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    Review: Nicholas Hytner’s ‘Guys and Dolls’ Finds New Depths

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    Nicholas Hytner’s heartbreaking ambulatory staging, at the Bridge Theater in London, finds new depths in the classic Broadway musical.“Guys and Dolls” is surely one of the most beloved Broadway musicals in London, where it resurfaces every decade or so to beguile audiences with its treasurable humor and wit. The difference this time, in Nicholas Hytner’s joyous new production, which opened Tuesday at the Bridge Theater, is that the show courses with a degree of feeling not always found in this story of two male “no-goodniks” and the women who love them. That warmth transforms Frank Loesser’s 1950 classic into something as touching as it is tuneful: You leave humming, and with a full heart.This first-ever musical at the Bridge theater, which opened in 2017, is also Hytner’s first London musical in 30 years. And like his last one, “Carousel,” this “Guys and Dolls” is sure to be a smash hit.Many will know the story, adapted from Damon Runyon: The nightclub singer Miss Adelaide (Marisha Wallace) wants to make a husband of her fiancé of 14 years, Nathan Detroit (Daniel Mays). Similarly domestic thoughts come to obsess the prim Sister Sarah (Celinde Schoenmaker), who falls hard for the smooth-talking gambler, Sky Masterson (Andrew Richardson).Celinde Schoenmaker, left, as Sister Sarah, and Marisha Wallace, as Miss Adelaide.Manuel HarlanAt the Bridge, 400 or so playgoers per performance have the opportunity to follow these characters’ paths to the altar, quite literally. The seats have been removed from the orchestra level and the action unfolds across hydraulic platforms that rise up from beneath the stage floor. Those who would prefer not to spend nearly three hours on their feet can occupy tiered seating that encircles the auditorium.Hytner has tried this immersive approach before, with Shakespeare, and the concept turns out equally well-suited to this self-described “musical fable of Broadway,” with its inimitable book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. The designer Bunny Christie offers the neon-filled landscape of a bygone Times Square, and crew members dressed as police officers are there to keep spectators out of the way of the flexible sets, and the performers.Yet proximity to the cast would mean nothing if the actors didn’t deliver. And it’s here that Hytner really scores, fielding a company of players — including several newcomers to musical theater — that mines the twin love affairs on view for all their emotional heft. They sing splendidly, and break your heart, too.I’ve not seen a “Guys and Dolls” that gives its central quartet such equal weight. It’s tempting to think of Sister Sarah in the shadow of the audience-grabbing Miss Adelaide, the singer — and stripper — who has been pretending for years to her unseen mother that she and Nathan are married.But Schoenmaker’s golden-voiced Sarah suggests a devil-fearing member of the Save-a-Soul Mission Band whose resolve looks ready to crack in the face of the right guy — which Sky turns out to be. Making his professional theater debut in that role, the dusky-voiced Richardson is a real find.As Miss Adelaide, Wallace avoids caricature, coupling robust comedy with the sense of an aching heart and bringing her roof-raising vocals to her character’s famously adenoidal “Lament.” But you also sense the mounting annoyance she feels toward the rapscallion Nathan, who won’t be easily weaned from rolling dice and shooting craps.Andrew Richardson, as Sky Masterson, and Schoenmaker.Manuel HarlanAdelaide and her dancers from the Hot Box stop the show with the second-act “Take Back Your Mink,” which the choreographers Arlene Phillips and James Cousins turn into a dizzying striptease. Yet you feel this Adelaide laying bare a depth of affection for Nathan that makes something momentous of their climactic duet, “Sue Me.” Mays, a TV and film name irresistibly cast as Nathan, brings a sure voice and even surer comic timing to the role, which he plays as a streetwise commitment-phobe who is essentially a softie.The score, orchestrated by Charlie Rosen, sounds great as performed by a 14-piece swing band perched above the action, lending a party feel to the proceedings, in which the audience joins a conga line with the cast (on the night I attended, at least).The ensemble numbers come roaring to life, with Cedric Neal’s sweet-faced Nicely-Nicely Johnson leading “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” to three encores. He is surveyed from above by the band leader, Tom Brady, who surveys the tidal pull of the song in mock-disapproval; after all, we can’t be there all night.But the evening is nowhere more affecting than in the plaintive solo number, “More I Cannot Wish You,” in which the kindly Arvide Abernathy (Anthony O’Donnell) wishes his granddaughter, Sarah, the experience of love that she has denied herself. There’s nothing I could wish more for theatergoers than to experience this “Guys and Dolls” for themselves.Guys and DollsThrough Sept. 2 at the Bridge Theater, in London; bridgetheater.co.uk. More

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      ‘Straight Line Crazy’ Review: The Road Rage of Robert Moses

