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    The ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Creative Team on Assembling Their Quirky Puzzle

    The toilets wouldn’t stop flushing. The playwright David Lindsay-Abaire was trying to talk about his collaboration with the composer Jeanine Tesori and the director Jessica Stone on their musical, “Kimberly Akimbo,” and in the background, the janitorial staff members of the Booth Theater were cleaning the bathrooms.“I said to Jeanine,” he said, trying to keep a straight face as another toilet flushed, “I wish we could write a musical the way that I write a play, where there’s not a team of other people involved.”Another flush.Tesori stood up, muttering, “I have to close that door myself.” Which prompted Stone to bend over in laughter.“Thank you,” Stone said, as Tesori returned to her seat in the basement lounge of the Broadway theater.“It is on theme,” Lindsay-Abaire said. “Nothing better.”“Isn’t that enough?” Tesori responded. “Doesn’t that say everything?”For the creative team behind “Kimberly Akimbo,” the chaotic energy of this morning fit the musical itself, whose concept seems — on the page, at least — too off-kilter for a shiny Broadway marquee.Victoria Clark, center, as Kimberly with Alli Mauzey, foreground left, and Steven Boyer, foreground right, who play her parents.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA musical dramedy set in New Jersey, “Kimberly Akimbo” tells the story of a teenager named Kimberly (played by Victoria Clark) who has a disease akin to progeria, which causes her to age at a hyperspeed. At 16, she looks 72.It’s far from a tragedy, though, thanks in part to the quirky characters: Kimberly’s pregnant mother is a hypochondriac; her best friend, Seth, loves anagrams and plays the tuba; and her aunt is trying to persuade her to commit some white-collar crimes. Through it all, even though people with her condition have an average life expectancy of 16 years, Kimberly learns to be young and unafraid after years of taking on adult responsibilities.“I love stories that weave together pain, and hilarity and absurdity. And that, to me, is David and Jeanine, and their work and their sensibility,” said Stone, 52, who has been attached to the musical since 2019. “It’s exhilarating.”When the show premiered Off Broadway last winter at Atlantic Theater Company, Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called it a “funny and moving new musical.” Led by the producer David Stone (no relation to the director), the show sold out its run, and a Broadway transfer was quickly announced. (As the producer of musicals like “Next to Normal” and “If/Then,” Stone is no stranger to an out-of-the-box concept.) Now “Kimberly Akimbo” is in previews, and scheduled to open on Nov. 10.Tesori, 60, and Lindsay-Abaire, 52, first worked together on “Shrek the Musical” in 2008, and for the past seven years, transforming Lindsay-Abaire’s 2001 play “Kimberly Akimbo” into a musical was their passion project. The focus and intimacy of that partnership, he said, made the musical “the easiest thing I’ve ever written.”He compares writing a musical to working on a puzzle. (He loves puzzles and word games; the show’s title is an anagram.) “It is like dumping a bunch of puzzle pieces onto the table,” he said. “It’s hard when you say, ‘Hey, 20 people, come on in and let’s do this puzzle together.’ But if it’s just the two of you — ‘I have this corner’; ‘I’m working on the edges; let’s get to the middle’ — then it comes into focus. And seldom does that happen with a musical.”Stone, Tesori and Lindsay-Abaire gathered to discuss their process on the first day of previews. These are edited excerpts from the discussion.Clark and Justin Cooley, who are reprising their roles on Broadway. “The two of them give each other really beautiful gifts,” the show’s director said of the actors.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDavid, what were the instincts that led you to write “Kimberly Akimbo” 20 years ago?DAVID LINDSAY-ABAIRE I was writing what I hoped would be a great part for an actress that I loved and adored: Marylouise Burke [who starred in the play Off Broadway in 2001]. I wrote a part for her because she and now Vicki [Victoria Clark] have such an amazing young spirit about them, even though they’re actresses of a certain age. And so I wanted to write an amazing part for a great actor. But I also wanted to explore mortality and what it means to truly live in the moment. What I probably didn’t know at the time was that I was also writing about my family in many ways, and things that I was afraid of and angry about.How do you mean?LINDSAY-ABAIRE Uh oh …JEANINE TESORI I don’t know if you can open that door.LINDSAY-ABAIRE Look, I love my family very much. And they messed me up just enough for this play to be what it is. [Tesori pats Lindsay-Abaire’s arm, remarking, “Wow.”] I don’t feel messed up by them. But I feel messed up just enough to be the writer and be the person that I am.TESORI That’s what makes you a storyteller. Healthy enough to write, damaged enough to want to write.The play didn’t have monologues for Kimberly, but it did have monologues for her parents. Was creating the musical a way to create more interiority for her?LINDSAY-ABAIRE During “Shrek,” I said to Jeanine, “I would love to write a musical the way that I write a play, where it would just be us figuring it out for as long as we needed to figure it out.” And then Jeanine said, “Well, how about one of your