Subterms
Alice McDermott, 70, writer There are three kinds of novels I’ve never taken to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels about novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway. Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author I’m putting the final touches […] More
Conceived in part by Bill T. Jones, this multigenre work at the Perelman Performing Arts Center is interested in homegrown prejudice, but lacks dramatic focus.Entering the Perelman Performing Arts Center’s auditorium, you quickly notice detritus that looks as if it has been blown in from a bewildering protest: A few small American flags here, color copies of a Greetings From Hollywood postcard there, wrinkled fliers everywhere. Some of them are imprinted with the text of the Second Amendment, others a rallying cry: “We fight fascists.” Among the most eye-catching is an ad for N.R.A. memberships, with its promise of “$5,000 Accidental Death and Dismemberment insurance.”But what about intentional deaths? “Watch Night,” a new multigenre hybrid show, is interested in those, specifically the ones fueled by homegrown prejudice.Inspired, or maybe wrenched into existence, by the massacres at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, this Perelman center commission was conceived by the choreographer and director Bill T. Jones and the poet and librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, with a score by Tamar-kali.Joseph often draws directly from the news in his art: His collaboration with the composer Carlos Simon, “brea(d)th,” which the Minnesota Orchestra premiered in May, was informed by the life and death of George Floyd. He wrote the libretto for “We Shall Not Be Moved” (2017), an opera inspired by the police bombing in 1985 of a Philadelphia house occupied by Black activists, with an artistic team that included Jones and Lauren Whitehead, the “Watch Night” dramaturg. Unfortunately, those experiences have not helped focus this new production.The central figure in “Watch Night” is an ambitious Black journalist, Josh (Brandon Michael Nase). “American rage is my beat,” he says early on, “and man, business is boomin.’” Josh, who sounds almost grimly excited by the professional opportunities this anger could create, dreams of finding a story “ready-made for Hollywood.”Kevin Csolak as the Wolf, who orchestrates a shooting in a Black church.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHe maintains that stance of studied disaffection in the face of a pair of shootings: one in a Black church, orchestrated by a man nicknamed the Wolf (Kevin Csolak), the other a copycat rampage in a synagogue. Josh, whose mother is Jewish, finds himself involved in conversations about the issues roiling American society at large, and confronts people including his brother, Saul (Arri Lawton Simon).Much of the show consists of characters debating — sometimes amicably, often less so — contrasting philosophies of life and belief: Saul and Josh, who straddle two heritages; the church’s pastor (the excellent baritone Sola Fadiran) and the synagogue’s rabbi (Brian Golub). But the creative team struggles to musicalize and dramatize arguments about, say, forgiveness and repentance.Despite its weighty themes, “Watch Night” is strangely bereft of affecting tension. It would seem impossible that a plot point involving a congregant from the church, Shayla (Danyel Fulton), serving as a guard in the prison holding the Wolf could be unaffecting, but it is.What is most surprising about the production, besides its overreliance on perfunctory ensemble dance, is the awkwardness of Jones’s staging. The Perelman’s adaptable space has been configured so that the audience is split in two, with the halves facing each other. Whenever the music is in an operatic mode, the text is projected along the sides of the stage at an angle that makes it difficult to read while watching the actors. Select sentences and words are also projected to maximize their impact, but the two screens’ visual potential still feels underused. (Adam Rigg did the scenic design; Lucy Mackinnon handled the projections.)A scene from “Watch Night,” with choreography by its director, Bill T. Jones.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe performers often walk up and down the aisles amid the audience, an immersive move that makes them hard to see if they are in your section — a sizable portion of viewers will have a tough time catching a crucial scene toward the end. How can we expect focus from a piece that struggles to exert control over our gaze?Then again, it often feels as if this indecision is embedded in the very fabric of “Watch Night.” In his program note, Joseph says that the new show “doesn’t code ‘switch,’ it code ‘surfs’” among disciplines and styles. There again it comes up short, including musically.The bassist Corey Schutzer and his often jazzy lines drive the eight-piece orchestra led by Adam Rothenberg. But Tamar-kali — whose “Sea Island Symphony: Red Rice, Cotton and Indigo” premiered this summer at Lincoln Center — mostly sticks to a limited palette. (One of the few times your ears may prick up is when she nods to Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much.”) The score feels as if it were paddling in place, never catching, let alone boldly surfing a wave that might transport us.Watch NightThrough Nov. 18 at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, Manhattan; pacnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More
A one-man Laurence Fishburne show, a Bill T. Jones premiere and a new take on “Cats” will be among the offerings at the new Perelman Performing Arts Center.As the marble-clad, cube-like Perelman Performing Arts Center has taken shape at the World Trade Center site, questions have swirled about what will actually happen inside.Some answers came on Wednesday, when the center announced a first year of programming that will feature original work, including the premiere of an autobiographical play written by and starring the actor Laurence Fishburne called “Like They Do in the Movies,” as well as partnerships, including with the Tribeca Festival.Bill Rauch, the center’s artistic director, said the roster was deliberately eclectic.