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      Off Broadway at the Shed, Ralph Fiennes is glorious in David Hare’s sputtering portrait of the man who paved New York.I doubt I’d have enjoyed meeting the real Robert Moses, New York’s paver of highways, evictor of minorities, eminent domain eminence and all-purpose boogeyman. But it’s a huge pleasure to meet him, in the form of Ralph Fiennes, in David Hare’s “Straight Line Crazy,” which opened on Wednesday at the Shed.Whether the creature Hare and Fiennes create has anything to do with the creature that created modern Gotham remains, for a while, an irrelevant question. Moses’ actual demeanor and utterance, as portrayed in the nearly 1,300 pages of Robert Caro’s biography “The Power Broker,” are little in evidence at the Hudson Yards theater.Fiennes is too gloriously entertaining for that. Melodramatic in the old-fashioned sense, a hero or villain from an operetta or Ayn Rand, he crows his lines like a rooster, albeit in an accent suspended somewhere between East Anglia and Texas. With his nose pointing straight up and his chest pointing straight out, he’s a figurehead on the prow of a ship that can slice through icebergs as easily as red tape.Also through consonants: When he says “boardwalk” — a thing he despises, with its “so-called amusements” and “lox and bagel merchants” — the word has three syllables: the board, the wal and the k.So what if Moses is racist, antisemitic (though Jewish by birth) and an unabashed elitist who aims to advance ordinary people’s fortunes “without having any respect for their opinions”? Here he is wit and pith personified — and why would he not be, with lines honed by Hare in high-gloss mode?Usually that high gloss means Hare is up to some undermining; in plays like “Plenty,” “The Judas Kiss” and “Skylight,” good badinage almost always means bad faith.But in “Straight Line Crazy,” the connection is unclear, forcing you to ask why such a progressive playwright would spend even half a play valorizing a man who, among many other practical atrocities, displaced 7,000 families to clear space for Lincoln Center and 40,000 residents to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway. A clue in the script: “Moses’ life is so prodigious and his reach so great,” Hare notes, “that I have chosen to concentrate on just two decisive moments in his extraordinary career.”From left: Danny Webb as Gov. Alfred E. Smith, Fiennes and Judith Roddy as Finnuala Connell in the play, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesApparently, one act will try to counteract the other, so it makes sense that the production, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage for the London Theater Company, should introduce us to Moses in 1926. At that time he is merely the chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission, and his antagonists are not yet sympathetic proles but out-of-touch gentry.These are the owners of Nassau County estates whose gorgeous seclusion, not to mention their orchards, are threatened by plans for the Northern and Southern State Parkways. The play’s first substantial scene is in fact with a (fictional) Vanderbilt, supplied with a big-eared butler named Fergus and an even bigger sneer.“Leave him at the end of the drive,” this Vanderbilt (Guy Paul) instructs the servant after dispensing with Moses.But of course it’s Moses who dispenses with Vanderbilt. In their scene together and in the long one that follows, at a headquarters that serves as a hive of urban planning, the power broker is shown breaking under- and overlings like twigs to get his way.I say he is “shown”; he is not dramatized except to the extent he is self-dramatized, with prompts from those underlings. (Their interruptions of “Why?” “What do they do?” and “What’s that?” amount to dramaturgy by laxative.) Perhaps because they too are fictional, and purpose-built, they have few characteristics except those that pertain to Moses: Ariel Porter (Adam Silver) is the meek one who backs off every argument, and Finnuala Connell (Judith Roddy) is the spunky one who stands up to him, at least on small points.It’s not until an official overling arrives that any actual drama occurs. He is Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York, a populist Democrat who is Moses’ patron and also, one begins to suspect, his patsy. That piquant combination, along with Danny Webb’s hilariously earthy take on the governor, gives the interaction between the men, needling each other among the maps and models of Bob Crowley’s set, the unlikely spin of a Mutt and Jeff comedy starring Laurence Olivier and Jimmy Durante.Helen Schlesinger as Jane Jacobs, the journalist and urban theorist, fails to emerge, as she did in life, as Moses’ greatest foil.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat’s going on beneath the comedy is less funny: On the theory that no one will tear up a road once it’s built, even if they’d have forbidden it beforehand, Moses orders construction to proceed on the parkways without having obtained the governor’s approval. That this is offered as an amusing example of flair and determination instead of a warning about subterfuge and megalomania means that Hare has either fallen under the Great Man’s spell or wants to make sure the audience has.Surely, you think during intermission, as you study the weird intrusion of the mall-like Hudson Yards into the city’s urban fabric, things will turn around in the second act, which the program tells you is set in 1956. That’s when Moses’ plan to extend Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park met with fierce resistance from a new kind of opponent: the “minstrels and artistic women with handbags” of Greenwich Village. Cue Jane Jacobs.Alas, that journalist and urban theorist, who has so far popped up merely to say hello, fails to emerge, as she did in life, as Moses’ greatest foil. It’s a strange choice to make Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger) a minor character. Perhaps because of the inconvenience of history — the two never met — we are denied a direct confrontation, and with it a satisfactory climax.Instead, Hare goes uncharacteristically soggy, hauling Moses’ alcoholic wife into the conversation for pathos and having Finnuala, after decades in service to the builder’s vision, finally repudiate it. Moses loses on minor, mostly made-up points, not the knockout that Jacobs, Caro and time actually delivered.But even as the directors’ invention fades along with Hare’s — the community meetings, full of serious nodding, are especially silly — Fiennes never falters. His Moses, like his performance, becomes a car in search of a road, gunning the engine with nowhere to go.That’s no tragedy. The play is still a pleasure, and Moses is still in the doghouse. The man who, in Hare’s formulation, thinks cars are the “can opener” to the tin that is America would not recognize a Manhattan that after decades of discussion is soon to institute congestion pricing.If the efficiency of the brute is often superior to the fecklessness of democracy in getting things done, it is not always as lasting — which is reason enough to see “Straight Line Crazy.” In the midst of what feels right now like the losing fight of progressivism, it’s worth peeking at the devil, with fear and envy and a little schadenfreude.Straight Line CrazyThrough Dec. 18 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Dark Clouds Over London Stages

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      Productions of “John Gabriel Borkman” and “Blues for an Alabama Sky” conjure bleak atmospheres in two playhouses.LONDON — Loss and defeat hang heavy over two recent London theater openings: They are entirely different in content but share an emphasis on despair.In “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” the American play from Pearl Cleage now in a revelatory production at the National Theater, inhabitants of 1930s New York yearn for a better, kinder life elsewhere. (The show runs through Nov. 5.) The Bridge Theater revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “John Gabriel Borkman,” on view until Nov. 26, gives us a title character who speaks excitedly of the “new life” he seeks, though his attempts to forge a fresh start lead only to death.Of the two shows, “Blues” is especially powerful, in what must be the staging of a playwright’s dreams: a starry production at a prestigious playhouse from a director, the fast-rising Lynette Linton, fully attuned to the work’s soulful rhythms. Premiered in Atlanta in 1995 and revived there in 2015, the play focuses on three people sharing adjacent Harlem apartments in a building that, in Frankie Bradshaw’s expansive design, reaches the full height of the auditorium.The neediest of the trio is Angel (Samira Wiley), a nightclub singer who has lost her job and her boyfriend, and has taken seriously to the bottle. “What kind of dreams am I going to have?” she asks her roommate, Guy (Giles Terera), a gay costume designer whom Angel calls “Big Daddy.” (The play often recalls Tennessee Williams, and you can easily see Angel as a Black variant on Maggie the Cat and also Blanche DuBois.)Guy’s response is to look toward Paris, a city that is home to the expatriate Black entertainer Josephine Baker: If that legendary American-born performer can find her way in Europe, so can Guy. Early on, he raises a champagne glass from Manhattan to the new career that surely awaits him designing for the Folies Bergère. That events don’t necessarily turn out as people hope is a given. Fate deals Angel an entirely separate hand, and Guy’s reveries about La Bakaire, as he refers to Baker, are pulled up short by racism and homophobia closer to home.Adekoluejo’s character in “Blues for an Alabama Sky” is on the front line of a nascent American abortion rights movement.Marc BrennerAcross the hall from Angel and Guy lives the more practical Delia (the wonderful Ronke Adekoluejo), who offers to teach Angel to type: Secretarial skills will provide useful employment while Angel, reeling from her dismissal from her nighttime job, gets back on her feet.As sensible and focused as her neighbors are mercurial, Delia, in her indrawn way, is a pioneer. She is on the front line of a nascent American abortion rights movement and is working to open a clinic nearby. “I’m not trying to make a revolution,” she says. “I’m just trying to give women in Harlem the chance to plan their families.”Complicating matters are the men who come into these women’s lives. Delia enters into a relationship with Sam (a warmhearted Sule Rimi), a doctor who supports her quest for female empowerment but would really rather take her out for a night on the town. Angel, in turn, catches the eye of the churchgoing Leland (Osy Ikhile), an Alabama native who offers care and comfort but doesn’t have much time for the flamboyant effeminacy of Angel’s beloved Guy.Will Angel forsake her deep friendship for romance? Wiley, a Juilliard-trained actress and established TV name, expertly catches the shifting moods of a restless soul who is of two minds about the virtues of domesticity; she also lends a terrific singing voice