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    At Two Summer Theater Festivals, Reassuring Signs of Life

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    The industry is facing challenges, but in western Massachusetts the quality of the works is as rich as ever, our critic writes.Suddenly, out of the darkness, came one of the most thrilling sounds an audience can make: a collective gasp. This is how you know that the crowd is rapt, that the storytelling has taken hold. And so it had the other night during a performance of “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at Barrington Stage Company, where a different plot twist elicited another welcome noise: a mid-scene eruption of delighted applause. Humans can be a lot of fun to see a show with.That’s something to keep in mind at this crisis moment in the theater, whose prepandemic audiences have yet to return in their former numbers, and whose programming has shrunk accordingly. But that doesn’t mean the work itself has withered. Over a couple of days in Western Massachusetts last week, I saw two plays, one play reading and one cabaret, and if you looked at the quality of what was there — rather than the quantity of what was not — you’d hardly know that anything was amiss. And Barrington Stage, anyway, has not scaled back this year.“Blues for an Alabama Sky,” directed by Candis C. Jones on the Boyd-Quinson Stage in Pittsfield, Mass., is a tone-perfect production of Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play, set in the summer of 1930, that has plenty of resonance in the summer of 2023. It also shimmers with the charisma of a terrific cast playing funny, likable, fully dimensional friends.Angel (Tsilala Brock), a role originated by Phylicia Rashad, is a Harlem nightclub singer with a voice to fit her name. Guy (Brandon Alvión) is a chicly fabulous costume designer with exquisite taste. In the middle of the Great Depression, they are both freshly out of work — since the night Angel told off her gangster ex from the stage, and Guy defended her. Now they’re roommates, sharing his apartment.Angel hopes that Leland (DeLeon Dallas), a conventionally religious Southern stranger, will swoop in and save her, even though they are a catastrophic mismatch. Guy plans to be rescued by Josephine Baker, whose portrait hangs from his wall like a deity. He sends his designs to her in Paris, fantasizing that she will whisk him there.Across the hall, Angel and Guy’s earnest, impassioned social worker friend, Delia (Jasminn Johnson), is helping to open a family planning clinic — and maybe falling for their nightlife-loving doctor friend, Sam (Ryan George), who delivers babies all over the neighborhood.“I’m not trying to make a revolution,” Delia says, and if her drably sensible suits are any indication, she means it. “I’m just trying to give women in Harlem the chance to plan their families.”But self-determination — control over one’s own body in particular — has always been revolutionary, and freedom from straitjacketing social mores is what Angel and Guy have been chasing ever since they left Savannah for Harlem. As a Black woman and a gay Black man, they’ve each encountered violence aimed at them for that.“Blues for an Alabama Sky” is about the tenacity of hope, the limits of forgiveness and the romance of defiance. It’s a glittering spoken blues, layered with yearning.Bill Irwin in master-clown mode at the Williamstown Theater Festival, which is hosting a series of cabaret performances this summer.Emilio MadridAbout 20 miles north of Pittsfield, Williamstown Theater Festival is producing a drastically cropped season, none of whose offerings are open to review — because, a publicist said, they “are all in active development.” Fair enough. But the festival — which landed in trouble in 2021 when workers accused it of exploiting them, and in response produced a streamlined 2022 season — hasn’t lost its stardust, even without its customary fully staged productions.In the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance at Williams College, the festival’s longtime home, the WTF Cabaret set (by Se Hyun Oh) is stark, the lighting (by Emily Schmit) glamorous. Both audience and performers are onstage, with the auditorium’s rows of empty seats forming the backdrop for the show. A sculptural array of illuminated bulbs hangs in the air, like a constellation of ghost lights. Simplicity, this summer, is the festival’s friend.So, last weekend, was the actor Jeff Hiller. Lately risen on the cultural radar thanks to HBO’s heart-stirring friendship dramedy “Somebody Somewhere,” he hosted the cabaret, trying out comic material for an August show at Joe’s Pub. Bill Irwin performed in master-clown mode, and Jacob Ming-Trent knocked his songs so far out of the park that he could not have been a better advertisement