“We much want to give many different audiences many different reasons to come into our building,” he said in a telephone interview, adding that PAC NYC — as the center is being called — is invested in “creating connections.”The year will feature dance, opera, music and theater. Some highlights include:The world premiere of “Watch Night,” a new multidisciplinary piece by the dance artist Bill T. Jones, the poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph and the composer Tamar-kali, in November.The New York Premiere of “An American Soldier,” an opera by the composer Huang Ruo and the playwright David Henry Hwang. The opera, which will be staged in May, tells the true story of Danny Chen, a New Yorker who enlisted in the Army and was subjected to hazing and racist taunts in Afghanistan, and who killed himself at 19.A reimagining of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Cats” set in New York City’s ballroom scene. The musical, planned for next June and July, will be directed by Zhailon Levingston and Rauch; its choreographers will be Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles, and its dramaturg and gender consultant will be Josephine Kearns.Dance performances will include a celebration of street dance from around the world, including notable D.J.s. There will be a recital by the Easter Island pianist Mahani Teave, an evening with the Broadway performer Brian Stokes Mitchell and, in October, the 2023 Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz International Piano Competition.Performances at the center are to begin Sept. 19 with a five-evening, pay-what-you-wish concert series called “Refuge: A Concert Series to Welcome the World.”One night will feature New York artists who come from elsewhere, including Raven Chacon, Angélique Kidjo and Michael Mwenso. Another will focus on spiritually oriented performers, including the Klezmatics and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street. Other concerts will highlight educators (featuring Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra), family ensembles (such as the Villalobos Brothers) and childhood traditions (with Alphabet Rockers).The center is named for Ronald O. Perelman, the billionaire who made a $75 million pledge in 2016. But its largest donor wound up being Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor, who gave $130 million to get it built. The center, which used to call itself “the Perelman” for short, now calls itself PAC NYC.“There will be something for everyone at PAC NYC,” Bloomberg, the center’s chairman, said in a statement.The Tribeca Festival will do its own programming, but Rauch described its presence as “a collaboration.”“It’s a natural allyship for us, given our location — it made great sense,” he said. “We’re very excited to have them in the building.”PAC NYC has also partnered with Creative Artists Agency to present conversations with celebrity authors like Kerry Washington, Jada Pinkett Smith, Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush.“Part of what we want to do is not only reflect the dynamic energy of all five boroughs but to invite conversation in our spaces,” Rauch said, “so having events that are book readings and getting to hear from the authors just feels like it’s well aligned.”Beginning June 23, tickets, starting at $39, are available through February. PAC NYC memberships starting at $10 for the inaugural season are available as of Wednesday.There are three stages at the PAC seating 99, 250 and 450 people. David Rockwell and his Rockwell Group designed the interior of the lobby and restaurant, which will be run by the chef Marcus Samuelsson, along with the bar and outdoor terrace.Plans for programming in the building’s lobby space will be announced in the future and will generally be programmed with less lead time, Rauch said.“All the performances on that stage will be open and free,” Rauch said. “That commitment to access is really crucial.” More
The shuttered show is facing legal action from the actors, stage managers and designers who worked on the production.A union representing the director and choreographers who worked on the recently closed Broadway musical “Paradise Square” is asking a federal court to enforce an arbitration award that was agreed upon in May, according to a lawsuit filed late last month.The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society asked the Federal District Court in Manhattan to confirm and compel payment of nearly $150,000 that is owed to the union; the show’s director, Moisés Kaufman; the choreographer Bill T. Jones; and a few others who worked on the production.The suit, filed on July 22, said the production company still had not “satisfied its obligations under the award.”The lawsuit names as defendants the limited partnership that produced “Paradise Square,” a musical set amid the racial strife of Civil War-era New York City, as well as Bernard Abrams, a producer who is a member of the Broadway League.The show, however, has been most closely associated with the producer Garth H. Drabinsky, who had a successful run as a theatrical impresario in the 1990s until he was charged with misconduct and fraud in the United States and in his native Canada, where he eventually served prison time.Drabinsky had hoped that “Paradise Square,” which ran at the Ethel Barrymore Theater from mid-March until July 17, would be his comeback. The show originated a decade ago as a musical called “Hard Times,” written by Larry Kirwan of the band Black 47 and leaning on the music of Stephen Foster, who wrote “Oh! Susanna” among other American standards. Delayed two years because of the coronavirus pandemic, it made its way to Broadway after out-of-town productions in Berkeley, Calif., and Chicago. The show received 10 Tony nominations but took home only one award, for the actress Joaquina Kalukango, whose performance was a signature of this year’s Tony Awards ceremony. The show struggled at the box office throughout its run, and it did not recover the $15 million for which it was capitalized.Richard Roth, a lawyer for the “Paradise Square” partnership, said on Monday, “My understanding is that everyone is going to be fully paid.”Abrams did not respond to requests for comment Monday.Through Roth — who pointed out that Drabinsky is not a member of the limited partnership — Drabinsky released a lengthy statement arguing that Covid had proved an insurmountable roadblock to the show’s sales and finances. He added that bonds worth nearly $450,000 that were put up by the producers should cover most of what the actors were owed.“Equity holds this bond security,” Drabinsky said, and “the lawsuits that have been filed by unions are simply to evidence the collection of amounts for which the partnership has previously consented. In this regard, I have never been a signing officer of the production, nor do I have any authority with respect to the signing of any bank instruments. Any delay in benefit payments was simply a function of available cash flow.”The Hollywood Reporter first reported the existence of the legal filing Monday.The unions representing actors and designers who appeared in or worked on the musical have also received arbitration awards for hundreds of thousands of dollars. In July, the United Scenic Artists’ local also went to federal court to seek confirmation and enforcement of its award. In the spring, the Actors’ Equity fund trustees went to court to enforce an arbitration award.The unions have also placed Drabinsky on their “do not work” lists. The directors and choreographers union automatically placed the producers on a similar list until the outstanding arbitration award is paid, according to a union official.The president of the local union of the American Federation of Musicians, Tino Gagliardi, said through a spokesman that “Local 802 and the musicians’ benefit funds are taking every legal action needed to recover wages and benefits that are due to the musicians.”Al Vincent Jr., the executive director of Equity, added in an email statement that the dispute was not over, saying, “Our process of getting our members appropriately paid for ‘Paradise Square’ continues with a number of outstanding grievances moving into arbitration.”Local 829, the scenic artists’ union, put Drabinsky on its “boycott list” because of “continued inaction and lack of communication regarding the significant payments and benefits,” said Carl Mulert, the local’s national business agent. “It is unfortunate that the legacy of this Broadway production, which includes the indelible contributions of our colleagues and kin on and off the stage, has been marred by a story of exploitation of and injustice for the many artists that have brought ‘Paradise Square’ to life.” More
