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      Review: In ‘The Saviour,’ Past Trauma Is Very Much Present

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      The gravitational pull of the hurts of yesteryear is on vivid display in Deirdre Kinahan’s drama at Irish Repertory Theater.Back stories can be dangerous things. A character besotted with them — especially reductive trauma-filled ones — colludes in her own miniaturization.That’s the case with Máire Sullivan, the central character of Deirdre Kinahan’s “The Saviour,” a two-character drama that is receiving its world stage premiere at Irish Repertory Theater. Propped up in bed on her 67th birthday, a languorous Máire (the lauded Marie Mullen, who originated the role in an online production of the play in 2021) enjoys a postcoital smoke as she waits for her lover to bring her a cup of coffee.Ciarán Bagnall’s set, with its chalky walls and dusty windows, suggests a room that hasn’t been aired out in years. It’s a fitting milieu for a woman who cultivates mental cobwebs. Even the “volcanic” sex she’s just had sends her mind hurtling to the past; addressing her confidences to Jesus, Máire, a devout Catholic, describes how sex was previously “foisted on me when I didn’t want it or offered for a bit of peace.”From there, clues pointing to a traumatic episode pile up. After her mother died when she was a young girl, Máire was sent to a Magdalene laundry, a “reformatory for whores and hussies,” as she describes it. These laundries, operated by Catholic religious orders and propped up with state funding, incarcerated thousands of Irish girls and women as late as 1996. Máire recounts the monotony of the work, the suffocating silence imposed on the “forgotten girls,” and the unmourned death of a friend who dropped “dead in the steam.” Such reminiscences, though chilling, seem both overly contrived and overly familiar when spatchcocked together, departing little from abused-children narratives handed down by Dickens and Charlotte Brontë.Even working with a script that leans too much on exposition, the galvanic Mullen shows impressive range, channeling Molly Bloom in a fist-pumping soliloquy about having sex as a sexagenarian one minute, chiding herself for “acting ridiculous” the next. When her son Mel (a guarded Jamie O’Neill) shows up to deliver some disturbing news about her lover, she unleashes a biblical wave of fury on him.Alas, for both these characters, the past is like a heavy fog that never lifts. (Mel hints darkly that Máire was an emotionally absent mother, frequently subject to dark moods, and even hit one of her children.) The gift that Mel brings for Máire’s birthday — a doll wearing a yellow dress with pink roses — is a throwback to a toy that the nuns at the Stanhope Street laundry snatched from her as a young girl. But even a seemingly heartfelt gift meant to restore something of the life that was taken from Máire is ultimately used as a weapon against Mel.As the play ends, Máire and her son, whose homosexuality she can’t bring herself to reconcile with her faith, are at an impasse. Under Louise Lowe’s direction, mother and son stand on opposite sides of a wall facing the audience, underscoring their estrangement, as Mel offers a moving reflection of a rare moment in his childhood when “Jesus left us a bit of room.” For all of Máire’s religious fervor, the continual resurfacing of trauma is the bigger issue. It exerts the gravitational pull of a black hole that sucks everything in and gives nothing back.The SaviourThrough Aug. 13 at Irish Rep, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      ‘The Smuggler’ Review: A Barman’s Rambling Yarn

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      The one-man show means to draw the audience into a moral quandary pitting immigrants and the American poor against each other.“I am/An Amerikan,” says Tim Finnegan, the Irish bartender-cum-storyteller in Ronán Noone’s “The Smuggler: A Thriller in Verse.” “Worked hard to be/A citizan,” he continues in a Dublin accent, the words purposely misspelled in the script. He cheekily punches the last syllables, emphasizing what the play’s subtitle already warned us about: We’re seeing a thriller in rhyme.This is the tone that this unkempt play, produced by the Irish Repertory Theater, strikes throughout: pat, masquerading as playful.It’s 2023, in a bar in an affluent Massachusetts community. Tim’s serving up drinks while telling us his story. He needed money for his family: his ever-exasperated wife and their ill toddler. Desperate, Tim found an untapped market to exploit: the homes of undocumented immigrants, many of whom are involved with lucrative illegal enterprises like human smuggling. Defending himself with weak arguments about moral subjectivity and telling us he’s just a good guy in tough circumstances, perhaps even a kind of Robin Hood, Tim says he robbed the immigrants for the down payment on a new home.Some other things happen: a car crash, a toppled tree, a beating, a murder, though many serve as diversions that needlessly overextend the storytelling. (A bonkers basement battle with a herculean rat, however, is the most suspenseful, and comical, portion of the play, in part because it’s so random.)