for seeing him down the road in Lenox, Mass., playing Bottom in Shakespeare & Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Aug. 1-Sept. 10).The cabaret hosts and guests change each weekend, but the band and the core performers (Eden Espinosa, Asmeret Ghebremichael and Jon-Michael Reese) are constants. Reese’s fresh, textured interpretation of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” given a soulful flourish by the music director, Joel Waggoner, ought to be a constant, too.Nearby at the Clark, I saw a Williamstown Theater Festival reading of Cindy Lou Johnson’s “Plunder and Lightning,” directed by Portia Krieger. It would be unfair to evaluate the play, about a family of schemers teetering on the edge of ruin, but it was a genuine joy to watch Annie Golden rip into a substantial comic part, with the brilliant Johanna Day alongside her. Not a bad lineup for a Friday afternoon, or for a $15 ticket. And the legroom? Miles of it.Barrington Stage Company presented the world premiere of Mike Lew’s “tiny father,” a comedy set in a neonatal intensive care unit, featuring Andy Lucien as the father of a premature baby.Daniel RaderBack in Pittsfield, Barrington Stage Company was also engaged in new work: the world premiere of Mike Lew’s “tiny father” — a comedy set in a neonatal intensive care unit, where Daniel (Andy Lucien) has become the father of a daughter born 14 weeks premature, and is soon a solo parent. Caroline (Jennifer Ikeda), a nurse on the unit, is his guide through this alien landscape — and sometimes, Daniel thinks, his opponent there.Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, it’s a smart play about parenthood, and the ways race and gender play into expectations and outcomes in health care and elsewhere. (Daniel is Black, his baby’s mother is Asian, and Caroline is written to be played by an Asian or Latina actress.) But the script demands an exceptionally tricky balance of comedy and emotional complexity in the portrayal of Daniel, which this production has yet to find. Talking to the baby, Sophia, though, Lucien is lovely always.Good news, then, from a theatrical landscape lately festooned with co-productions. Though this “tiny father” has ended its Barrington Stage run, it will get a chance to go deeper when it moves to Chautauqua Theater Company in Chautauqua, N.Y., next week. Butts in seats, please.Blues for an Alabama SkyThrough Aug. 5 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org.tiny fatherAug. 4-17 in the Bratton Theater at the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, N.Y.; chq.org. More

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      ‘Into the Woods’ Review: Some Enchanted Evening

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      Sara Bareilles and Neil Patrick Harris lead a starry Encores! revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s sweet-sour musical.For nearly three decades, the Encores! concert series at New York City Center has upheld a specific mission — excavating the hidden gems of American musical theater, burnishing them to a fully orchestrated shine. Which makes the fractured fairy tales of “Into the Woods,” Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s sweet-sour 1986 musical, a peculiar choice. (Let’s just say that when Rob Marshall has directed a star-crammed film version of a show within the last decade, it is no longer a hidden gem.)But that mission has expanded, unearthing something as glorious as Lear deBessonet’s revival. Her “Into the Woods” runs through May 15; only a few tickets remain. So if you know a spell to charm the secondary market, cast it now.The show, as ever, collides characters drawn from a half-dozen tales in the European folk tradition — Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack the Giant Killer, a prince or two. At its whirling center are a humble baker (Neil Patrick Harris, with down-to-the-millisecond comic timing) and his wife (the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter and recent Broadway baby Sara Bareilles, no slouch). Desperate for a child, they heed the witch next door (Heather Headley, a diva in a frowzy wig and claws) and head into the forest — here, a bare stage ornamented with the set designer David Rockwell’s elegant birch trunks. Within three nights they must obtain a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn and a slipper as pure as gold.This color-blocked quest overlaps with those of Little Red (Julia Lester, pert and twinkling), waylaid by a seductive wolf (Gavin Creel, sleazy and flawless), and the moony Jack (Cole Thompson, sweet and dreamy), forced by his mother (the comic genius Ann Harada) to sell the cow that he loves too much. Separated in the woods, the baker and his wife have other encounters. The baker meets a mysterious man (the downtown stalwart