plays? I think ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ could be a musical. It has a really deep, complicated inner life. Those characters want to sing to me, their emotions are deep. And I like how funny it is.”By making it a musical, we had a way into the characters that the play did not have. We could crack open Kimberly’s heart, and let her express all of those feelings and emotions and fears and desires and longings, that are only subtext in the play.TESORI I feel it in my body when something sings, I can’t put it into words. And these characters, they reminded me of people I grew up with, they reminded me of people in my family — and not always people who are center stage, especially in a musical.Jessica, how did you direct Victoria Clark, who is 63, and Justin Cooley, who plays her boyfriend, Seth, who’s now 19? They come across as being the same age.STONE: It actually is thrilling because you have two people on opposite ends of the spectrum. The skill that Vicki brings to the process of exploration can’t be created in Justin. I watch him being elevated by the discipline and skill, and her surgical approach to figuring out Kim and mapping out Kim’s world and behavior. He starts to sort of mimic that work ethic and he starts to explore and basically copy that approach.His complete honesty, tabula rasa, complete truthful, youthful, wide-eyed innocence and sweetness — it’s really hard to create that once you’ve lived, you know, 35 more years. So the fact that she’s in his orbit, this beautiful, innocent, youthful presence also washes over her. So the two of them give each other really beautiful gifts.Speaking of teenagers, there’s a duality to the show. It’s about youthfulness, but it’s also about mortality. As experienced artists, how do you keep that youthful tone intact?TESORI It’s part of being of a certain age, and what we have all experienced at this age. I’m older than these two. We share the same sensibility of humor. But there’s also this sense, like, we’ve been through some [expletive]. And our friends have been through some [expletive], and we’ve lost people. And if you’re lucky, you’re able to bring both of those things to an audience so they can recognize it. Because I think sometimes because musicals have artifice, they can seem artificial. And they’re not. They are the greatest art form.STONE We’re all parents. And we all have been close observers to adolescents. That adds a little bit to the glaze of authenticity, and a little understanding of the behavior, needs and pitfalls.LINDSAY-ABAIRE The first time in, I was really accessing my teenage years and stuff about my parents and my family, but really homing in on the Seth character who is very close to me in very many ways. I’m now the father of teenage boys, and I just had access to the parents in a way that I didn’t have when I wrote it. I understand much more acutely the fear of losing a child. The whole dynamics between parents and teenagers that I was sort of making up 20 years ago, now I know it deeply and personally. And I also got the chance to put all of my high school friends up onstage. Those four kids in the show choir were not in the play.“If you can have a gaggle of teenagers skipping out of the show, and then this grumpy old man with tears in his eyes — that’s victory,” said Lindsay-Abaire, right.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesDo you imagine this as the kind of show that parents can take their teens to?STONE ​​My kids, 13 and 15, were here, and they loved it. Because I’m so invested in the parent side of the story, and in the mortality side of the story, and in the how-do-you-choose-to-live-your-remaining-days-on-this-planet side of the story, I forget about the delight, the tremendous luxury of hope and time, that teens have. And that enables so much in terms of imagination and promise. [My sons] think it’s hilarious. They love Deborah [Kimberly’s aunt, played by Bonnie Milligan], because they love a rule breaker. They also thought it was really moving. They were really intrigued by the relationship between Kim and Seth, not because it’s a traditional love story. But they really responded to that deep friendship.LINDSAY-ABAIRE Nothing has made me happier than seeing gaggles of teenagers really love the show. But at the same time, at the end of the Atlantic run, a grumpy old man was walking up the aisle and he looked at me and I thought he’s going to criticize the piece. And he said, “I just want you to know that I’m going to go out and live life more fully tomorrow.” My eyes welled up and then he was gone into the night. If you can have a gaggle of teenagers skipping out of the show, and then this grumpy old man with tears in his eyes — that’s victory.In the musical, Kimberly’s aunt sings an upbeat number about how to commit mail fraud. Jeanine, how did you write a catchy song about white collar crime?TESORI [laughs] It’s exposition, which is generally not great for a song. But then I thought, “Oh, if we make it really sort of furtive, and it’s got a little bit of a muted guitar thing, and it’s sort of like Peggy Lee, but maybe on a very, very off day …” It’s having it be fun, so that she can convince the teens to be part of it.LINDSAY-ABAIRE It’s a teaching song. We were talking about “The Rain in Spain” [from “My Fair Lady”], but it’s about check washing. It’s just messed up enough. More

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    7 New Musicals Are Headed to Broadway This Fall