“The Smuggler,” a one-man show, means to draw the audience into a moral quandary about Tim’s actions and the unfair status of immigrants and the citizen have-nots of America. But the play never demonstrates enough of Tim’s character to make him an interesting figure. Nor does it indicate it has a nuanced political statement — just transparent generalizations meant to be wise aphorisms about the American dream. (“You do what you need to do/To become what you want/To be.”)Michael Mellamphy is affable enough as Tim, like a regular about town, but he’s neither as charming nor as menacing as his narration would have us believe. Under Conor Bagley’s awkward direction, Mellamphy especially struggles in the transitions between scenes and characters: the accents muddled, the gestures, postures and voices forced. His movements around the space — circling, pacing around the bar — are more choreographed than natural.The immersive set design, by Ann Beyersdorfer at the intimate W. Scott McLucas Studio Theater, provides color and detail. The walls of the theater are littered with quintessential Irish dive décor: ships, anchors, Irish flags. (“The Smuggler,” which won the 2019 best playwright award at New York’s 1st Irish Festival, was also staged in Washington, D.C., that year in an actual bar.)The play is loaded with “cheap” rhymes — as Noone himself describes them in his script — questionable metaphors, odd meter and endless nudge-and-winks to the form (“And maybe at this point/You’re getting bored/With the exposition”). Still, “The Smuggler” has more issues than how violently it strong-arms the word “hyperbole” into an exact rhyme with “today.” (And that’s very violently, by the way.) The play has several glaring blind spots: The few women mentioned are unlikable, often nags, and the various brown immigrants all seem to be criminals, primarily because the playwright has failed to engage with the deeper issues of gender or race.If “The Smuggler” aims to be about the price of the American dream and the moral cost of being a successful American citizen, it takes more than a few measures of doggerel from a black-market bartender to do so.The SmugglerThrough Feb. 26 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Belfast Girls’ Set Sail, but This Isn’t a Pleasure Cruise

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      A historical drama revisits a 19th-century scheme in which Irish girls of “good character” were encouraged to immigrate to Australia.In 1850, it took about three months to travel to Australia from Ireland. Jaki McCarrick’s heartfelt, doubtful “Belfast Girls,” at the Irish Repertory Theater, sets sail with the Inchinnan, bedding down in a windowless cabin with several characters as part of a real-life resettlement plan then known as the Earl Grey Scheme or the Famine Orphan Scheme.A plan to relieve the pressure on Irish workhouses while supplying Australia with workers (and not incidentally, wives), the scheme promised to deliver skilled young women of good moral character. In two years, over 4,000 teenage girls and young women were transported. Few of these women were skilled, some weren’t young, some weren’t orphans and some were prostitutes, which makes the claims to good character somewhat dubious, at least by 19th-century standards. But these young women were willing, with the promise of food and clothing — shifts, stockings, petticoats, two gowns — inducement enough for them to make the crossing and then to face the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic prejudice that greeted them on arrival.McCarrick’s play, directed with sympathy and occasional silliness by Nicola Murphy, introduces us to five of these women: the tough Judith, a Belfast girl by way of Jamaica (Caroline Strange); the sly Sarah Jane (Sarah Street), a country girl; “Fat Hannah” (Mary Mallen); “Stupid Ellen” (Labhaoise Magee); and the bookish Molly (Aida Leventaki). Each has a secret, or several secrets, some more terrible than others, and in the way of plays like this, all will be revealed before the ship docks.McCarrick does some adept character development and gives the actresses plenty to work with — too much, at times. And the performers are eager, with Mallen and Magee finding moments of nuance even in smaller roles. If Strange finds less texture, she’s a forceful performer and one to keep an eye on. Still the play’s first half, with its focus on circumstance and environment, tends more toward the novelistic than the theatrical. Only in the second act do the dynamics of character and dialogue drive the story, which briefly slides toward melodrama.Like the 1970s and ’80s dramas of David Hare, Caryl Churchill and Howard Brenton, as well as McCarrick’s Irish counterpart, Brian Friel, “Belfast Girls” resembles a state of the nation play, which uses a historical moment to think through larger themes, here how a country treats its most oppressed and least enfranchised citizens.While McCarrick has clearly researched the famine that preceded and encouraged the scheme, “Belfast Girls” only rarely emerges as a convincing portrait of the mid 19th-century. The characters, with their insistence on self-determination, feel too modern, and there are a few infelicities, like the idea that “The Communist Manifesto,” first translated into English toward the end of 1850, would circulate onboard. And some of the dialogue rings anachronistic, as when Judith scolds Sarah Jane for her lack of fellow feeling.