to those snatches of the blues that punctuate the production. Terera is in full command as the changeable Guy, a dreamer who is flighty one minute, fully alert the next, and who knows all too well that his sexuality is viewed as an “abomination.”Guy sees the world around him as “tawdry and tainted” and can’t wait to sail first-class to freedom in France, although we never find out if his wishes are fulfilled. We’re left wishing a gentler future for the play’s central characters, whose openheartedness may, with luck, see them through the obstacles that lie in their way.It’s difficult to think quite so generously about John Gabriel Borkman, the disgraced former bank chief executive who gives Ibsen’s 1896 play its title. But Lucinda Coxon’s vigorous new version, presented without intermission in a fleet staging by Nicholas Hytner, invests the title character with a fantasy life that borders on madness. Back home after serving a five-year prison sentence for fraud, he spends his time rehearsing past grievances and rhapsodizing about rebuilding his life.Simon Russell Beale and Lia Williams in “John Gabriel Borkman” at the Bridge Theater.Manuel HarlanIt’s possible in the production’s spartan contemporary setting — Borkman’s wife, Gunhild (a blistering Clare Higgins), is watching daytime TV as the play begins — to see the title character as a Nordic variant of Bernie Madoff, or other moneymen who met a grievous end. Rich in rhetoric, Borkman compares himself to “a great wounded eagle watching the vultures scavenge my plans.”In fact, as the character is played by the great Simon Russell Beale (a Tony winner in June for “The Lehman Trilogy”), I was reminded of Shakespeare’s Lear, a onetime role for Beale. There’s a Shakespearean grandeur to the deluded Borkman as he staggers shaggy-haired into the snow, speechifying to the night sky like Lear cast out into the storm.And just as Lear recognizes too late the depth of his youngest daughter’s love, Borkman comes belatedly to an awareness that it was his sister-in-law Ella (a coolly furious Lia Williams) who loved him fully. The two face off in the upper floor of the Borkman house in a prolonged confrontation that is the highlight of the play. “You killed love in me. Can you even understand what I’m saying to you?” Ella says in an emotional outburst that Borkman dismisses as “hysterics.”The Borkmans’ son, Erhart (Sebastian de Souza), is a student who has taken up with a flamboyantly dressed older woman, Fanny (Ony Uhiara), much to the chagrin of his family. Fanny speaks of whisking the young man off to Rome with the same enthusiasm that Guy, in “Blues,” speaks tantalizingly of Paris: Anything, you get the feeling, would be preferable to the wintry drear that is their daily lot.“Be happy!” Ella says when she wishes Erhart farewell, “as happy as you can!” In Ibsen’s compellingly grim world, that’s probably not very happy at all.Blues for an Alabama Sky. Directed by Lynette Linton. National Theater, through Nov. 5.John Gabriel Borkman. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through Nov. 26. More

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      In Two London Plays, Being Black Means Looking From the Outside In

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      Black characters in “Mad House” and “The Southbury Child” endure microaggressions and aspersions. The familiar scenarios hit home for our critic.LONDON — It was my second time here, and I kept trying to remember if I had felt as conspicuous during my first visit. I could count the number of other Black women I spotted during my five days here: the hotel receptionist with the French braid, whom I spoke with when I stopped in to ask to use the bathroom, the long-haired woman at my own hotel’s front desk, the woman talking rapidly into her cellphone outside a Starbucks, the two women (clearly tourists) with matching backpacks near the British Museum, and the young woman with the short, relaxed hair, who was clutching a shopping bag as she walked briskly down the street. That list isn’t comprehensive. But it’s not far off.So when the eyes of a white person linger on me, as they did numerous times during this trip, my imagination tricks me into thinking every glance is a rebuke — whether because of my obvious Americanness; or because of my race, my tattoos or my pink hair. I don’t know how to sit with my discomfort in these moments, and I inevitably ask myself: How much of an outsider am I?Such thoughts often cross my mind when I go to the theater — whether in New York, London or elsewhere — and sit among the predominantly white audience, watching the mostly white actors onstage. In choosing which London shows to squeeze into my short work trip, I gravitated to two brand-new family dramas, “Mad House” and “The Southbury Child,” with big-name stars and stories about white families.As these weren’t the domains of Tina Turner or Sister Deloris Van Cartier or Noma Dumezweni’s Nora Helmer, I didn’t expect to see any Black women on either stage. But I was wrong; in both “Mad House” and “The Southbury Child,” a Black woman — the lone Black person in each show — is not only a part of the play, but she also serves as an outsider who witnesses and comments on the chaos, enduring microaggressions and outright aspersions before making her escape.In “Mad House,” written by Theresa Rebeck (“Bernhardt/Hamlet”) and directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, David Harbour (“Stranger Things”) plays a man named