    Behind every new New York season are a lot of wannabes, also-rans and hopeless cases to keep track of.I have friends who keep a spreadsheet of every show they’ve seen, cross-indexed to their Playbill collection.I’m the opposite. I toss my Playbills but keep Excel fired up with compulsive catalogs of what’s coming next.Especially for musicals, it’s a highly unreliable list. Some shows have sat on it undisturbed since the 20th century. I don’t think the stage adaptation of “My Man Godfrey,” first announced in 1985 and occasionally re-announced ever since, will ever actually open on Broadway. And was ABBA really going to write a version of “Marty”? No, that must have been a typo — though I’m not sure for what.On the other hand, at least one show I thought would never make it off the list unfortunately did. (Clue: It involved an escape to Margaritaville.) In my “comments” column for dubious entries, I sometimes include useful information like “Whut?”In any case, it’s around this time of year that I traditionally cull and update the herd, getting excited or terrified about what’s headed my way. So far, seven Broadway musicals are in the “definite” column, having been officially announced for the fall.They make an unusual grouping. To begin with, only one, “1776,” is a revival — and that one might as well be new. As reshaped by Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page in the post-“Hamilton” manner, and featuring a cast of women, nonbinary and transgender performers, the American Independence pageant aims to offer a more inclusive history than our real past did.Also unusual: Among the six new musicals, only “A Beautiful Noise,” based on the life and songs of Neil Diamond, is a biographical jukebox. (Will Swenson, who does swagger very well, stars.) And only two others — a very modest proportion compared to most seasons — are Hollywood adaptations.One of those is “Almost Famous,” based on Cameron Crowe’s 2000 coming-of-age film about a young man swept up in a 1970s rock ’n’ roll dream. It may ensure some authenticity that Crowe has written the book for the show, and, with the composer Tom Kitt, the lyrics.The other Hollywood adaptation is “Some Like It Hot,” based on the 1959 Billy Wilder comedy. If you think you’ve seen it onstage before, you’re partly right; it was first turned into a musical, called “Sugar,” in 1972. That version’s score was by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill; this one’s by their natural inheritors, the “Hairspray” team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman.The remaining incoming musicals, though no less exciting, may be even more familiar. (I’ve already seen two of them in earlier productions.) “Kimberly Akimbo,” based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s play about a girl with a premature-aging condition, ran Off Broadway, at the Atlantic Theater Company, last season. “KPOP,” a behind-the-scenes look at the Korean pop music industry, was another Off Broadway hit, in 2017. Both will have big adjustments to make for larger theaters and audiences, and I’m eager to see how they do it.Then there’s “& Juliet,” which has been playing in London (with a pandemic interruption) since 2019, and which is the only show on my spreadsheet to start with a typographical symbol. From a distance, it appears to be a mash-up of several Broadway tropes: updated Shakespeare, romantic fantasy and hit parade. Its songs, by Max Martin, are mostly familiar from recordings by Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Backstreet Boys and the like.But the seven sure musicals this fall are only the tip of my Excel iceberg. Slightly below the water line are shows almost certain to announce their arrival quite soon, including the revival of Bob Fosse’s “Dancin’,” the stage adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada” and the London hit “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.”Diving a bit deeper, we get to a larger school of wannabes. Many seem fascinating; “Lempicka,” for one, about the hedonistic Polish painter, has been getting good reviews for its various tryout productions.Others seem stuck in development hell. “Harmony,” the Barry Manilow show about a singing group in Nazi Germany, had its world premiere in 1997; it took 25 years to get as far as the tip of Manhattan, where it had a brief run this spring. At its final performance there, Manilow’s collaborator Bruce Sussman told the audience, “I’d like to think of today as only the end of the beginning!”Everyone does, even the bottom feeders, those mystifying creatures someone apparently once considered a good idea. “Magic Mike”? “The Honeymooners”? The Baby Jessica Falls in the Well musical? The adaptation of “Paradise Lost”? (Only one of those is made up.)But for list-compulsives like me — my spreadsheet includes nearly 100 titles, from “A Little Princess” to “Zanna” — the quality of the product hardly matters. What I like to contemplate is the vast array. Sometimes I envision the titles as a swarm of planes taxiing at airports all over the country: “Bhangin’ It,” “Trading Places,” “Black Orpheus,” “Beaches,” even the “Untitled Roy Rogers Musical.” They haven’t lifted off yet, and some of them are out of fuel, but they’re on the runway, eager noses all pointed in our direction. More

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    Musical Comedy ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ to Open on Broadway Next Fall