Musicals like “MJ” and “Paradise Square” take on dance of the past — with some missed opportunities. But the dance in “For Colored Girls” helps us to “remember what cannot be said.”A Black dancer and an Irish one face off in a dance contest in 19th-century New York. They take turns, each trying to top the other with steps and rhythms that are unique and unbeatable. It’s adversarial but also collegial, since the premise both assumes and encourages commonality, the kind of back-and-forth that breeds hybrids. This is a primal scene of American dance, and a version of it is on Broadway now.Whether in revivals, jukebox musicals or reimaginings of more distant history, a lot of the dance on Broadway these days is dance of the past. It’s theater, so the aim is less historical fidelity than persuasiveness. The choreography has to represent how people used to move in a way that makes sense to people today. But that constraint contains a possibility: In watching performers of the present embody the dance of the former times, we might feel, in our own bodies, how the present and the past are connected.That possibility was live for all five shows nominated for Tony Awards in choreography this year. The subject of each is, in some sense, historical. But the one that addresses dance history most directly is “Paradise Square.” It’s a musical about the Black and Irish denizens of the Five Points district in the 1860s. In the decades before, this neighborhood was a crucial site of interracial exchange and invention, a nursery not just for tap dance but for American theatrical dance in general — the kind that would long characterize Broadway musicals.“Paradise Square,” with choreography by Bill T. Jones and others, makes dance central and consequential.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMainly set in the kind of tavern where much cultural exchange occurred, the story seems to make dance central and consequential. No one knows exactly what the dancing in the Five Points looked or sounded like, so Bill T. Jones, leading a team of choreographers, is free to juxtapose some ideas of the Black and African side (Juba dance, shout) with some ideas of the Irish (the fast stepping familiar from “Riverdance”). But this choreography is subtle and inventive only compared to the absence of those qualities in the score and book. It doesn’t persuade.The Irish dance, credited to Jason Oremus and Garrett Coleman, is served somewhat better, partly because the Irish clichés in the music support it. Two of what the program calls “Irish Dancers” (Coleman and Colin Barkell), with little role in the plot, get to be briefly impressive in bursts of footwork. But even as the story builds to that Black vs. Irish dance-off, the dancing doesn’t make us feel how and why Black and Irish dance mixed, the similarities and differences that attracted the cultures to each other.It’s a missed opportunity. “Paradise Square” might have staged a shocking, thrilling return to sources, especially the Black ones. Instead, in a deeply flawed show, it offers the sort of choreography that inspires comments like “But wasn’t the dancing good?” Not good enough.Hugh Jackman in “The Music Man,” with choreography by Warren Carlyle.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA revival of “The Music Man,” a tried-and-true classic, is a much simpler choreographic assignment. Warren Carlyle does the job just fine. He has an adequate, nostalgic grasp of the period flavor, the “new steps” of the 1910s. The origins of these moves — in places like the Five Points before spreading to places like Iowa, the musical’s setting, and to the white stages of Broadway — isn’t part of the story. So Carlyle can focus on arranging a large cast of skilled dancers. If it’s all a little cautious and underwhelming, so is the rest of the production.Carlyle offers a professional, if uninspired, take on Broadway choreography as it used to be. “Six” is much more current, despite being about the wives of Henry VIII. The conceit of the show is to give them voice by casting them as contemporary pop divas, inspired by Beyoncé, Rihanna and the like. It’s a singing contest, and we expect to see certain kinds of dancing. These are dancing singers, and as each queen takes her turn, the others serve as the backup that every pop diva commands in concert.This is dance of the present, and Carrie-Anne Ingrouille, the choreographer, is up to speed in the genre and its variations — the ratios of sass and sex and empowerment moves, even the requisite absence of dance in Adele-style heartache. She keeps the action both tight and fluid, letting the performers save enough breath for all their belting. Like the clever, catchy pastiche songs, the choreography identifies its sources without quoting directly. It gives the pleasure of finding what we already know in a context where we might not expect it.Present tense: The cast of “Six” doing Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s moves.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA show about Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, and one of the great dancing singers, might seem to call for a similar approach. But “MJ,” as in so many other ways, is a different beast. It’s a jukebox musical, so the whole point is to hear the songs you know and love. But many of these songs already have choreography inextricably attached: that of Jackson’s hugely influential music videos of the 1980s. This isn’t just a period style that can be reproduced in general. Plenty of people who know the words and melodies also know all the steps.What is Christopher Wheeldon, the choreographer of “MJ,” to do? For the parts of the show covering Jackson’s early life, the Motown and Soul Train years, Wheeldon can work idiomatically, borrowing the styles to tell the story. When the timeline reaches the advent of MTV, though, he balks, having dancers tease some of the zombie boogie from “Thriller” at the back of the stage, facing away.It’s true that the second act begins with a close-to-verbatim reproduction of Jackson’s epochal “Motown 25” performance of “Billie Jean.” And Myles Frost, who plays the adult Jackson, is an astonishing mimic. (He dances that “Billie Jean” a little better than Jackson did.) But elsewhere, Wheeldon keeps replacing the original choreography with his own, and I kept feeling my heart sink, both as a lifelong Jackson fan and a dance critic.An effective replacement would have to be an improvement. And while Wheeldon is expert at crowd control and transitions (and an extremely accomplished choreographer of ballet), he has little feel for what Jackson in the show calls “smelly jelly” — funk, swing or whatever the dancers of the real Five Points called it. Despite help from Rich and Tone Talauega, who worked with Jackson, Wheeldon keeps swerving from that core, straightening away the rhythmic complexity of Jackson’s dancing along with its strangeness.Myles Frost as Michael Jackson in “MJ,” which was directed by Christopher Wheeldon, who was also the lead choreographer.