Chekhov adaptations on the market, it’s fair to wonder whether the Dramatists Guild requires playwrights to crank them out as a condition of membership.If so, “The Seagull” is apparently the recommended source — appearing more often than “The Cherry Orchard,” “Three Sisters” and “Uncle Vanya” combined. The 1896 tragicomedy about the hopelessness of love and theater has set off a flock of homages and spoofs, often in one booby-trapped package.That most of the adaptations don’t stick doesn’t matter; since opening night, little has been heard from “Drowning Crow,” “Stupid ____ Bird,” “A Seagull in the Hamptons” or even “The Notebook of Trigorin,” Tennessee Williams’s 1981 stab. What counts, at least as far as selling the show is concerned, is the mash-up of a classic title with a modern sensibility, so that troikas and patronyms become sports cars and upspeak.The first question to ask in approaching these rehashes is: Do they make any sense if you don’t know the source? The second question is: Do they add any worth if you do?“The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” Thomas Bradshaw’s entry in the reincarnation sweepstakes, clears the first bar, with maybe a trailing foot, in a New Group production that opened on Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Airlifting the story from a 19th-century Russian estate to a 21st-century Catskills compound makes sense, and Chekhov’s artsy, spoiled, lovestruck characters are more or less at home in a world of soy milk, Prada sneakers and pans in The New York Times.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.These characters, mostly renamed with English soundalikes, constellate pretty much as the original 10 did. (Some workers on the estate have apparently been fired.) Their North Star, Irene, played by Parker Posey, is a moderately successful and immoderately self-involved actress who is “theater famous, not famous famous.” Posey, that former indie “it girl,” is perfectly cast as a woman who has won one Tony but can say with light sincerity, “I do need another one.”Along with her lover, the middlebrow novelist William (Ato Essandoh), Irene has returned from the city to visit her ailing friend, Samuel (David Cale), and her sensitive yet untalented son, Kevin (Nat Wolff). Kevin is in love with Nina (Aleyse Shannon), a neighbor’s daughter who stars in the play he plans to present to the assembled company. But Nina is in love with William, while another family adjunct, Sasha (Hari Nef), is in love with Kevin.There are yet more triangles and quadrilaterals of affection, not always clearly mapped in Bradshaw’s vigorous trimming of the text. (Even so, Scott Elliott’s production is a bit pokey, running 2 hours and 35 minutes.) But you do get the gist: Everyone wants someone they cannot have, and privilege breeds discontent.Whether Bradshaw’s “Seagull” also passes the second test for such adaptations — does the new version add any value beyond what the original offers? — may depend on whether you admire his work in the first place. His kind of theater, he has said, is about asking audiences to “question their own reactions” even if they are “outraged” as a result. This he has faithfully done in plays like “Fulfillment,” “Intimacy,” and “Burning,” which depict, often explicitly, incest, pornography, scatology and sadomasochism.Posey as the stage actress Irene with Nat Wolff, who plays her sensitive son, Kevin, in Thomas Bradshaw’s play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere’s a lot of that in his “Seagull” too. Kevin’s ridiculous play — in the Chekhov a gassy symbolist fantasy — is more literally gassy here, as Nina extols the virtues of public farting. Its climax comes when, having asked audience members to share their “most recent masturbation experience,” she rewards the best answer with the chance to watch hers. With unusual delicacy for a Bradshaw play, this is staged in a tub behind a curtain.But mostly he translates the bad behavior of Chekhov’s characters to snark instead of smut. Take the famous opening salvo of the original “Seagull,” in which Masha is asked by Medvedenko, the poor schoolteacher who loves her, why she dresses all in black. Her ruefully funny answer — “I’m in mourning for my life” — becomes something merely nasty when Sasha, as she is now called, tells the rechristened Mark (Patrick Foley), “at least I don’t buy my clothes at Walmart.”If the play, with all its cattiness and cruelty, at times feels like “Mean Girls Goes to Camp,” it’s not always clear where the meanness is coming from. When Sasha or Irene cut someone down, as they frequently do with generous heaps of obscenity, Nef and Posey subtly show us that they’re mostly self-medicating with insults.But other times it seems as if no one, or perhaps just the popular yet perennially panned Bradshaw, is behind the rancor. It’s no accident that the names of the holies casually sideswiped in the rush of dialogue are mostly theatrical: Arthur Miller, Tracy Letts, “How I Learned to Drive,” Terrence McNally, Nora Ephron and Janet McTeer in an “all-female ‘True West.’”Grinding axes can be funny, and several times I caught myself guffawing in public, then regretting it privately. Though that’s probably just where Bradshaw wants us, the easy laughs don’t really provide added value; over time, they’re more subtractive.But then two things happen.One is that the play opens