“Empathy it’s called,” Judith says. “That thing where ya break out of your own clannish mentality ta do somethin’ for someone else!”But these are momentary annoyances. The greater problem is that Murphy’s production is overly literal, hewing to realism when the script seems to suggest something more abstract. This keeps the play small and overheated, even though the cabin itself — the functional set is by Chika Shimizu and lit with economy by Michael O’Connor — doesn’t feel especially claustrophobic. Until the final moments, when the women stand on deck and contemplate their future, “Belfast Girls” never quite manages to reach out from its world into ours, which is what makes a drama like this feel essential. For a shipbound play, it only rarely raises anchor.Belfast GirlsThrough June 26 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘The Streets of New York’ Is a Good Old Melodrama

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      At the Irish Repertory Theater, this musical confection is a luridly entertaining tale, set mostly in 1857, about a villainous banker and his wily clerk.The 19th-century playwright Dion Boucicault cut an uncommonly colorful figure — prodigal, voracious, cavalier. As an author of theatrical hits on both sides of the Atlantic, he made assorted fortunes and lost them reliably, while his romantic life was the stuff of drama, and occasionally farce.One of the earliest headlines about him in The New York Times, in 1863, was the simple “Dion Boucicault in Trouble.” A lawsuit said that the married playwright had locked himself in the London bedroom of an unwitting colonel during a midnight visit to an actress whose estranged husband was in hot pursuit.Scandal, riches, penury — the Dublin-born Boucicault knew each of those states from the inside, and was brilliant at weaving them into luridly entertaining melodramas. Two decades ago, Charlotte Moore, the artistic director of Irish Repertory Theater, adapted one of those plays, “The Poor of New York,” into a sweetly funny confection of a musical, “The Streets of New York,” now enjoying a charmer of a revival on the company’s main stage.Directed by Moore on an agile, stylized set by Hugh Landwehr, it’s a pleasurable escape, for a tuneful two-plus hours, into a quasi-cartoon version of old New York, where the virtuous struggle and the villainous thrive. You know in your bones, because this is melodrama, that a comeuppance for the bad guys is inevitable — just as soon as a slip of paper, long missing from its rightful owners, reappears.“The Streets of New York” begins in 1837, on the eve of a financial panic, as the scoundrel banker Gideon Bloodgood (David Hess) prepares to abscond from New York with a fortune and let his depositors suffer the consequences. Enter Patrick Fairweather (Daniel J. Maldonado), a sea captain eager to entrust his $100,000 to Bloodgood. The receipt for that transaction, stolen by Bloodgood’s wily clerk, Brendan Badger (Justin Keyes), is the slip of paper in question.The plot soon leaps forward 20 years to find the captain’s widow, Susan (Amy Bodnar), and grown children, Lucy (DeLaney Westfall) and Paul (Ryan Vona), in desperate straits in a tightfisted economy. But the merciless Bloodgood and his spoiled-from-the-cradle daughter, Alida (Amanda Jane Cooper, delightfully comic in the show’s best role), are flourishing.So is romantic longing. Will the handsome, down-on-his-luck scion Mark Livingston (Ben Jacoby) end up with Lucy, his true love, or will the scheming Alida ensnare him? Will Paul and the sharpshooter Dixie Puffy (a terrific Jordan Tyson) — who sings of wanting to “hold his hand, touch his skin, kiss his lips, rip his shirt off” — ever figure out that their ferocious crush is mutual?Moore injects plenty of playful effervescence into the show’s tension — particularly in Alida’s exuberant numbers, “Oh How I Love Being Rich” and “Bad Boys,” and her dripping-with-decadence dresses. (The choreography is by Barry McNabb; the costumes are by Linda Fisher.)For the most part, the show deftly balances dark and light even as it retains Boucicault’s social critique of the rich nonchalantly crushing the poor. But the ending teeters into treacle with would-be uplift aimed at the audience, which feels out of joint with the rest.That is a minor point, though, in a production that is otherwise wonderfully done. With a lovely aural depth provided by an orchestra of cello, woodwinds, harp, bass and violin (directed, at the performance I saw, by Ed Goldschneider), this is an old-fashioned, get-your-mind-off-things kind of show.Grab your vaccine card, put on a good mask and go.The Streets of New YorkThrough Jan. 30 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Review: Channeling Anger in ‘A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’