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe most telling moment is the scene of the dancers who inspired Jackson. The representations of the Nicholas Brothers and Fred Astaire show no understanding of what Jackson saw in them (rhythm and attack that extend back to the Five Points), and thus the production can’t fully communicate how this great imitator forged a style that has been endlessly imitated. The only predecessor that “MJ” comprehends is Bob Fosse, whose own easy-to-imitate style defines the boundaries of Broadway dance inside which “MJ” keeps retreating.A good director might have pointed this out. But the director of “MJ” is Wheeldon (who, granted, had many other Jackson-related problems to deal with). There’s a strong Broadway precedent for combining those roles, one established by Jerome Robbins. But among this year’s Tony nominees, the best example of how that can benefit a show isn’t Wheeldon.It’s Camille A. Brown. “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” is what its dancing-poet author, Ntozake Shange, called a “choreopoem.” Although the show was a Broadway hit in 1976, the form didn’t become common, even as the text became canonical. Directing and choreographing this revival, Brown becomes one of exceedingly few Black women ever to take both roles for a Broadway show. (The last that comes to my mind is Katherine Dunham, in 1955.) That fact matters, but so does how she uses the combined power: She restores the work as an expression of a culture in which dance is central.The seven women of the cast recite poems, and they’re always dancing, in sadness and joy. They dance in girls’ games that become adult play, part of Shange’s original conception. But Brown adds American Sign Language, making the weaving of language and motion even more visible. Like the cast of “Six,” these women back each other up in dance. But in Brown’s vision, you can also sense their connections in the way that an exposing monologue by one, about abortion or abuse or self-discovery, reverberates in the silent bodies of the others.This isn’t what we know and expect of Broadway choreography. But unlike “Paradise Square,” it is a powerful return to a source. Dance, Shange once wrote, “is how we remember what cannot be said.” Brown reminds us. More
In a new musical starring Joaquina Kalukango, the love between Black and Irish New Yorkers in a Manhattan bar is threatened by Civil War riots.Everything in “Paradise Square” is true. Nothing in “Paradise Square” is true.Yes, history shows that in 1863, after Abraham Lincoln extended the Civil War draft to include all white men between the ages of 25 and 45 — Black men being excepted because they were not considered citizens — mobs of disgruntled Irish Americans rose up against Black people in New York, burning buildings and killing many in their path.And it’s true that in the impoverished, piano-shaped district of downtown Manhattan called Five Points, some Black and Irish neighbors who had been living together in relative harmony joined forces to resist the mobs.But in hammering these large-scale events into individual stories, and in manipulating them so performers have reason to sing at top volume and dance nearly nonstop, the uplifting, star-making, overwrought new musical, which opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, turns history on its head. Racism becomes an individual character flaw instead of a systemic evil; resistance, the solitary moral genius of a hero.Chloe Davis, foreground center left, and Sidney DuPont in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn this case, the hero is Nelly O’Brien, or really Joaquina Kalukango, who plays her with enough guts, stamina and vocal bravura to make you believe in a character glued together from the shavings of history. Nelly is the proprietor of a (fictional) Five Points bar and brothel called Paradise Square: “a little Eden” where, as one of the bald lyrics by Nathan Tysen and Masi Asare puts it in the title song, “We love who we want to love/with no apology.”Indeed, Nelly is married to the Irish American Willie O’Brien (Matt Bogart, suitably strapping). His sister (and Nelly’s best friend), Annie Lewis (Chilina Kennedy, absurdly fierce), is married to a Black minister, the Rev. Samuel Jacob Lewis (Nathaniel Stampley). When Annie’s nephew Owen (A.J. Shively) arrives from Ireland, around the same time that Samuel, a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad, brings Washington Henry (Sidney DuPont) to Paradise Square en route from Tennessee to Canada, the joint begins to seem like a rooming house for incendiary plot points.The cast of “Paradise Square” includes, foreground from left: Gabrielle McClinton, DuPont, Kalukango, Chilina Kennedy, Nathaniel Stampley and Davis.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMost of the characters — and there are 10 major roles — seem less like people than ideas with human masks. Willie’s war buddy Mike Quinlan (Kevin Dennis) represents the unemployed Irish workers easily swayed by demagogic politicians. A white pianist and composer who turns plantation tunes into uptown hits (Jacob Fishel) represents, somewhat anachronistically, the problem of cultural appropriation — though it’s a nice touch that some Stephen Foster songs, like “Camptown Races,” are reappropriated in Jason Howland’s music.Another Foster song — “Oh! Susanna” — gets an even more interesting overhaul, insidiously connecting the show’s all-purpose villain, Frederic Tiggens, as he fans the Irish rebellion, to racist Southern tropes. (Foster’s melody is reset with the lyric “You were true to a country that wasn’t true to you.”) Alas, none of Tiggens’s dialogue is as subtle; a vaguely defined “uptown party boss” set on shutting down the “depravity” of places like Paradise Square, he leaves the performer John Dossett little to do but metaphorically twirl his mustaches.If most of the score suffers from a mild case of overstatement — whipping up a series of generic rock ballads and throat-shredding anthems — the book and staging suffer from full-blown emphasitis. The book, credited to Christina Anderson, Craig Lucas and Larry Kirwan, is especially problematic. Based on Kirwan’s musical play “Hard Times,” and apparently rewritten heavily in nine years of development, it strips everything down to the naked basics as it tries to accommodate so many characters along with a checklist of sensitivities.Kevin Dennis, far left, and A.J. Shively, top right, rise up against the draft in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’m a sucker as much as the next critic for liberal pieties, and I appreciate the stance of a musical centered