    The new musical, by David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori, will star Victoria Clark as a teen girl who ages too quickly.“Kimberly Akimbo,” a musical comedy about a young girl with a medical condition that causes rapid aging, will transfer to Broadway next fall.The show, based on a play by David Lindsay-Abaire, had an initial Off Broadway run that opened late last year at the Atlantic Theater Company, where it ran through the peak of the Omicron surge of the coronavirus and was greeted with strong reviews. Jesse Green, in The New York Times, called it “funny and moving.”The musical stars Victoria Clark, a 62-year-old actress playing a 15-year-old girl who is managing not only her affliction — a condition that limits her life expectancy — but also life with a ludicrous family.“It’s a coming-of-age story, but an unusual one because the clock is ticking from the get-go,” Clark said in an interview. “She has a limited amount of time left, and what draws me to her is her joie, and watching how someone can triumph who you least expect to succeed.”Clark, who stars alongside a company of much younger actors, said playing an adolescent had deeply affected her.“There is a boldness and a rawness to adolescence, and at the same time a balance between holding back and going for it that is so beautiful,” said Clark, who won a Tony Award in 2005 for “The Light in the Piazza.” “This character has taught me the beauty of impulse, and the beauty of being present, and not just accepting one’s fate. After the show I just wanted to run and find everyone I loved and tell them how much they meant to me.”The show features music by Jeanine Tesori, the Tony-winning composer of “Fun Home,” and a book and lyrics by Lindsay-Abaire, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play “Rabbit Hole.” It is directed by Jessica Stone, a longtime actress making her Broadway directing debut, and choreographed by Danny Mefford (“Dear Evan Hansen”).The Broadway cast will feature the same actors as the Off Broadway production, including Steven Boyer (“Hand to God”) and Alli Mauzey (“Cry-Baby”) as the protagonist’s parents, Bonnie Milligan (“Head Over Heels”) as her aunt, and Justin Cooley making his debut as one of her classmates.“Kimberly Akimbo” is scheduled to begin previews on Oct. 12 and to open on Nov. 10 at an unspecified Shubert theater. The lead producer is David Stone, who is also the lead producer of “Wicked”; other producers include the actress LaChanze and the theater owner James L. Nederlander, as well as Patrick Catullo, Aaron Glick and the Atlantic Theater Company. More

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    Welcoming Back Live Theater Doesn’t Mean Agreeing About All of It

    The year that just ended was a difficult one for people who make theater, as they faced economic, aesthetic and medical challenges. In a smaller way it was therefore a strange year for those of us who write about and review their work. Not until late summer 2020 — and then more fully in the fall — did we see live plays and musicals, and enjoy the pleasures that come with doing so: not just the communal experience in the theater but also the shared reflection afterward.For us — Jesse Green, the chief theater critic, and Maya Phillips, a critic at large — that shared reflection often included the gift of disagreement. And so, on the last day of 2021, we met, in cyberspace, to talk about what each of us liked most over the last several months, what we disliked most — and how a bit of (respectful!) head-butting can expand our understanding of both. Below, edited excerpts from the conversation.JESSE GREEN The return of live theater, however precarious, was a great thing for both of us — as critics, of course, but also as lovers of plays and musicals. There was a lot to see, and a lot we liked.MAYA PHILLIPS It was strange, though, to return to crowded theaters after being holed up in our apartments for so long. And it felt overwhelming — in a good way, but still overwhelming — to dive right back into a full fall season. But, yes, it was great to be back. What stood out to you?GREEN I found myself gravitating, somewhat unexpectedly, to the extremes of experience, rather than the subtle middle ground I often find so amenable. I went for big comedy and sensation, as in the first live show I saw, “Merry Wives,” Jocelyn Bioh’s Shakespeare revamp for the Public Theater in Central Park. To share belly laughs with hundreds of people again was a joy. I felt that way again, indoors, with “Six.”A grand Broadway spectacle: The cast of “Six,” the new musical about the wives of Henry VIII. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPHILLIPS I agree. I loved the color of “Merry Wives” in every respect — the bright costumes, the flashy ending, the vibrant performances and, of course, that cast of people of color. “Six” was the epitome of the grand spectacle that Broadway can be — in all the best ways. And don’t forget “Trouble in Mind.” That was one of my favorites, and I thought the comedy worked so well in that production.This should come as no surprise to you, but I’m more of a tragedy girl myself. What appealed to you on the more somber side of things?GREEN Funny you should mention “Trouble in Mind,” which I responded to both as a comedy (which it is, formally) and as a tragedy (which it is, sociologically). That’s part of what made Alice Childress’s play, which was supposed to have its Broadway premiere in 1957, so smashing in 2021: It finds a way to tell a story about the waste of Black talent within the warm, familiar confines of a backstage setting. But I