a new line of inquiry as Nina (who is biracial) and William (who is multiracial) explore the way identity inflects their art and ambition. “Interracial children are the glue that will one day bond our sad, broken country,” William says. To which Nina responds flirtatiously, “I don’t know. I think Black people should stick together.”This is the kind of alteration that enhances the original, giving a familiar relationship a different dimension.And then in its second half, the play changes again. Instead of looting or even building on Chekhov, it is drawn into the immense depth of his writing and becomes, at least fitfully, “The Seagull” itself. The tender scene in which Irene redresses, in both senses, her son’s wounds — he’s tried to kill himself — works exactly as it always does, no matter that it involves a conversational detour to P.S. 122. And the play’s infallible final gesture, here involving rude Scrabble instead of bingo, once again doesn’t fail.Still, I’m left to wonder whether a few moments of enhanced relevance are worth the bother of a comprehensive and often counterproductive update. Couldn’t this cast have pulled off the standard edition? And pulled it off more smoothly, without the staging longueurs occasioned by the rough text and the stop-and-go direction? (But do keep the fabulous contemporary clothing by Qween Jean.)Short of fulfilling a union requirement, there’s no reason for playwrights to keep pickpocketing Chekhov. Though as I write that I realize: That’s what we all do anyway.The Seagull/Woodstock, NYThrough April 9 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; thenewgroup.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      The Past Pushes Back in 2 Shows With Contemporary Blackness in Mind

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      New productions of “The Merchant of Venice” and “Black No More” aim to reflect our current racial politics. The results are uneven.On a recent weekend, I eagerly set out to see two new productions that prominently center Blackness: the director Arin Arbus’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” and “Black No More,” a new musical with a starry creative team that was inspired by a satirical 1931 novel about race in America.“The Merchant of Venice,” a Theater for a New Audience production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, came first. Here, Arbus strong-arms contemporary politics into the work, which she places in a modern-day setting. The tension between Arbus’s direction and the text is most apparent in a scene in which Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, in arguing he should be repaid after a merchant defaults on a loan, cites laws about the enslaved:You have among you many a purchased slaveWhich, like your asses and your dogs and mules,You use in abject and in slavish partsBecause you bought them. Shall I say to you‘Let them be free, marry them to your heirs.Why sweat they under burdens?’In this race-conscious production, the speech takes on a different meaning. Since the actor playing Shylock is John Douglas Thompson, Shylock’s Jewish identity is subordinated to another one: a Black identity.While “Merchant” reflects our current racial politics and sensibilities through the director’s vision, “Black No More,” the New Group’s musical, relies on the major ways in which its script deviates from the original novel. Both shows function almost as reactionary works of criticism, “Merchant” critiquing Shakespeare’s text and “Black No More” critiquing the bleak satire of the novel. And though each production brings art from the past to the present, sometimes in brilliant ways, the antiquated plots, themes and characters aren’t always easy to recontextualize. The past pushes back.In this “Merchant,” Antonio, the title character, and Bassanio, the best friend to whom he offers his fortune and very nearly his life, are lovers. The women — the heiress Portia, her maid Nerissa and Shylock’s daughter, Jessica — are married in the end, as is typically the rule in Shakespeare’s comedies, but are unhappy and wise to their husbands’ misogyny and other faults. And then Shylock and his daughter (and Shylock’s Jewish friend Tubal) are all Black, which brings in the history of racial discrimination, slavery and prejudice.Arbus shifts the focus of the text so Shylock — performed by Thompson with devastating pathos — isn’t the antagonist who stands in the way of the central characters’ happiness, but the tragic heart of the play. Though there’s still the matter of the dual Black and Jewish identities; of course Black Jews exist, but the conflation addles the themes of the production and bends the original text in directions it can’t actually go.While the text specifically speaks of anti-Semitism, the pivot to include anti-Black racism overwhelms it. Arbus does try to balance the two identities, especially in the final scene, in which Shylock and his daughter (beautifully portrayed by Danaya Esperanza) recite a Hebrew prayer; the exceptional performances almost make up for the fact that the scene feels out of place, like a last-ditch effort to assert that this is still also a play about anti-Semitism.Blackness is already in the play, in the form of racist throwaway comments about “Moors” that Arbus’s direction highlights to the degree she can. So Portia’s matter-of-fact dismissal of any dark-skinned suitors