on Black lives that has its heroine say, near the end, “We pass on to you this story on our own terms.” But strong stances do not make up for weak characterization or suggest why such strength is necessary. That the position of the Irish and other white immigrants is not nearly as effectively dramatized as that of the Black characters is morally good but theatrically dull.In that combination, I feel the meaty hand of the producer Garth H. Drabinsky, who seems to have used his influence to shape “Paradise Square” into a likeness of his previous hits. Like “Ragtime” in 1998 and the 1994 revival of “Show Boat,” it frames social unrest as the product of a few representative individuals and tries to fill the inevitable gaps with big sound and stagecraft. It also borrows a famous plot device from “Show Boat” — which is effective here even if the debt goes otherwise unpaid.But unlike those musicals, which were built on the frames of strongly written novels by authors with singular voices, “Paradise Square” feels almost authorless despite its many contributors, and the direction of Moisés Kaufman, known for a strong hand and conceptual coherence, does little to erase the impression of anonymity. (The design elements are likewise merely efficient.) Contingent and anxious, the show seems more interested in saying the right things than in telling a coherent story.DuPont, left, and Shively in the show, which has choreography by Bill T. Jones.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWait — I take that back: It does tell a coherent story, in two ways. One is in the dancing, which employs a kaleidoscopic crash of contextual styles, including step dance for the Irish characters and Juba for the Black ones, to explore, far more subtly than the book, the place where appropriation and joyful sharing meet. (If unlikely as a plot point, the dance-off between Owen and Washington is a high point emotionally.) Again, many hands are at work here, with Bill T. Jones heading a musical staging team of at least five other choreographers, but the result scores its points effectively.The other source of coherence in “Paradise Square” is Kalukango, who somehow alchemizes the remarkable difficulties of the role into her characterization, making it incredible in the good way instead of the bad. Having seen her previously as Cleopatra in “Antony and Cleopatra,” Nettie in “The Color Purple” and Kaneisha in “Slave Play,” I am not exactly surprised, but they were more successful pieces of writing. Nothing really prepares you for the moment when an actor brings everything she has to the stage and essentially writes what needs to be said while you watch. It makes you believe in making history.Paradise SquareAt the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; paradisesquaremusical.com. Running time: 2 hours and 40 minutes. More
New productions of “The Merchant of Venice” and “Black No More” aim to reflect our current racial politics. The results are uneven.On a recent weekend, I eagerly set out to see two new productions that prominently center Blackness: the director Arin Arbus’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” and “Black No More,” a new musical with a starry creative team that was inspired by a satirical 1931 novel about race in America.“The Merchant of Venice,” a Theater for a New Audience production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, came first. Here, Arbus strong-arms contemporary politics into the work, which she places in a modern-day setting. The tension between Arbus’s direction and the text is most apparent in a scene in which Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, in arguing he should be repaid after a merchant defaults on a loan, cites laws about the enslaved:You have among you many a purchased slaveWhich, like your asses and your dogs and mules,You use in abject and in slavish partsBecause you bought them. Shall I say to you‘Let them be free, marry them to your heirs.Why sweat they under burdens?’In this race-conscious production, the speech takes on a different meaning. Since the actor playing Shylock is John Douglas Thompson, Shylock’s Jewish identity is subordinated to another one: a Black identity.While “Merchant” reflects our current racial politics and sensibilities through the director’s vision, “Black No More,” the New Group’s musical, relies on the major ways in which its script deviates from the original novel. Both shows function almost as reactionary works of criticism, “Merchant” critiquing Shakespeare’s text and “Black No More” critiquing the bleak satire of the novel. And though each production brings art from the past to the present, sometimes in brilliant ways, the antiquated plots, themes and characters aren’t always easy to recontextualize. The past pushes back.In this “Merchant,” Antonio, the title character, and Bassanio, the best friend to whom he offers his fortune and very nearly his life, are lovers. The women — the heiress Portia, her maid Nerissa and Shylock’s daughter, Jessica — are married in the end, as is typically the rule in Shakespeare’s comedies, but are unhappy and wise to their husbands’ misogyny and other faults. And then Shylock and his daughter (and Shylock’s Jewish friend Tubal) are all Black, which brings in the history of racial discrimination, slavery and prejudice.Arbus shifts the focus of the text so Shylock — performed by Thompson with devastating pathos — isn’t the antagonist who stands in the way of the central characters’ happiness, but the tragic heart of the play. Though there’s still the matter of the dual Black and Jewish identities; of course Black Jews exist, but the conflation addles the themes of the production and bends the original text in directions it can’t actually go.While the text specifically speaks of anti-Semitism, the pivot to include anti-Black racism overwhelms it. Arbus does try to balance the two identities, especially in the final scene, in which Shylock and his daughter (beautifully portrayed by Danaya Esperanza) recite a Hebrew prayer; the exceptional performances almost make up for the fact that the scene feels out of place, like a last-ditch effort to assert that this is still also a play about anti-Semitism.Blackness is already in the play, in the form of racist throwaway comments about “Moors” that Arbus’s direction highlights to the degree she can. So Portia’s matter-of-fact dismissal of any dark-skinned suitors as she speaks to Nerissa (played by the Black actress Shirine Babb) is challenged by Nerissa’s disapproving glare. And when Jessica’s suitor, Lorenzo, disdainfully jokes about Shylock’s servant impregnating a Moor, Jessica silently steps away in disgust.Racism against Black people was assumed in Shakespeare’s time, so in a contemporary race-aware production that stays loyal to the text, the characters’ reactions to it must be limited to pauses and glances.Perhaps a contemporized version of this problematic play must be edited beginning with the language, mixing in modern-day parlance, as James Ijames did in his “Fat Ham,” or revised by artful omission, as in Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth.” Because there’s a limit to