David Patrick Kelly, who doubles as the narrator). His wife befriends Cinderella (Denée Benton, luminous, with a crystalline soprano), on the run from a pursuing prince (Creel again).From left, Gavin Creel, David Turner, Ann Harada, Bareilles and Harris in Lear deBessonet’s revival of the Sondheim-Lapine musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen tales have circulated since the premodern era, it’s no spoiler to say that they all end happily. Cinderella gets her prince. Rapunzel (Shereen Pimentel, mellow in an underwritten role) gets hers (Jason Forbach, in for Jordan Donica). Little Red and her grandmother (Annie Golden) are released from the wolf’s stomach. Jack, now rich, reunites with his cow (expertly puppeteered by Kennedy Kanagawa). But that only brings us to intermission. And unease already glimmers, firefly-like, among the trees.In “Maybe They’re Magic,” the baker’s wife interrogates the ethics of ambition. Characters weigh personal desire against the needs of the greater community. And as in Sondheim shows like “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Gypsy” and “Sweeney Todd,” they wrestle with the question of whether getting what you want is actually good for you. What if you get what you wish and you still want more? What if the wish come true isn’t really worth what it cost you?The second act darkens and destabilizes these tales. It’s a truism that a happy ending depends on stopping a story at just the right moment. “Into the Woods” insists on continuing straight past happily ever after, exploring the repercussions of those Act I choices and offering new and somewhat more abstract conflicts. The priority shifts from the individual to the collective as characters band together to save the kingdom and themselves. That should feel at least as propulsive as gathering potion ingredients. Instead it feels theoretical, a filigreed representation of the classic trolley problem. Should the characters deliberately sacrifice one person — Jack — or do nothing and allow many others to die?This more philosophical turn has bothered many critics. If I’m honest, it bothers me. But I can still remember myself 30 years ago, wearing out the VHS tape of the original Broadway version, which PBS aired as part of its “American Playhouse” series. The conflicts didn’t feel abstract to me then. Keying into the emotional force underlying them — the wanting, the regret — I understood the musical’s questions of right and wrong, and the very murky moral territory in between, the way children do: intuitively and very personally.From left, Heather Headley, Julia Lester, Cole Thompson, Denée Benton and Harris in the show’s second act, which darkens and destabilizes the fairy tales.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow I understand them differently: as conjectures and hypotheticals. But that doesn’t make them any less urgent. The last two years, maybe the last six years, maybe more, have emphasized the stark divisions in American life, isolating us in our individual experiences of suffering and perceived injustice. But these same years have offered galvanizing examples of mutual care and aid, a mode echoed in the ballad “No One Is Alone,” which argues for support and understanding despite differences.If I were a betting woman, I would hazard that’s the aspect of “Into the Woods” that appealed to deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores! and an artist with a long history of community engagement and activism. Unlike the other Encores! shows of the season — “The Tap Dance Kid” and “The Life,” both of which received contested updates — “Into the Woods” arrives largely unchanged. And no longueur or flubbed cue breaks the spell of her compassionate, witty production. She has cast wonderful comedians, many of whom are also wonderful singers, and has encouraged them to deliver rich and very human performances, accented by Lorin Lattaro’s friendly, organic choreography and Rob Berman’s splendid music direction.The show ends with a musical combo punch — “No One Is Alone,” “Children Will Listen” — an absolute T.K.O. to anyone who argues that Sondheim’s pleasures are intellectual alone. (It’s a deeper cut, but the preceding song, “No More,” an existential body blow, prepares the way, too.) For “Children Will Listen,” led by Headley, with superb, sinuous phrasing, deBessonet suddenly swells the cast with 70 or so supernumeraries, children and seniors singing along.The night I saw it, not all of that singing was precisely on key, and the child nearest me overacted wretchedly. But I found myself crying without really knowing why. For the child I was, I suppose. And the child I am. And the mother now, also. I listened. I am still listening. You should, too.Into the WoodsThrough May 15 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More