as she speaks to Nerissa (played by the Black actress Shirine Babb) is challenged by Nerissa’s disapproving glare. And when Jessica’s suitor, Lorenzo, disdainfully jokes about Shylock’s servant impregnating a Moor, Jessica silently steps away in disgust.Racism against Black people was assumed in Shakespeare’s time, so in a contemporary race-aware production that stays loyal to the text, the characters’ reactions to it must be limited to pauses and glances.Perhaps a contemporized version of this problematic play must be edited beginning with the language, mixing in modern-day parlance, as James Ijames did in his “Fat Ham,” or revised by artful omission, as in Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth.” Because there’s a limit to Arbus’s approach even within these textual constraints; Nerissa and Jessica can silently respond to a comment about Moors, but no one speaks about or refers to Shylock’s Black identity, just his Jewish one. It’s odd to showcase Blackness without having a Shylock who can explicitly speak about his Blackness. It then feels as if his two identities are at war. To which should we direct our attention, because the text can’t hold both?These thoughts lingered as I headed to the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan to see “Black No More,” whose short run ended this weekend.Unlike “Merchant,” “Black No More” isn’t loyal to the original text, George S. Schuyler’s novel of the same name. But it does take the book’s basic plot and characters. (“Schuyler’s ‘Black No More’ is an essay,” Tariq Trotter, who wrote the show’s lyrics, said in a recent interview. “Ours is an essay on that essay. A critique of a critique.”)In Schuyler’s novel, a Harlem man named Max Disher undergoes a scientific procedure that turns Black people white. The process, invented by a Black scientist named Dr. Crookman, becomes so popular that it affects Black businesses and institutions, labor politics and more. The newly Caucasian Max changes his name and moves down South to find and marry the racist white woman named Helen who had previously rejected him. He eventually becomes the leader of a white supremacist group and profits off racist rhetoric.Brandon Victor Dixon as Max Fisher in the musical “Black No More.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Black No More” the musical, directed by Scott Elliott and with a book by John Ridley (“12 Years a Slave”), softens — and in some cases eliminates — Schuyler’s biting critique. The novelist didn’t just target racist whites but also Black identity, and Black leaders and institutions that claim to support the Black community while actually damaging and profiting off it.In the novel, characters mostly act in their self-interest, especially when it comes to money; in many ways the villain is capitalism. (Schuyler was a vocal socialist at the time he published the book.) In the musical, things are simplified: Dr. Crookman (played by Trotter) is a devil figure offering a Faustian bargain.There aren’t many sympathetic characters in the text, which the musical changes. Helen, now a liberal at heart, falls in love with Max when he’s still Black and reveals she’s only pretending to be racist around her conservative family.In the book, Max’s best friend, Bunny, follows his lead, also turning white and serving white supremacists for profit. In the musical, Bunny (now Buni) is a Black woman who acts as Max’s moral compass; she defends Blackness and calls out Max for betraying his race. Schuyler’s book disregards women, and the intersection of race and gender, altogether. In the musical, Buni gets a song about the burdens Black women bear for their families and communities, but her character is thinly written, just bolstering Max’s story.The influential Black artists who worked on the show appeared eager to transform the original work into a piece that celebrates Blackness. Trotter’s lyrics, Bill T. Jones’s choreography and the music by Trotter, Anthony Tidd, James Poyser and Daryl Waters were lovingly appreciative of Black movement and sound, with R&B, soul, hip-hop, spoken word, step and lindy hop forming an extravagant collage. And some numbers — like the oddly triumphant final song of Black solidarity — and a new Black activist character named Agamemnon, seem incorporated to counter the cynicism of Schuyler’s work.It’s understandable, especially given the way Black Lives Matter has shaped the cultural conversation about inequality faced by Black people; it would be outré to produce a true adaptation of a work like Schuyler’s, which has no redeemable Black characters and berates pillars of the Black community as vehemently as it does white institutions.And so Max, our Black-turned-white protagonist, is given a guilty conscience; he’s made sympathetic just long enough so he can be the martyr, shot down in the middle of a fourth-wall-breaking monologue that’s meant to be a bridge between the 1931 story and 2022 audiences.In art, context is key. But depending on the work and what new context the director or playwright wants to bring to it, some changes can feel too forced, too transparent. “Expectation from you all is … what? For me to give a moving soliloquy on race in America?” Max says in his final monologue. He’s no longer speaking from the world of the musical but from today. “Still we can’t put all our nonsense behind us,” he says. And the bullet that takes him down? It doesn’t come from Schuyler’s time; it’s shot from 2022. It just goes to show that when past and present collide, it may not be pretty. More