Michael who is watching over his dying father, Daniel (played by Bill Pullman) in rural Pennsylvania. But the father’s illness isn’t enough to stop the man’s unending stream of vitriol and abuse.It’s just the two of them now, since Michael’s beloved mother died, because of — according to his father — Michael’s yearlong stay at a mental hospital, which broke her heart. Rounding out the living members of this broken nuclear family are Michael’s brother, Nedward, a Manhattan stockbroker who pops up after a prolonged absence to take charge of Daniel’s assets, and his sister, Pam, a vicious manipulator who shows up halfway through the play to exacerbate the situation.Into all this mess enters Lillian, a Caribbean hospice nurse hired to help make Daniel comfortable during his final days. She maintains her professionalism despite Daniel’s crass come-ons, objectifying of her body, offensive comments about trans people (she’s so muscular she might be a man, he declares) and racist attitude (he repeatedly insists that he paid for her, like a slave). She’s spoken down to and bossed around by Ned and especially by Pam, who insists Lillian is unqualified. After Lillian shares a letter with Michael that she’s discovered among Daniel’s papers, the extent of his family’s lies come to light.Because I’ve seen so many plays in which the entrance of a Black character signals the beginning of a string of awful clichés and tropes, I am now leery when I see a lone Black person appear among a cast of white characters. When Akiya Henry, the actress playing Lillian, initially appeared in the first act, walking into Daniel and Michael’s kitchen, I felt this same foreboding.Originally from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, as the family members announce several times, Lillian is an outsider, and she’s a helper — quite literally, of course, since she’s a nurse. Armed with sharp retorts and a sassy, well-timed sucking of her teeth, Lillian punctuates the absurdity of the circumstances and brings the outside world into the confines of this unstable family home so the audience doesn’t get too claustrophobic. She is also the main inciting force that moves the story forward and cracks open the family dynamic. She’s not so transparent an archetype that her tale is left to the imagination, though: She gets a tragic, grief-filled back story, but only so the play can relate Michael’s emotional baggage through Lillian. She’s the mirror held up to Michael’s inner life.Racheal Ofori as the adopted daughter of a white family in Stephen Beresford’s “The Southbury Child” at the Bridge Theater.Manuel HarlanIn one of the other West End plays I saw, Stephen Beresford’s “The Southbury Child,” directed by Nicholas Hytner, the token Black woman is even more aware of her status as an interloper, and the script struggles to give the character dimension.Here, Alex Jennings (“The Crown”) plays a philandering vicar and alcoholic who becomes the town pariah after refusing to allow balloons at a young girl’s funeral. The Black actress Racheal Ofori plays his adult daughter Naomi, who materializes like the prodigal adopted daughter. Appearing in fitted tops and mini skirts after nightlong partying, Naomi is, well, the black sheep in more ways than the most obvious racial one. Unlike her religious father, she is what she calls a “militant atheist”; she lacks the same underlying bitterness of her mother and outshines her hardworking but overlooked elder sister.Naomi plays no role in the odd central drama about balloons but saunters onto the stage every once in a while, in her club clothes or pajamas, taking in the drama and mocking and jesting at her family and her status as the sole person of color. Like Lillian in “Mad House,” Naomi serves as the wise fool.Hers is one of several side stories in this intriguing yet overpacked play: Feeling alienated as a Black woman in a white family, she seeks out her birth mother in the hope that doing so will help her find her true self. In the meantime, her character is the snarky observer who then complains about being tokenized by her community. In one instance, she sneers as she describes the self-congratulatory white moms who proudly set up play dates between their daughters and the town’s Black girl.The similarities in the way the characters’ arcs end in each play are intriguing: For both Naomi and Lillian, the departures are abrupt. It’s as if neither stage has a place for these Black women beyond their roles as outside observers and truth-tellers. Once they’ve played their parts, they are seemingly given an out; finally spared from having to see the mess through to the end. But the exits of these Black women also seem like a validation that they don’t actually belong there. That they are exceptional.And, in a sense, they are — both Henry and Ofori make their characters compelling, so much so that sometimes they steal the spotlight. Not for long, though — never for long. Despite the strong Black female leads you can catch on some stages, too many productions still embrace a very narrow role for their Black women, who can nurture, drop snide remarks and reveal truths the other characters fail to see — so long as they know their place as visitors in the narrative. More

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      Ralph Fiennes to Star in Play About Robert Moses at the Shed