Arbus’s approach even within these textual constraints; Nerissa and Jessica can silently respond to a comment about Moors, but no one speaks about or refers to Shylock’s Black identity, just his Jewish one. It’s odd to showcase Blackness without having a Shylock who can explicitly speak about his Blackness. It then feels as if his two identities are at war. To which should we direct our attention, because the text can’t hold both?These thoughts lingered as I headed to the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan to see “Black No More,” whose short run ended this weekend.Unlike “Merchant,” “Black No More” isn’t loyal to the original text, George S. Schuyler’s novel of the same name. But it does take the book’s basic plot and characters. (“Schuyler’s ‘Black No More’ is an essay,” Tariq Trotter, who wrote the show’s lyrics, said in a recent interview. “Ours is an essay on that essay. A critique of a critique.”)In Schuyler’s novel, a Harlem man named Max Disher undergoes a scientific procedure that turns Black people white. The process, invented by a Black scientist named Dr. Crookman, becomes so popular that it affects Black businesses and institutions, labor politics and more. The newly Caucasian Max changes his name and moves down South to find and marry the racist white woman named Helen who had previously rejected him. He eventually becomes the leader of a white supremacist group and profits off racist rhetoric.Brandon Victor Dixon as Max Fisher in the musical “Black No More.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Black No More” the musical, directed by Scott Elliott and with a book by John Ridley (“12 Years a Slave”), softens — and in some cases eliminates — Schuyler’s biting critique. The novelist didn’t just target racist whites but also Black identity, and Black leaders and institutions that claim to support the Black community while actually damaging and profiting off it.In the novel, characters mostly act in their self-interest, especially when it comes to money; in many ways the villain is capitalism. (Schuyler was a vocal socialist at the time he published the book.) In the musical, things are simplified: Dr. Crookman (played by Trotter) is a devil figure offering a Faustian bargain.There aren’t many sympathetic characters in the text, which the musical changes. Helen, now a liberal at heart, falls in love with Max when he’s still Black and reveals she’s only pretending to be racist around her conservative family.In the book, Max’s best friend, Bunny, follows his lead, also turning white and serving white supremacists for profit. In the musical, Bunny (now Buni) is a Black woman who acts as Max’s moral compass; she defends Blackness and calls out Max for betraying his race. Schuyler’s book disregards women, and the intersection of race and gender, altogether. In the musical, Buni gets a song about the burdens Black women bear for their families and communities, but her character is thinly written, just bolstering Max’s story.The influential Black artists who worked on the show appeared eager to transform the original work into a piece that celebrates Blackness. Trotter’s lyrics, Bill T. Jones’s choreography and the music by Trotter, Anthony Tidd, James Poyser and Daryl Waters were lovingly appreciative of Black movement and sound, with R&B, soul, hip-hop, spoken word, step and lindy hop forming an extravagant collage. And some numbers — like the oddly triumphant final song of Black solidarity — and a new Black activist character named Agamemnon, seem incorporated to counter the cynicism of Schuyler’s work.It’s understandable, especially given the way Black Lives Matter has shaped the cultural conversation about inequality faced by Black people; it would be outré to produce a true adaptation of a work like Schuyler’s, which has no redeemable Black characters and berates pillars of the Black community as vehemently as it does white institutions.And so Max, our Black-turned-white protagonist, is given a guilty conscience; he’s made sympathetic just long enough so he can be the martyr, shot down in the middle of a fourth-wall-breaking monologue that’s meant to be a bridge between the 1931 story and 2022 audiences.In art, context is key. But depending on the work and what new context the director or playwright wants to bring to it, some changes can feel too forced, too transparent. “Expectation from you all is … what? For me to give a moving soliloquy on race in America?” Max says in his final monologue. He’s no longer speaking from the world of the musical but from today. “Still we can’t put all our nonsense behind us,” he says. And the bullet that takes him down? It doesn’t come from Schuyler’s time; it’s shot from 2022. It just goes to show that when past and present collide, it may not be pretty. More
A new musical imagines the invention of a decolorizing process. Will it save Black Americans from hatred or destroy them?The 1931 Afrofuturist novel from which the new musical “Black No More” takes its name is hardly subtle, starting with its subtitle: “Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940.” George S. Schuyler’s satire is basically a thought experiment in which a procedure that decolorizes Black people solves America’s race problem but creates a new one when there’s no one left for haters to hate.The New Group’s musical version, which opened on Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center, makes the smart decision to borrow only the novel’s rudiments. It dumps most of the silly names (Ezekiel Whooper, Rufus Kretin), thin caricatures (of W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, among others) and weirdly jovial tone in favor of a more serious look at internalized racism and the conundrums of assimilation.The result, directed by Scott Elliott, is a gorgeous mess. Though it forefronts Schuyler’s central question — Is the goal of racial progress the ennoblement of Blackness or its disappearance into a “chromatic democracy”? — its tone is jumpy and its storytelling lumpy. The book by John Ridley, who wrote “12 Years a Slave,” makes only halfway repairs to the original, while introducing new problems that music and dance can’t solve.But oh, what music and dance! That the score is the work of many hands — lyrics by Tariq Trotter of the Roots; music by Trotter, Anthony Tidd, James Poyser and Daryl Waters — seems to have been an advantage here, helping to establish the show’s various moods and personalities.With nods to Kurt Weill, “Hamilton,” hip-hop, gospel, jazz, spoken word and Tin Pan Alley, among other aptly diverse inspirations and traditions, the songs reveal the characters’ yearnings and aversions, which often amount to the same thing. As well, under Waters’s musical supervision, they offer plenty of opportunities for phenomenal singing from the cast of 26, accompanied by a terrific band of seven.Lillias White, center, as a beauty impresario modeled on Madam C.J. Walker.