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      Review: In ‘Black No More,’ Race Is Skin Deep, but Racism Isn’t

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      A new musical imagines the invention of a decolorizing process. Will it save Black Americans from hatred or destroy them?The 1931 Afrofuturist novel from which the new musical “Black No More” takes its name is hardly subtle, starting with its subtitle: “Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940.” George S. Schuyler’s satire is basically a thought experiment in which a procedure that decolorizes Black people solves America’s race problem but creates a new one when there’s no one left for haters to hate.The New Group’s musical version, which opened on Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center, makes the smart decision to borrow only the novel’s rudiments. It dumps most of the silly names (Ezekiel Whooper, Rufus Kretin), thin caricatures (of W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, among others) and weirdly jovial tone in favor of a more serious look at internalized racism and the conundrums of assimilation.The result, directed by Scott Elliott, is a gorgeous mess. Though it forefronts Schuyler’s central question — Is the goal of racial progress the ennoblement of Blackness or its disappearance into a “chromatic democracy”? — its tone is jumpy and its storytelling lumpy. The book by John Ridley, who wrote “12 Years a Slave,” makes only halfway repairs to the original, while introducing new problems that music and dance can’t solve.But oh, what music and dance! That the score is the work of many hands — lyrics by Tariq Trotter of the Roots; music by Trotter, Anthony Tidd, James Poyser and Daryl Waters — seems to have been an advantage here, helping to establish the show’s various moods and personalities.With nods to Kurt Weill, “Hamilton,” hip-hop, gospel, jazz, spoken word and Tin Pan Alley, among other aptly diverse inspirations and traditions, the songs reveal the characters’ yearnings and aversions, which often amount to the same thing. As well, under Waters’s musical supervision, they offer plenty of opportunities for phenomenal singing from the cast of 26, accompanied by a terrific band of seven.Lillias White, center, as a beauty impresario modeled on Madam C.J. Walker.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe choreography, by Bill T. Jones, is likewise thrilling, sometimes illustrating specific ideas (like the differences between Black and white social dancing) and other times expressing the overall conflict between racial pride and frustration. Because that conflict remains unresolved in the story, Jones often declines to resolve it in movement; numbers build from tension to frenzy without the overfamiliar Broadway-style climax.But the sung and danced elements of “Black No More” prove too exciting for its wobbly book to support. Making the inventor of the decolorizing process the narrator — his name, alas, is Dr. Junius Crookman — immediately sets the story on a strange footing; a neutral figure in the novel, he is here an amoral villain, and in Trotter’s uneven performance (excellent with the rapping, stiff with the acting) a bit too Dr. Evil. This immediately sidelines the actual central character, Max Disher, creating a blurry focus from which the show never fully recovers.Still, by the time Disher (Brandon Victor Dixon) becomes Crookman’s first patient, submitting to what looks like a dental procedure, “Black No More” has efficiently set up his reasons for choosing whiteness. Though he enjoys the “sporting life” he leads in Harlem, his safety there from the stings of overt racism comes at a cost. In “I Want It All,” his introductory song, he explains that he is never a whole man within his community’s confines, but merely “three-fifths” of one.For others, though, Harlem is “heaven’s gate” and “the Mecca of the Black race.” Disher’s best friend — a man named Bunny in the novel but here a woman named Buni — can’t understand why anyone would leave a place “where a person knows what they’re in for.” (Buni is played by Tamika Lawrence, a stunning singer.) For Agamemnon (Ephraim Sykes), a character new to the story, Disher is simply a traitor, selling out the dream of Black excellence.From left: Dixon, Tamika Lawrence and Tariq Trotter in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBoth are especially unimpressed by Disher’s baser motivations: to make more money in a more exciting career (he’s an insurance salesman) and to hook up with the white woman from Atlanta he falls in love with one night in a club.That woman, Helen Givens — played by Jennifer Damiano in a Veronica Lake wig — is the musical’s most radically revamped character; she is much more complicated than the unreconstructed racist of the novel. Unfortunately, in their attempt to give her greater agency, the musical’s authors make her motives and choices almost incoherent.As the story begins to pile on plot — it feels too hasty even at a long two hours and 30 minutes — the problem spreads to everyone else. Especially after Disher and Givens marry in Georgia, and a baby of likely mixed race impends, the musical pushes too hard toward tragedy, winding up well short at melodrama.Jennifer Damiano, center left, with Dixon and other ensemble members.