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      Annie Ryan’s stage adaptation of the Eimear McBride novel is given a lucid and intimate revival at the Irish Repertory Theater.The girl is 5, doing somersaults in a skirt, her little-kid underwear showing as she tumbles.“It’s disgusting,” her scandalized grandfather huffs. “How is she supposed to be a child of Mary?”The Virgin Mary, that is. If you grew up Roman Catholic, the phrase “child of Mary” might already be familiar. Likewise the notion of moral purity it connotes, ingrained early in the narrator of Eimear McBride’s formidable rush of a novel “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing,” whose solo-show stage adaptation by Annie Ryan is getting a gorgeously lucid, intimate production at the Irish Repertory Theater.Both the novel, published in the United States in 2014, and the stage version, first seen in New York in 2016, predate the rise of the #MeToo movement. But they reflect an anger that was building and that McBride was able to articulate in the speed-of-thought story of a girl, whose name we never learn: a child who draws strength from what she has been taught to believe is her badness, but is left unguarded against others’ actual evil.Directed by Nicola Murphy on Irish Rep’s tiny second stage, Jenn Murray rides the current of the monologue like a river, navigating its rapids and eddies, and stretches of calm, with a deftness that easily brings the audience along. On a spare set by Chen-Wei Liao, abetted by Michael O’Connor’s lighting and underscored by Nathanael Brown’s subtle music and sound design, Murray slips in and out of a crowd of characters with near-total legibility.The girl is in utero when the play begins, but sentient all the same, and already fond of her toddler big brother. The whole play is spoken to him, her most precious person, who, by the time she is born, is surgery- scarred, with branches of a tumor left in his brain.Their mother, abandoned by her husband and frightened for her son, clings to religion. She might love her daughter. Mainly, she seems repelled by her.As a small child reveling in naughtiness, the girl races into the rain to swear lavishly — “My bad words best collection,” she calls it — where no one else can hear. Part of the pain of the play is watching that exuberant defiance ground down by shaming rules that dictate permissible female behavior and blame those who, by their own choice or someone else’s, don’t comply.She is 13 when her aunt and uncle come to visit. The others leave the house, and the uncle, stomach-lurchingly, seizes his chance. He goes to the girl’s room, charms her, kisses her. She thinks he wants more, but he protests: “I’m not that man.” He is, though, and he does. She is a child and he ought to be her protector. When sex hurts her, he says, “You’ll be fine.”This isn’t true then or in the years that follow, as his predation works its warping damage and what feels to the girl like her own sexual empowerment morphs into egregious, long-term self-harm.In college, she won’t speak the secret of her uncle’s abuse even to her best friend.“What is there to say?” she asks. She’s learned her lessons well.A Girl Is a Half-Formed ThingThrough Dec. 12 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      How to Decorate Your Apartment Like an Artistic Director

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      When Charlotte Moore moved into John McMartin’s Upper West Side co-op, it was ‘not pretty.’ Nearly five decades later, that’s been fixed.In 1971, Charlotte Moore auditioned for “A Little Night Music” on the stage of the Winter Garden Theater, where the musical “Follies” was playing. (Readers will soon see that this is not an irrelevant detail.)Ms. Moore, who tends toward the dramatic, a trait that has likely served her well as a founder and the artistic director of the Irish Repertory Theater, insists to this day that her tryout, in front of the director Harold Prince, was “a disaster, a complete disaster — I was in tears and ruins, absolute ruins, embarrassed and humiliated.”But maybe not such a disaster. A year later, Mr. Prince phoned her with an invitation to join the fledgling New Phoenix Repertory Company. “When I decided to throw everything away and come here without knowing anyone at all, it was a ridiculous idea,” said Ms. Moore, whose adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s “The Streets of New York,” originally staged by her at the Irish Rep in 2001, begins performances there again, under her direction, on Dec. 4.