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      The production of “Straight Line Crazy,” by David Hare, will begin preview performances Oct. 18 and have a nine-week run.“Straight Line Crazy,” the play by David Hare about the contentious urban planner Robert Moses, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage, is coming to New York this fall.Following a buzzy spring run at the Bridge Theater in London, the play about Moses’s legacy of power and divisive creations of highways, parks and bridges will premiere at the Shed’s Griffin Theater for a nine-week run with preview performances starting Oct. 18 and an opening night slated for Oct. 26.“Straight Line Crazy” follows Moses’s rise to influence in the late 1920s as one of New York’s most powerful men, and then his devolution in the late 1950s, when grass-roots organizers and public transportation advocates decried his public works for displacing residents and disenfranchising communities who stood (or lived) in the way of his vision.“I think what this play evokes for us, and evokes here in New York, is who gets to shape our city spaces, who gets to shape our public spaces? What voices are engaged in these processes that affect so many?” Madani Younis, chief executive producer at the Shed, said in an interview.Moses will be played by the Tony Award-winning and Oscar-nominated actor Ralph Fiennes (also known for playing Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies), returning to New York theater for the first time since 2006, when he starred as the gaunt miracle worker (and possible charlatan) in Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer.”The theater critic Matt Wolf wrote in The New York Times that in the London run of “Straight Line Crazy,” Fiennes had “enough barrel-chested authority to sustain interest in what might otherwise seem arcane,” adding that he almost wished the play were longer.Younis, of the Shed, said, “This is the rise and fall story of a very divisive figure and it stirs up questions for our present about civic responsibility, about values and who shapes cities.”“This is what great art should always do,” he said.The production will run through Dec. 18. More

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      Trump and Moses: American Power Brokers on London Stages

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      In new works by English playwrights, the 45th U.S. president plots to become the 47th, and the New York urban planner Robert Moses loses his mind.LONDON — Donald J. Trump won’t surrender the spotlight easily. But few could have guessed that he would find renewed life on the London stage, where Mike Bartlett’s scattershot satire, “The 47th,” opened last week at the Old Vic and will run through May 28.Why the number 47? Because the play takes off from America’s 45th president angling anew for top office in 2024. His appetite for attention remains undimmed, as does a fondness for golf. Bertie Carvel, whose portrayal of Trump is the play’s banner achievement, is first seen chugging into view on a golf cart: an impressive entrance that starts the play on a high.Dismounting to launch into a lengthy soliloquy bemoaning “four years of lonely exile,” the character before us looks and sounds uncannily like the man himself. Embodying a public figure 30 years his senior, Carvel — clearly padded — captures Trump’s outsize swagger and bullishness, alongside his ever-busy hands and that strangely fey voice. The tilted head and near-constant squint are perfectly caught, too.But those expecting the sort of “Saturday Night Live”-style broadside familiar from Alec Baldwin are in for a surprise. Within minutes, the audience is aware of a character, not a caricature, and one with a lot on his mind. The opening monologue depicts a vengeful figure acutely aware of how he is regarded: “I know, I know, you hate me,” this Trump remarks at the start.Promising “plans and plots aplenty,” Trump comes across as a Richard III for our time in a blank verse play that tosses out Shakespearean allusions like confetti. Seething with resentment but mindful of his dynasty, Trump gathers his three eldest children to search, like Lear, for an heir to a political kingdom he won’t lose without a fight.The play, to its credit, views Trump in three dimensions, and grants him a way with words you certainly wouldn’t expect from those lips in real life. “It’s not like you to coyly act the mute,” he tells Ivanka (a sleekly coiffed Lydia Wilson), a Cordelia equivalent reluctant — as in “King Lear” — to voice the affection that her father should already know. And I laughed out loud at this Trump’s dismissal of Machiavelli’s “The Prince” as too long — as if he would have opinions about a 16th-century political treatise.Joss Carter as the Shaman and Lydia Wilson as Ivanka Trump in “The 47th.”Marc BrennerWhen Carvel is center stage, “The 47th” entirely grips. The problem comes with a rambling, shapeless narrative that soon loses its way. It’s as if Bartlett were so busy trying to cover all bases that he leaves too many untended. (He’s certainly busy, with three plays running simultaneously in London.)The family drama, for instance, soon gives way to a portrait of an increasingly turbulent America whose anger has only intensified since the storming of the Capitol last year. Bartlett concocts a new slogan — “America rules” — that is emblazoned on banners spilling from the upper reaches of the theater to put us in a rallying state of mind. Miriam Buether’s set is itself quite plain: a blank canvas for a bellicose electorate.The imagined 2024 presidential race finds a sleepwalking, ailing