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd yet, melodrama can be effective, especially when sung; the “melo” part of the word, after all, means music. Except for Sykes, who gets a great gospel number (“Lord Willing if the Creek Don’t Rise”), the women are more successful than the men at pushing past the confusions of the plot. (Dixon, usually a riveting performer, seems strangely recessive here.) And do not ask why Madame Sisseretta Blandish, the beauty impresario modeled on Madam C.J. Walker, sings not only in her salon but also in a nightclub; when it’s Lillias White doing the singing, who cares? She makes even the gibberish of scat syllables piercingly specific.Though Disher is the one who undergoes the most dramatic change — he eventually becomes the “Grand Exalted Giraw” of a Klanlike organization — I found myself more interested in Madame Sisseretta. In part that’s because she’s not allegorical; she’s a practical businesswoman who understands that her vanishing trade in hair straighteners and skin lighteners is different only by degree from Crookman’s. In the song “Right Amount of White” — “Just a little pinch of French/Just a slight touch of Dutch/Just a little bit of Brit” — she establishes the show’s themes and relevance with humor and theatrical specificity that’s mostly absent elsewhere.As “Black No More” continues its development process, it will surely need to find more breathing space like that between the whimsy of the novel and its current chaotic gloom. (Except for Qween Jean’s sexy costumes, the design is almost punitively cold.) I hope the authors can do so without losing what’s already beautiful about this promising work — keeping in mind that beauty, if not (according to “Black No More”) Blackness, is only skin deep.Black No MoreThrough Feb. 27 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; thenewgroup.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      In 'Black No More,' the Evolution of Black Music, and a Man’s Soul

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      The new show “Black No More,” inspired by a 1931 satirical novel about race relations, has “the point of view of people who are very much products of now.”A Black man in New York City, during the Harlem Renaissance, is hoping for a life without bigotry. This is Harlem after all, a Black enclave, the epicenter of culture and creativity. Here, he’d have an easier time in getting along.Or so he thought. He soon learns that utopia is an illusion, that racism prevails no matter the location. In the North, he discovers, the racism is subtle: He’s somehow not the right fit for his job, though his supervisor, a white man, says he’s doing well. Others think he’s too uppity, so he is let go.Distraught, he undergoes a procedure to turn himself white and retreats to Atlanta. There he sees how prejudiced whites speak of Black people when they aren’t in the room: The “n” word is tossed around with the hard “-er.” He soon realizes that his new skin tone can’t save him, either. The life he wants means nothing if he loses his soul along the way.This is the plot of “Black No More,” a new musical presented by the New Group and inspired by George S. Schuyler’s 1931 novel of the same name. The show, an expansive, Afrofuturistic take on race relations in America now in previews at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan, is set against an equally vast arrangement of jazz, gospel, R&B, hip-hop and reggae meant to connect the past and present. By using older and newer styles of music, coupled with the protagonist’s struggles to rise above the same discrimination endured today, the show explores how little race relations have progressed.Jones, far right, working on the show’s choreography with cast members, including Lillias White, center.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesAnd it almost didn’t see the light of day.The screenwriter John Ridley, who wrote the show’s book, was inspired to adapt the story after reading Schuyler’s novel over a decade ago, before he’d written his Oscar-winning adaptation of “12 Years a Slave.” “I read it and was really taken with the wit and unbridled satire,” he said. “So much of the writing was timely and timeless and painful and painless.”He initially wrote it as a screenplay in 2013, but couldn’t get financing for a sci-fi-inspired film about Black existence. Someone suggested trying to have it produced as a play, but that also proved to be a tough road. Of the stage directors he reached out to, Ridley said that Scott Elliott, the artistic director of the New Group, was the only one who expressed interest. He read the novel and thought it would work best as a musical. “It had the possibility to be an amazing theatrical satire, but with humanity in it, with real people, not like ‘wink-wink satire,’” Elliott said.There was just one problem: Ridley didn’t like musicals. “I was like, ‘Well, yeah, but that’s OK,” Elliott said. “Let’s go on this journey together and see what happens.” Ridley’s view on musicals changed after meeting with Tariq Trotter, better known as Black Thought of the Roots, and seeing “Hamilton.” He said that show convinced him that musicals can be vehicles for sending a strong message.They enlisted Trotter, who wrote the lyrics and developed the music with Anthony Tidd, James Poyser and Daryl Waters, and the Tony-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones. Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Hamilton,” owns the commercial rights. And with all the star power (Broadway veterans, including Brandon Victor Dixon, Lillias White and Ephraim Sykes), it seems “Black No More” could very well be destined for Broadway.John Ridley with the show’s associate director Monet during a recent rehearsal. Marc. J. FranklinAmong other themes, the show holds up a mirror to those in the Black community who aspire to whiteness. The protagonist, Max Disher (played by Dixon), decides to lighten his skin after meeting a white woman, Helen Givens (Jennifer Damiano), in the Savoy Ballroom during a night out. That he’d be willing to sacrifice his identity after a chance encounter with the woman is a longstanding critique of some Black men: No matter how much they’re supported by Black women, they still see dating white women as the ultimate societal prize.The musical also delves into the internal baggage that comes with Blackness, the weight of external pressure applied by those who look like you but don’t know your circumstances. How do you stay true to yourself without disappointing your peers? And what does it mean to be real Black anyway?“For me, the lesson to be learned is that there is a cost,” Dixon said. “There is a cost to the choices we force each other to make to become happy, accepted members of society. It’s time for us to re-examine those costs. Is this the construct in which we can really rise and grow and evolve as a human population?”“Black No More” begins amicably, with a flurry of Black and white ensemble dancers gliding in unison across the stage, surrounding a barber’s chair used for the skin-altering experiment. Out walks Trotter, who plays Junius Crookman, the doctor performing the procedure. He paints Harlem as a deceptive place where dreams don’t always come true. “You’ll find all things … both high and low,” he says in his opening monologue. “Here where every Black baby must try to grow.”The music of “Black No More” largely fits this era, smoothly transitioning from swing jazz to big band to soul. Some of the verses have a rap lilt to them — Trotter, after all, is the lead vocalist of the Roots — but his writing here explores a broad range of musical textures, conjuring old Harlem while conveying music’s full spectrum. After Max becomes white, the music becomes softer and more delicate, sounding almost like bluegrass or folkish in a way. Near the end of the show, two white women sing over what sounds like an R&B track, a genre typically associated with Black women. “Black No More” is full of this sort of cross-pollination.“I’ve always been very big on allowing the universe to sort of write the songs, allowing the material to work itself out,” Trotter said. “These songs represent the different elements of Black music. What we arrived at is something that feels like an education in the evolution of Black music, which, at its core, would be the evolution of American music.”Tamika Lawrence and Brandon Victor Dixon during a dress rehearsal.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesThe Harlem Renaissance is widely seen as an artistic movement in which Black creators like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Duke Ellington made landmark work. Indeed, the Renaissance helped change how Black people were viewed culturally; from it came a new, fearless creative generation. Yet the Renaissance had its detractors. Some said the literature only catered to whites and the Black middle-class. Even one of Harlem’s most famous establishments — the Cotton Club — was only for whites. “Black No More” demystifies Harlem as a mecca by wrapping its arms around it, wiping off the glitter while celebrating its charm.“The show, in my mind, is a critique of a critique,” said Jones, who is also choreographing the new Broadway musical “Paradise Square.” “We’re trying to make a musical about a historical novel, but with the point of view of people who are very much products of now. For God’s sake, we are post-George Floyd.”“Black No More” was originally slated to premiere in October 2020. But then the pandemic shut down theaters, forcing shows to postpone or cancel their runs. And in May 2020, Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by the police officer Derek Chauvin. Protests ensued. Coupled with outcries over the deaths of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, these rebellions felt different. The precinct in which Chauvin worked was burned. In New York City, protesters and law enforcement regularly clashed, intensifying the already-strained relationship between certain residents and the police.Near the end of “Black No More,” over an aggressive rap beat, a white antagonist asserts that Black lives don’t matter, a perceived reference to the modern-day Black Lives Matter movement. Within the context of the musical, he’s upset that his sister got involved with a Black man. Yet the subtle nod acknowledges the cloud of George Floyd hanging over this musical.