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe choreography, by Bill T. Jones, is likewise thrilling, sometimes illustrating specific ideas (like the differences between Black and white social dancing) and other times expressing the overall conflict between racial pride and frustration. Because that conflict remains unresolved in the story, Jones often declines to resolve it in movement; numbers build from tension to frenzy without the overfamiliar Broadway-style climax.But the sung and danced elements of “Black No More” prove too exciting for its wobbly book to support. Making the inventor of the decolorizing process the narrator — his name, alas, is Dr. Junius Crookman — immediately sets the story on a strange footing; a neutral figure in the novel, he is here an amoral villain, and in Trotter’s uneven performance (excellent with the rapping, stiff with the acting) a bit too Dr. Evil. This immediately sidelines the actual central character, Max Disher, creating a blurry focus from which the show never fully recovers.Still, by the time Disher (Brandon Victor Dixon) becomes Crookman’s first patient, submitting to what looks like a dental procedure, “Black No More” has efficiently set up his reasons for choosing whiteness. Though he enjoys the “sporting life” he leads in Harlem, his safety there from the stings of overt racism comes at a cost. In “I Want It All,” his introductory song, he explains that he is never a whole man within his community’s confines, but merely “three-fifths” of one.For others, though, Harlem is “heaven’s gate” and “the Mecca of the Black race.” Disher’s best friend — a man named Bunny in the novel but here a woman named Buni — can’t understand why anyone would leave a place “where a person knows what they’re in for.” (Buni is played by Tamika Lawrence, a stunning singer.) For Agamemnon (Ephraim Sykes), a character new to the story, Disher is simply a traitor, selling out the dream of Black excellence.From left: Dixon, Tamika Lawrence and Tariq Trotter in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBoth are especially unimpressed by Disher’s baser motivations: to make more money in a more exciting career (he’s an insurance salesman) and to hook up with the white woman from Atlanta he falls in love with one night in a club.That woman, Helen Givens — played by Jennifer Damiano in a Veronica Lake wig — is the musical’s most radically revamped character; she is much more complicated than the unreconstructed racist of the novel. Unfortunately, in their attempt to give her greater agency, the musical’s authors make her motives and choices almost incoherent.As the story begins to pile on plot — it feels too hasty even at a long two hours and 30 minutes — the problem spreads to everyone else. Especially after Disher and Givens marry in Georgia, and a baby of likely mixed race impends, the musical pushes too hard toward tragedy, winding up well short at melodrama.Jennifer Damiano, center left, with Dixon and other ensemble members.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd yet, melodrama can be effective, especially when sung; the “melo” part of the word, after all, means music. Except for Sykes, who gets a great gospel number (“Lord Willing if the Creek Don’t Rise”), the women are more successful than the men at pushing past the confusions of the plot. (Dixon, usually a riveting performer, seems strangely recessive here.) And do not ask why Madame Sisseretta Blandish, the beauty impresario modeled on Madam C.J. Walker, sings not only in her salon but also in a nightclub; when it’s Lillias White doing the singing, who cares? She makes even the gibberish of scat syllables piercingly specific.Though Disher is the one who undergoes the most dramatic change — he eventually becomes the “Grand Exalted Giraw” of a Klanlike organization — I found myself more interested in Madame Sisseretta. In part that’s because she’s not allegorical; she’s a practical businesswoman who understands that her vanishing trade in hair straighteners and skin lighteners is different only by degree from Crookman’s. In the song “Right Amount of White” — “Just a little pinch of French/Just a slight touch of Dutch/Just a little bit of Brit” — she establishes the show’s themes and relevance with humor and theatrical specificity that’s mostly absent elsewhere.As “Black No More” continues its development process, it will surely need to find more breathing space like that between the whimsy of the novel and its current chaotic gloom. (Except for Qween Jean’s sexy costumes, the design is almost punitively cold.) I hope the authors can do so without losing what’s already beautiful about this promising work — keeping in mind that beauty, if not (according to “Black No More”) Blackness, is only skin deep.Black No MoreThrough Feb. 27 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; thenewgroup.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More
The new show “Black No More,” inspired by a 1931 satirical novel about race relations, has “the point of view of people who are very much products of now.”A Black man in New York City, during the Harlem Renaissance, is hoping for a life without bigotry. This is Harlem after all, a Black enclave, the epicenter of culture and creativity. Here, he’d have an easier time in getting along.Or so he thought. He soon learns that utopia is an illusion, that racism prevails no matter the location. In the North, he discovers, the racism is subtle: He’s somehow not the right fit for his job, though his supervisor, a white man, says he’s doing well. Others think he’s too uppity, so he is let go.Distraught, he undergoes a procedure to turn himself white and retreats to Atlanta. There he sees how prejudiced whites speak of Black people when they aren’t in the room: The “n” word is tossed around with the hard “-er.” He soon realizes that his new skin tone can’t save him, either. The life he wants means nothing if he loses his soul along the way.This is the plot of “Black No More,” a new musical presented by the New Group and inspired by George S. Schuyler’s 1931 novel of the same name. The show, an expansive, Afrofuturistic take on race relations in America now in previews at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan, is set against an equally vast arrangement of jazz, gospel, R&B, hip-hop and reggae meant to connect the past and present. By using older and newer styles of music, coupled with the protagonist’s struggles to rise above the same discrimination endured today, the show explores how little race relations have progressed.Jones, far right, working on the show’s choreography with cast members, including Lillias White, center.