“I knew nothing. But I just did it,” continued Ms. Moore, who grew up in a small farming community in Illinois, the granddaughter of Irish immigrants, and studied theater at Washington University in St. Louis.“I wanted very much for Jack to be comfortable,” said Charlotte Moore, who shared a one-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side with her partner, the actor John McMartin, for more than 40 years.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesShe rented an apartment on Riverside Drive and began to settle in. Not long after signing the lease, Ms. Moore met John McMartin, one of the stars of “Follies,” which had recently closed. Now he, too, was part of the New Phoenix troupe.“I was madly in love with him on Day 1, although I didn’t know anything about him and hadn’t seen him in anything. I didn’t see ‘Follies,’ to my horror,” said the now 80-ish Ms. Moore.That lapse was apparently forgiven. A bit more than a year later, she moved in with Mr. McMartin, a divorcé who owned a large one-bedroom co-op with a private entrance on West End Avenue.She is still there. Mr. McMartin, who died in 2016, bequeathed the apartment to his two children, Ms. Moore said, “but he said specifically in his will that I am to be here as long as I want, and I would never leave.”During her first days in residence, she took the measure of her new home and found it wanting. “Jack had been living the bachelor’s life there since his divorce, and it was not pretty,” she said. “When I say, ‘Not pretty,’ that’s a gross understatement.”There was, for starters, a bed in the living room, mounted on two-by-fours. “Oh, my God, I was stunned,” she said. “I was stunned.”Charlotte Moore, 80-ishOccupation: Actor, co-founder and artistic director of the Irish Repertory TheaterMaking room: “We never did any structural work on the apartment. All I did was kind of refurnish the place, and arranged the spaces the way they were supposed to be.”Forty-five years on, the apartment is structurally as Ms. Moore found it. But she has determinedly changed it from crash pad to adult home.When outfitting the living room, she took her cues from her mother. “She hated modernity and loved classic rooms,” Ms. Moore said. Thus, the pale-green-and-gray velvet sofa with leaf patterning, the accent chair in a floral print, the nicely faded Persian rug and the four high-backed dining chairs that she inherited from her grandmother. Ms. Moore cleverly turned the foyer into a cozy TV room — she disapproves of televisions in living rooms, never mind beds — with a pair of chocolate-brown leather club chairs.Dark wood bookcases in the living room and TV room hold Ms. Moore’s many books about Napoleon (“I don’t know why, but I’m a Napoleon freak”); her books on Ireland (“Obviously, I have lots of books about Ireland”); and a mass of tiny glass and plastic pigs.Ms. Moore converted the foyer of the apartment to a TV room.Katherine Marks for The New York Times“I collect pigs, and Jack McMartin bought me a pig every birthday,” she said. “Napoleon and pigs — I don’t know why they go together.”While Ms. Moore summarily chucked some offending pieces when she moved in — goodbye to the hulking cabinet in the middle of the kitchen — she didn’t completely clean house. A much-loved breakfast table that was surrounded by a pair of rattan chairs and a curved banquette is still there. So is a hutch that holds her substantial cache of delft pitchers, vases, platters, cups and plates. Hanging above is a framed trio of Beatrix Potter illustrations featuring a rabbit, a gift from Mr. McMartin.Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of Ms. Moore’s favorite pieces in the apartment — the two flowered cushions on the banquette, the large, square wood coffee table in the living room and the vintage baby grand — are from stage sets. The piano has a particularly winning provenance: It was part of the scenery in the 1983 touring production of “Private Lives” that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and featured John Cullum and Ms. Moore.“I’m not swearing to this, but I might have said, ‘You know, Richard, the only thing I hate to leave in this show is the damn piano. I love it so much. I think it’s so beautiful,’” said Ms. Moore, who composed the songs for “The Streets of New York” on that very instrument. “Well, one day, there it was, at the door of my apartment.”“All I did was kind of refurnish the place,” Ms. Moore said.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesMr. McMartin is very much a presence. He smiles from photographs. His books, many inscribed, still line the shelves. The gloves that were part of his costume in a Broadway production of “Chemin de Fer” hang in a frame near the living room. On a recent morning, Ms. Moore reached behind a bookcase and pulled out the cane that Mr. McMartin wielded during the shattering “Live, Laugh, Love” production number at the end of “Follies.”“Jack Cassidy came in here one time,” Ms. Moore said, referring to the Tony-winning actor. “And he said, ‘John, it’s time you did something with this place, because it’s a special place.’ I felt that way about it, too.”“I wanted very much for him to be comfortable and live in a pretty place,” she continued. “No, that’s not it. I wanted to live in a pretty place. I grew up in a nice house — a lovely house, actually — and I wanted this apartment to be wonderful. For both of us.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      Review: The Melancholy of Misspent Lives in ‘Autumn Royal’