“We just happen to be in a space where certain audiences are ready to receive what we’re trying to say, as opposed to pre-2020,” said Tamika Lawrence, who plays Buni Brown, Max Disher’s best friend. “There are certain cultures in America — white cultures, specifically — that I think are now ready to have tough conversations and ready to see this kind of art.”Trotter concurred. “I think some people may take offense,” he said. “Some people may be appalled, some may take it as a challenge to widen their scope, to tear some of the bandages off these bullet wounds that we deal with as a society.”“Black No More” is presented with the hope that Black and white people can find common ground somewhere. That we can at least see one another’s differences and be respectful of them.Just don’t do something drastic like change your skin color. As the musical teaches us, the grass isn’t greener.“What it says is, ‘Look at yourself, take a look at where we are, take a look at where we’ve come from, how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go,” Trotter said of the show. “It speaks to a commonality that we all share as humans, as people, as inhabitants of this planet. I don’t think we’re ever going to exist in perfect harmony, but I think there’s a possibility for us to coexist in peace.” More

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      ‘Black No More’ to Land Off Broadway This Winter

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      The musical will feature the theatrical debut of the Roots’ Black Thought, who will be writing the music and lyrics and be in a lead role.“Black No More,” a musical with a book by the “12 Years a Slave” screenwriter John Ridley and music and lyrics by the Roots’ Tariq Trotter, a.k.a. Black Thought, will finally get its turn in the spotlight.The musical, originally scheduled to premiere in October 2020, was delayed by the pandemic. The production, from the New Group, will now begin this winter.“Black No More,” based on George S. Schuyler’s 1931 novel of the same name, will play a limited engagement, Jan. 11 through Feb. 27, 2022, at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Opening night is scheduled for Feb. 8.“The music transcends genre,” Trotter said in a phone interview. “But most of it feels like Black music. I feel like this play, we might be able to break it down and use it as an education in the origins and history of Black music.”“I didn’t feel like I was confined; I didn’t feel like I had to stick to music of the day,” he continued. “I felt like we were able to tell the story, and make it in very many ways a period piece — without only writing jazz music.”Schuyler’s satirical story, a piece of the Harlem Renaissance canon, follows the development of Black-No-More, a scientific procedure for turning Black skin white, created by one Dr. Junius Crookman. (Trotter, in a theatrical debut, will also play Crookman in the show.)The protagonist, Max Disher (Brandon Victor Dixon), decides to undergo the procedure after being spurned by a white woman for being Black. In the meantime, Black-No-More gains popularity nationwide. The more Black people make the transition, the more obvious the economic importance of racial segregation becomes.“I thought it was mind blowing,” Trotter said of Schuyler’s book. “I couldn’t believe that something of this caliber of science fiction and wit and just dark humor and something with so many layers was written at the time that it was.”Apart from Trotter and Dixon (“Hamilton”), the cast also includes Jennifer Damiano (“Next to Normal”), Tamika Lawrence (“Rent”), Theo Stockman (“American Psycho”), Tracy Shayne (“Chicago”) and Walter Bobbie (“Chicago”). Rehearsals begin in November. Additional casting will be announced at a later date.The show will be coming from a Tony-winning team: It will be directed by the New Group’s founding artistic director, Scott Elliott; choreographed by Bill T. Jones; and have music supervision, orchestrations and vocal arrangements by Daryl Waters.“There’s a very serious look that we need to take at history and at the story of this nation and the ways in which it has been told and will be told, moving forward,” Trotter said. “It’s my hope that this work and work like this are going to compel people to continue that examination.” More

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      in Theater

      Review: ‘Waiting for Godot’ in the Bleakest Zoom Room Ever

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      Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo star as Beckett’s tragicomic tramps — minus the comic part.Early audiences were baffled by “Waiting for Godot.” Even Peter Hall, who in 1955 directed the first English language production, claimed not to understand it. When actors with access to its author, Samuel Beckett, demanded explanations from him, he usually professed himself helpless to answer.Now, though some of the references have become more obscure with time, it’s hard to imagine anyone not fathoming the play’s gist. Decades of high school lit seminars, let alone the gradual opening of the playgoing class’s eyes to the world’s inequities and terrors, have transformed it from an enigmatic museum piece into an existential tchotchke.But there is more to “Waiting for Godot,” which the New Group has just released as a lugubrious film starring Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo, than its status as a modern classic suggests. Its portrait of life as a charnel house may be half the story but in this case, it’s the only half.After all, Beckett called “Godot” a tragicomedy, presumably with emphasis on