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesAnd it almost didn’t see the light of day.The screenwriter John Ridley, who wrote the show’s book, was inspired to adapt the story after reading Schuyler’s novel over a decade ago, before he’d written his Oscar-winning adaptation of “12 Years a Slave.” “I read it and was really taken with the wit and unbridled satire,” he said. “So much of the writing was timely and timeless and painful and painless.”He initially wrote it as a screenplay in 2013, but couldn’t get financing for a sci-fi-inspired film about Black existence. Someone suggested trying to have it produced as a play, but that also proved to be a tough road. Of the stage directors he reached out to, Ridley said that Scott Elliott, the artistic director of the New Group, was the only one who expressed interest. He read the novel and thought it would work best as a musical. “It had the possibility to be an amazing theatrical satire, but with humanity in it, with real people, not like ‘wink-wink satire,’” Elliott said.There was just one problem: Ridley didn’t like musicals. “I was like, ‘Well, yeah, but that’s OK,” Elliott said. “Let’s go on this journey together and see what happens.” Ridley’s view on musicals changed after meeting with Tariq Trotter, better known as Black Thought of the Roots, and seeing “Hamilton.” He said that show convinced him that musicals can be vehicles for sending a strong message.They enlisted Trotter, who wrote the lyrics and developed the music with Anthony Tidd, James Poyser and Daryl Waters, and the Tony-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones. Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Hamilton,” owns the commercial rights. And with all the star power (Broadway veterans, including Brandon Victor Dixon, Lillias White and Ephraim Sykes), it seems “Black No More” could very well be destined for Broadway.John Ridley with the show’s associate director Monet during a recent rehearsal. Marc. J. FranklinAmong other themes, the show holds up a mirror to those in the Black community who aspire to whiteness. The protagonist, Max Disher (played by Dixon), decides to lighten his skin after meeting a white woman, Helen Givens (Jennifer Damiano), in the Savoy Ballroom during a night out. That he’d be willing to sacrifice his identity after a chance encounter with the woman is a longstanding critique of some Black men: No matter how much they’re supported by Black women, they still see dating white women as the ultimate societal prize.The musical also delves into the internal baggage that comes with Blackness, the weight of external pressure applied by those who look like you but don’t know your circumstances. How do you stay true to yourself without disappointing your peers? And what does it mean to be real Black anyway?“For me, the lesson to be learned is that there is a cost,” Dixon said. “There is a cost to the choices we force each other to make to become happy, accepted members of society. It’s time for us to re-examine those costs. Is this the construct in which we can really rise and grow and evolve as a human population?”“Black No More” begins amicably, with a flurry of Black and white ensemble dancers gliding in unison across the stage, surrounding a barber’s chair used for the skin-altering experiment. Out walks Trotter, who plays Junius Crookman, the doctor performing the procedure. He paints Harlem as a deceptive place where dreams don’t always come true. “You’ll find all things … both high and low,” he says in his opening monologue. “Here where every Black baby must try to grow.”The music of “Black No More” largely fits this era, smoothly transitioning from swing jazz to big band to soul. Some of the verses have a rap lilt to them — Trotter, after all, is the lead vocalist of the Roots — but his writing here explores a broad range of musical textures, conjuring old Harlem while conveying music’s full spectrum. After Max becomes white, the music becomes softer and more delicate, sounding almost like bluegrass or folkish in a way. Near the end of the show, two white women sing over what sounds like an R&B track, a genre typically associated with Black women. “Black No More” is full of this sort of cross-pollination.“I’ve always been very big on allowing the universe to sort of write the songs, allowing the material to work itself out,” Trotter said. “These songs represent the different elements of Black music. What we arrived at is something that feels like an education in the evolution of Black music, which, at its core, would be the evolution of American music.”Tamika Lawrence and Brandon Victor Dixon during a dress rehearsal.Douglas Segars for The New York TimesThe Harlem Renaissance is widely seen as an artistic movement in which Black creators like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Duke Ellington made landmark work. Indeed, the Renaissance helped change how Black people were viewed culturally; from it came a new, fearless creative generation. Yet the Renaissance had its detractors. Some said the literature only catered to whites and the Black middle-class. Even one of Harlem’s most famous establishments — the Cotton Club — was only for whites. “Black No More” demystifies Harlem as a mecca by wrapping its arms around it, wiping off the glitter while celebrating its charm.“The show, in my mind, is a critique of a critique,” said Jones, who is also choreographing the new Broadway musical “Paradise Square.” “We’re trying to make a musical about a historical novel, but with the point of view of people who are very much products of now. For God’s sake, we are post-George Floyd.”“Black No More” was originally slated to premiere in October 2020. But then the pandemic shut down theaters, forcing shows to postpone or cancel their runs. And in May 2020, Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by the police officer Derek Chauvin. Protests ensued. Coupled with outcries over the deaths of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, these rebellions felt different. The precinct in which Chauvin worked was burned. In New York City, protesters and law enforcement regularly clashed, intensifying the already-strained relationship between certain residents and the police.Near the end of “Black No More,” over an aggressive rap beat, a white antagonist asserts that Black lives don’t matter, a perceived reference to the modern-day Black Lives Matter movement. Within the context of the musical, he’s upset that his sister got involved with a Black man. Yet the subtle nod acknowledges the cloud of George Floyd hanging over this musical.“We just happen to be in a space where certain audiences are ready to receive what we’re trying to say, as opposed to pre-2020,” said Tamika Lawrence, who plays Buni Brown, Max Disher’s best friend. “There are certain cultures in America — white cultures, specifically — that I think are now ready to have tough conversations and ready to see this kind of art.”Trotter concurred. “I think some people may take offense,” he said. “Some people may be appalled, some may take it as a challenge to widen their scope, to tear some of the bandages off these bullet wounds that we deal with as a society.”“Black No More” is presented with the hope that Black and white people can find common ground somewhere. That we can at least see one another’s differences and be respectful of them.Just don’t do something drastic like change your skin color. As the musical teaches us, the grass isn’t greener.“What it says is, ‘Look at yourself, take a look at where we are, take a look at where we’ve come from, how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go,” Trotter said of the show. “It speaks to a commonality that we all share as humans, as people, as inhabitants of this planet. I don’t think we’re ever going to exist in perfect harmony, but I think there’s a possibility for us to coexist in peace.” More