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      The Irish Repertory Theater returns to live performances with a domestic tragicomedy by Kevin Barry.Above the narrow little room where May and Timothy sit plotting, their father lies abed, his wits gone haywire. Sometimes, from below, they hear him speak the first and only line of the poem he’s been composing for months: “A duck walk across a puddle.”In just those six words, the bird exhibits more agency than May and Tim have shown for years, maybe ever. Well into adulthood, they remain trapped in the same house in Cork, Ireland, where they’ve spent their whole lives — caring for their father and passing cruelly amusing judgment on the neighbors.“The Coynes all had the big, beefy faces,” May says, gazing out the window as one of them walks by. Then comes the withering, tossed-off insult: “Whatever they did wrong in a past life.”Even so, an ingrained dread of what the neighbors might think has kept her and Tim in line, ministering to the man upstairs — May taking on the dirty work, like sponge baths, that Tim claims to be too delicate for.But in Kevin Barry’s domestic tragicomedy, “Autumn Royal,” the first live performance at the Irish Repertory Theater since the start of the pandemic, the time for rebellion has come. Because as unwell as their father might seem, his lab results point to years, maybe decades, more of life.“What are we goin’ to do, May?” asks Tim, who nurses a detailed fantasy of escaping to Australia, where he will surf daily, find a little blond wife and have two children with her named Jason and Mary-Lou.If you’re familiar with Barry’s fiction, like his grim and gorgeous novel “Night Boat to Tangier,” you know that the moral brokenness of his often wildly hilarious characters can take extravagantly violent turns. May (a very funny Maeve Higgins) and Tim (John Keating, ditto) certainly are tempted, in the interest of securing their own freedom.Once they summon their courage, though, the gravest infraction they can commit starts with leafing through the yellow pages, in search of a nursing home. The place they choose is the Autumn Royal — where, Tim says, his guilt slipping out, “There’s only two to a cell.” But ridding themselves of their father isn’t as easy as shipping him off.Ciaran O’Reilly’s production, on Charlie Corcoran’s suitably claustrophobic set, is wonderfully agile with Barry’s comedy but never finds its footing with the intimations of trauma threaded through the script. A revelation near the end doesn’t land with the emotional heft it needs, and neither does the play.In the more surreal moments of painful memory, busy projections (by Dan Scully) crowd the walls, demanding attention, when a less embellished design approach — a change of lighting, say — would have kept the focus on Barry’s language, which is already heavy with atmosphere. Similarly, the sound design (by Ryan Rumery and Hidenori Nakajo) muddies when it means to clarify.This production succeeds mainly on the level of a caper, albeit one spiked with melancholy about squandered lives. Reminiscing about how beautiful their long-split parents once were, Tim laments to his sister, “They could have had magnificent children.”“We’re never going to get past ourselves here, Tim,” May says.Weighed down by duty, stalled by inertia, maybe she’s right.Autumn RoyalThrough Nov. 21 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Theater to Stream: ‘Wicked in Concert,’ Christopher Lloyd as Lear

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      An all-star lineup sings Stephen Schwartz’s indelible score, and Doc from “Back to the Future” is intriguing casting for a Berkshires production.Was there a “Hunger Games”-style backstage contest for who got to sing “Popular” and “Defying Gravity”?That was my first question when I saw the lineup for the PBS special “Wicked in Concert,” hosted by the original stars Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, on Aug. 29. My personal pick for the first song is Alex Newell, who turns up alongside Mario Cantone, Gavin Creel, Ariana DeBose, Cynthia Erivo, Jennifer Nettles, Amber Riley, Ali Stroker and more. This tribute to Stephen Schwartz’s songs should keep fans happy until the show returns to Broadway (Sept. 14) and hits the big screen (eventually, one day, possibly-maybe, who knows).Quick: What performance so stunned Sheryl Lee Ralph that she described her reaction like so? “You ever see the cartoons where the lion roars, and the people are pinned to the wall? It was like that.” The answer — Jennifer Holliday’s in “Dreamgirls” — can also be found at PBS, where “Broadway: Beyond the Golden Age” is now streaming. The