Biden (a raspy-voiced Simon Williams) ceding center stage to Kamala Harris (the American actress Tamara Tunie), whom Trump duly treats with contempt. “You’re an ugly person,” he tells her. “I’m sorry but you are.” In fact, Tunie is so immediately classy and capable a presence that you wish she were given more to do.As well as characters we all know already, Bartlett presents some new ones, including Rosie (Ami Tredrea), a Republican, who derides her brother Charlie (James Cooney), a Democratic journalist, as “desperate and corrupt.” Rupert Goold’s production elsewhere brings on a QAnon-style Shaman (a furious Joss Carter) as a reminder of the darker forces that threaten democracy. Thrashing about in fury, he signifies a gathering anarchy that is also summoned by Ash J. Woodward’s video projections depicting mob misrule.Reuniting the team behind another play that peered into the immediate future, Bartlett’s “King Charles III,” this latest exercise in prophesy sags whenever Trump leaves the stage. His energy — however malign — is the motor that keeps it going, and Carvel certainly has my vote.Trump requires little introduction. But that might not be the case with Robert Moses, the Yale- and Oxford-educated urban planner and designer who died in 1981, age 92. His story famously informed the vast 1974 biography “The Power Broker,” by Robert Caro, and has now spawned a more streamlined play, “Straight Line Crazy.” Written by the English playwright David Hare, this exposition-heavy drama brings Ralph Fiennes roaring back to the stage as Moses and is running at the Bridge Theater through June 18.Ralph Fiennes as Robert Moses in David Hare’s “Straight Line Crazy,” directed by Nicholas Hytner at the Bridge Theater.Manuel HarlanAnyone who has made use of the highways and bridges in the greater New York area has probably traveled a route made possible by Moses, a hugely renowned figure in his day. A visionary who overflowed with ideas about how to reshape public spaces and the ways people obtain access to them, Moses attracted criticism as well. Although he didn’t drive himself, he was hostile to public transportation, not to mention casually racist and heedless of the communities displaced by the realization of his grand schemes. (One highway included bridges with deliberately inadequate clearance, so buses couldn’t use them.)Hare chooses two decisive points in Moses’ life to tell a story of vaulting ambition that devolves into the madness hinted at in the play’s title: 1926, as Moses, not far from 40, proposes building two parkways to link New York City to Long Island, and, after the intermission, 1955. The idea then was to build a sunken expressway that would cut through Lower Manhattan’s Washington Square Park.Fiennes has enough barrel-chested authority to sustain interest in what might otherwise seem arcane. You almost wish that the play, and Nicholas Hytner’s adroit production, were longer and amplified the material more. Moses’ nemesis, the urban space activist Jane Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger, struggling with the accent), gets a crucial speech at the top of the play, but this self-described warrior isn’t shown putting up much of a fight.The other characters — various employees of Moses included — largely pale next to the momentum that builds as Moses starts to break down. “I’d rather be right, and alone, than soft, and with other people,” he admits toward the end, showing the Trump-like megalomania that brings a piecemeal play to hurtling, powerfully acted life.The 47th. Directed by Rupert Goold. Old Vic, through May 28.Straight Line Crazy. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through June 18. More

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      In ‘Bach & Sons,’ a Composer Stares Down Death

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      The new play at the Bridge Theater in London and two other productions on the city’s stages examine characters facing the end.LONDON — Few actors could stare down mortality better than Simon Russell Beale in “Bach & Sons,” a problematic new play at the Bridge Theater that benefits from a piercing central performance. Telling of the often testy relationship between the composer Johann Sebastian Bach and two of his 20 children, both sons who were musicians as well, the writer Nina Raine has come up with a research-heavy play that could be described as “Amadeus” lite. Like that play, Peter Shaffer’s celebrated take on Mozart, “Bach & Sons” features extended discussions of the nature of mediocrity, and also leans toward the scatological. Amid an expletive-heavy script, one character makes a passing reference to “a turd in the tureen.”Nicholas Hytner’s production boasts an evocative design from Vicki Mortimer, with cascading keyboards hanging above the stage; as in “Amadeus,” the dialogue often cuts off to make way for excerpts from the composer’s output. Beale with Racheal Ofori as Anna Magdalena Wilcke in another scene from “Bach & Sons.” Manuel HarlanOver time, Bach Sr. loses his sight and cedes ground to his son Carl (a vivid Samuel Blenkin), whom the father derides as musically “efficient” — a decided slight from a visionary who likes his art messier and more inspiring. Yet all Carl wants is simply to be loved. (Another son, Wilhelm, is played by Douggie McMeekin as an artistic prodigy doomed to failure.)The family chat consists largely of extolling the power of music, when you can’t help but feel that, really, they would have gotten