the second part of the word because the first part speaks for itself. The thumbprints of Buster Keaton, and especially Laurel and Hardy, are all over its main characters, the broken-down migrant workers Vladimir and Estragon. (Estragon was first played on Broadway by the great vaudevillian and erstwhile Cowardly Lion Bert Lahr.) The undercard, Pozzo and Lucky, are no comic slouches either; together, the four wanderers, with their long-honed routines and jags of passive-aggressive mayhem, outnumber and upstage the Three Stooges.But of the New Group’s cast, which also includes Tarik Trotter as Pozzo and Wallace Shawn as Lucky, only Leguizamo, as Estragon, could really be considered a clown — and not just because he called himself one in his 2011 one-man show “Ghetto Klown.”A theatrical being to his core, he has the quick-twitch reflexes and papered-over wounds that can make injury funny. The best parts of this “Waiting for Godot” mine that duality, and also Leguizamo’s heritage; when Hawke, as Vladimir, discredits Estragon’s account of being beaten for no cause, we get a new, white-privilege angle on their recurrent miscommunication.Hawke, left, and Leguizamo mask up when approaching the other two tramps in the play.via The New Group Off StageBut even Leguizamo is done in by a production, directed by Scott Elliott, that is almost entirely — and, it would seem, deliberately — humorless. The actors are shot in separate gloomy interiors, and from stationary positions, so as to appear in Stygian Zoom-like frames as if at a virtual meeting of hobbits.And though Beckett did say, in response to a proposed in-the-round production, that “Godot” needed “a very closed box,” I doubt this is what he meant. In any case, a play that famously takes place outdoors, with its sole scenic element a barren tree that for Act II sprouts five leaves, is now mercilessly interiorized, and a relationship that is meant to test the limits of intimacy is unhelpfully kept at arm’s length from the start.To the extent this comments on our pandemic moment, it’s at least intriguing; a lot of thought seems to have gone into Vladimir and Estragon’s decisions to mask up, mostly when they approach Pozzo and Lucky. But this and other contemporary intrusions, including the use of cellphones for texting and black screens when the characters apparently disable their feed, don’t actually illuminate anything, let alone emphasize the play’s humor as they seem to intend. It’s hard to laugh when you can hardly see.That problem encourages a certain degree of overacting, especially from Hawke, as if he were trying to make himself visible from a distance. (He has lovely moments, though.) Trotter, who under the name Black Thought was a co-founder of the hip-hop group the Roots, uses his terrific stage voice to capture Pozzo’s first-act bluster without resorting to flailing, but has a harder time with the humbled version of the character who returns in Act II.At least Drake Bradshaw, in the small role of Godot’s young herald, is sweetly effective in both his appearances. And though Shawn, delivering Lucky’s impossible speech — nine minutes of gibberish — is able to make convincing emotional sense of the moment, the production as a whole doesn’t support his efforts. Vladimir and Estragon check out of the Zoom call for much of the harangue, encouraging us to think we might do so as well.It’s not that you need to be literal with “Waiting for Godot”; it’s anything but a naturalistic drama. I liked the designer Qween Jean’s past-midnight cowboy look for Hawke and Mets cap and tank top pandemic ensemble for Leguizamo. But if Elliott, working with the Academy Award winner John Ridley’s Nō Studios and the Hollywood producer Frank Marshall, has avoided excessive fealty to Beckett’s instructions — the estate approved the socially distanced production — he has not provided anything as coherent to take their place.For one thing, the action is awkwardly staged, even beyond the necessity of executing comedy bits when the actors, if not the characters, are calling in from different locations. (The passing of Lucky’s hat, a clear lift from Laurel and Hardy, is totally botched.) At three hours, the show is also long, even bloated. Most problematically, Vladimir’s and Estragon’s embraces, so necessary to the play’s emotional equilibrium, are about as warm here as octopi suckering up to opposite sides of a glass wall.Far from seeming too modern, though, this “Godot,” especially coming more than a year into the pandemic, seems too passé. Other companies, even no-budget ones like Theater in Quarantine, have long since figured out ways to make an aesthetic out of the limitations of lockdown. Why only now, just as those lockdowns are lifting, is this first-gen take on pandemic play production emerging? About the only expressive use of the medium is in the processing that gives the film the appearance of a dodgy video feed, with freezes and glitches that imitate a poor signal.You could argue that a dodgy feed is exactly the way “Godot” depicts life: as a poor approximation of what it should be. But in Vladimir and Estragon, Beckett also finds poignancy, humor and the last dregs of physical love, where Elliott and company find only horror. If they are right, what kind of pass have we come to, in which even Beckett’s vision is not bleak enough?Waiting for GodotThrough June 30; thenewgroup.org More