documentary covers musicals from 1959 to the early ’80s and includes interviews with Carol Burnett, Liza Minnelli and Dick Van Dyke. pbs.org.Lloyd as LearAdmit it: You are curious to know whether Christopher Lloyd, still best known for his comedic roles in “Taxi” and the “Back to the Future” trilogy, could pull off “King Lear.” Maybe not curious enough to travel all the way to Lenox, Mass., where the actor recently took on the daunting title role outdoors, but streaming the show from home is an easier way to find out what went down in the Berkshires. Nicole Ricciardi’s production for Shakespeare & Company earned wildly divergent reviews, which is often a sign that at least something is going on. Through Aug. 28; theatermania.stream.If you are really feeling adventurous, head to the Hollywood Fringe, which takes a “free-for-all approach,” unfettered by that tyrannical institution known as a “curative body.” Will it be exciting, terrifying, or both? Just select “streaming” as a filter, take a deep breath and dive in. Through Aug. 29; hollywoodfringe.org.‘George M. Cohan Tonight!’The title character of this biographical show is not a household name, unless the house hosts a coven of musical-theater experts. Yet if you have ever been on Times Square, chances are good you have at least glimpsed a representation of Cohan: It’s his statue next to the TKTS booth. Cohan was such an influential songwriter, director and producer in the Broadway of the early 20th century that he has earned two biopics, “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “George M!” — portrayed by James Cagney in 1942 and Joel Grey in 1970, respectively, which is a quite a range of actors — and this bio-show, which premiered at Irish Repertory Theater in 2006. The company is now bringing back an abridged digital version of Chip Deffaa’s musical, starring Jon Peterson. Through Aug. 29; irishrep.org.‘Bagdad Cafe’The indefatigable British director Emma Rice is a master at translating films to the stage — which is a lot harder than you might think. Only a few of those productions have crossed the Atlantic, most notably the lovely “Brief Encounter,” which made it to Broadway in 2010. Now comes her adaptation of “Bagdad Cafe,” Percy and Eleonore Adlon’s 1987 art-house staple, in which two women form a bond in a Mojave roadside joint. It was an unlikely project (a West German production set in America and starring the great CCH Pounder long before she found television fame), boosted by an unlikely hit song, “Calling You.” The show is in person at the Old Vic and streaming for a limited time as part of the company’s famed In Camera series. Aug. 25-28; oldvictheatre.com.‘The Blackest Battle’Emmanuel Kyei-Baffour, left, and Gary Perkins in “The Blackest Battle.”Theater AllianceIn this new hip-hop musical by Psalmayene 24 and nick tha 1da, Bliss (Gary Perkins) and Dream (Imani Branch) fall in love in a dystopian America. Unfortunately, they belong to enemy factions that engage in fiery rap battles, which goes to show that futuristic America is just like Shakespearean Verona of “Romeo and Juliet.” Raymond O. Caldwell’s production is presented by Theater Alliance, in Washington, D.C. Through Aug. 29; theateralliance.com.‘Ni Mi Madre’The intimate Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, in New York City, has decided to expand it footprint by making the shows in its new season available in person and online. First out of the gate is this solo, written and performed by Arturo Luís Soria (who was in the Broadway cast of “The Inheritance”). The story, inspired by Soria’s own mother, looks at the relationship between a parent and her queer son. Through Sept. 19; rattlestick.org.Two Leading Men Open UpBack in 1996, Adam Pascal brought some rock hunkiness to musical theater when he played a guitar-strumming bohemian who made shapeless sweaters look sexy in “Rent.” Pascal went on to build a solid career through shows as diverse as “Aida” and “Something Rotten!” Now he looks back in wonder in his concert “Adam Pascal … So Far.” Through Aug. 24; stellartickets.com.Another Broadway star exploring solo waters is Norbert Leo Butz, who a few months ago found himself in Vancouver, shooting the science-fiction series “Debris.” (He plays a C.I.A. operative, and if you think that’s a stretch for this amiable star, check out his expert turn as a loser marina owner in “Bloodline.”) The gig left Butz time to work out new arrangements for some of his favorite pop tunes, which he’s now performing in his acoustic concert “Torch Songs for a Pandemic” at Feinstein’s/54 Below. Happily, one of the performances is livestreaming. Aug. 21; 54below.com.‘Lava’The British press showered Ronke Adekoluejo with praise for her performance in Benedict Lombe’s “Lava,” a continent-spanning monologue that explores issues pertaining to identity via the travails of a British-Congolese woman. The show recently had an in-person run at the Bush Theater and worldwide audiences can now check out a streaming version. Aug. 16-21; bushtheatre.co.uk. More