on with making it. A climactic discourse on dissonance reminded me of Georges Seurat’s quest for harmony in the musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” to cite a more moving depiction of the creative process than “Bach & Sons,” with its boilerplate pronouncements about the value of art. Even so, Beale commands attention as the aging and worn Bach fades away. The composer’s canon, we’re told, can be characterized as a meditation on “the variety of grief,” and Beale communicates a man who has lived that grief himself: The actor cuts against the sentimentality of the writing to catch directly at the heart. “You can’t go on living and living and living,” says a character at the start of Nick Payne’s “Constellations” — and so it’s not altogether surprising when this 70-minute play turns toward confronting death in its second half.Payne’s one-act two-hander was first seen at the Royal Court in 2012 before transferring to the West End and then Broadway. The elegant staging from the director Michael Longhurst is now being revived at the Vaudeville Theater through Sept. 12, with the designer Tom Scutt’s buoyant cloudscape of balloons intact.Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker in Nick Payne‘s “Constellations,” directed by Michael Longhurst at the Vaudeville Theater.Marc BrennerThis time, there are four casts rotating across the run, and London theatergoers have so far had the opportunity to see two of them. (Among those still to come is a gay coupling that will feature the TV and stage name Russell Tovey.) The changing players reveal wildly contrasting takes on a tricky if accessible text in which events, large and small, are replayed with different outcomes, in accordance with Payne’s interest in the existence of a “multiverse.” That notion of alternate worlds coexisting alongside ours fuels a play that explores the infinite variability of life’s every moment, except the final one, which is always death.Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker, the oldest duo of the four, are also the more actorly of the two seen so far: You feel Wanamaker, especially, standing outside her character, Marianne, a Cambridge brainiac who holds forth on quantum mechanics and string theory. The parts don’t feel like a natural fit for either performer, though Capaldi, a onetime Doctor Who on TV, compensates with an abundance of charm. A much younger company brings together Sheila Atim (who won an Olivier for her role in “Girl From the North Country”) and Ivanno Jeremiah, who have a visceral connection onstage. Jeremiah is immediately likable as Roland, a beekeeper who meets Marianne at a barbecue and engages with her in a strange conversation about licking your elbow — to be honest, such exchanges work much better with the younger cast. Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah in “Constellations.”Marc BrennerAnd when Marianne confronts her possibly foreshortened life, the astonishing Atim communicates the gravitas of the situation even as Payne’s play makes clear that her fate can be rewritten with a happier ending in a parallel universe. These two are so good that, on a fourth viewing of the play, I felt as if I were seeing “Constellations” afresh: Atim and Jeremiah replay familiar material so it seems new — a virtue in a play that makes so much of repetition.If “Constellations” is late in raising the specter that its leading woman will die too soon, we know from the start that this is what will happen to the heroine of “Last Easter,” the 2004 play by Bryony Lavery at the intimate Orange Tree Theater through Aug. 7. (The show will be livestreamed on the theater’s website on July 22 and 23.) The director Tinuke Craig’s nimble production finds surprising levels of comedy in this story of June (the excellent Naana Agyei-Ampadu), a lighting designer with terminal cancer who goes on a pilgrimage with three friends to Lourdes, France, because — well, why not? Maybe a miracle will happen.June, it seems, is especially fond of the painter Caravaggio, and the first act veers away from anything maudlin toward lessons in art history one minute, a jaunty snatch or two from the song “Easter Parade” the next. The tone is unexpectedly breezy, and the camaraderie between June and her pals, also theater practitioners, is nicely done. These friendships keep June’s spirits buoyant, even as her body starts to let her down.From left, Naana Agyei-Ampadu, Jodie Jacobs and Peter Caulfield in Bryony Lavery’s “Last Easter,” directed by Tinuke Craig at the Orange Tree Theater.Helen MurrayYet after the intermission, as June’s condition worsens, the writing turns more self-conscious. June’s devoted buddy Gash (Peter Caulfield) twice calls out “cliché alert,” and several events are described as “undramatic,” an unusual choice of adjective for a dramatist. (The quartet also includes the character of a heavy-drinking actress who soon wears out her welcome, both as written and performed.)The imminence of death seems to defy this gifted writer, who goes for the sort of deathbed scene that has been seen onstage and in movies many times over. Whatever the reason for “Last Easter’s” prosaic closing scenes, they share with “Constellations” a sense that mortality comes best in good company.Bach & Sons. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through Sept. 11.Constellations. Directed by Michael Longhurst. Vaudeville Theater, through Sept. 12.Last Easter. Directed by Tinuke Craig. Orange Tree Theater, through Aug. 7. More