suspect your penchant for tragedy is more in the classic vein — and there, I think we would want to talk about “Pass Over.”PHILLIPS I’m an equal opportunity lover of all forms of tragedy, but yes, my preferred brand of comedy is laced with the kind of biting sociological satire and subtly tragic moments that Childress offers in “Trouble in Mind.”When I think about “Pass Over,” the explicit moments of tragedy aren’t what stand out. In fact, those moments of physical and emotional and verbal violence — the ending in particular — didn’t always work for me. The most fascinating aspects, and the most tragic, were the ways the two Black characters related to each other, within this framework that the playwright, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, adopted from Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” It’s the same kind of nihilistic view that Beckett had, with similar linguistic play, but it’s so much more meaningful because it’s used to reveal how race is its own trap, a purgatory, in America. But then it also contains humor, like “Trouble in Mind.”From left: Brandon Micheal Hall, LaChanze, Chuck Cooper and Danielle Campbell in Alice Childress’s 1955 play “Trouble in Mind.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGREEN Inadvertently but appropriately, purgatory was a frequent theme as live theater ventured out this fall. Another show that dramatized it — and sang about it, too — was the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of “Caroline, or Change,” in which the title character, a Black woman in Louisiana, spends most of her working life in the subterranean laundry room of a Jewish family. And in Martyna Majok’s “Sanctuary City,” the limbo of being Dreamers — the children of undocumented immigrants in the United States — becomes not just a political problem but an emotional one, as two teenagers, denied a place in the country, try to find a place for themselves in each other. With a few reservations, I loved both those shows, and I think you did too.PHILLIPS Yes, both were fantastic, and I’d also add Sylvia Khoury’s brutal “Selling Kabul,” at Playwrights Horizons, to that category of shows featuring characters trapped in a kind of political limbo. Though, in that case, it’s also literal, because the whole play takes place in one small apartment, and one of the characters is unable to leave. But I want to get to some of the things we disagree on, because I feel as if — despite our different preferences — we’re often on the same page when it comes to the criticism. The fall had a lot of shows we didn’t see eye to eye on!Francis Benhamou, left, and Marjan Neshat in Sylvia Khoury’s tense drama “Selling Kabul,” at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGREEN I guess that brings us to “Clyde’s” by Lynn Nottage — another purgatory play. This time the purgatory is a truck stop sandwich shop run by a diabolical character (played by Uzo Aduba) and staffed by former prisoners who have almost no way back into society. And yet, somehow, it’s a comedy.PHILLIPS A comedy that I didn’t find funny! I love Lynn Nottage, but I’ve noticed I’ve had problems with her comedies. And this one in particular I found flimsy. To use the already heavy-handed sandwich metaphor, I’d say there wasn’t enough meat to it, despite the performances, which I liked. But I also wished that Aduba had more to do; it was great watching a Black woman be this ridiculously arch villain, but that character, and the whole theme of redemption and connection through the creative art of sandwich-making, felt one-note to me.GREEN Comedy is more personal than tragedy. I laughed and laughed — no doubt in part because of the performances but also for the very reason you were disappointed: It didn’t try to explain itself. Also, it gave us characters, most of them Black and Latino, without a white filter, which for me was a pleasure and a relief. Also a pleasure and a relief: The characters (spoiler alert) escaped their purgatory. Which is not to say I don’t understand your criticisms; I find them useful because one person can only absorb one idea of a play at a time. I wonder if you feel the same way, or whether it’s just annoying when we disagree?Uzo Aduba and Ron Cephas Jones in Lynn Nottage’s “Clyde’s,” one of the shows our critics had differing opinions about.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPHILLIPS What you say about comedy being more personal is exactly right. I had issues with the allegory to begin with, and because it’s so prevalent, I was looking for other dimensions or nuances to latch onto but was just left with the element of the play — the main element — that I found unappealing.But I never find our disagreements annoying! At first I found them unsettling. I’m not sure if you still get the anxiety I do — that you’ve missed something that your fellow critics haven’t, and that must be the root of the disagreement, that you’re just wrong. Now I find our disagreements informative. Like with your review of “Clyde’s,” you pointed out the same problems I had with it, but while those issues couldn’t redeem the show for me, for you there was more to it. What’s most important to me there was that we saw the same things and just had different responses.GREEN I like that formulation, and wish it were more commonly held. But it’s understandable that people want critics to love what they love; critics feel the same way! I do feel scarily out on a limb when I dislike something so many people, including my colleagues, like. That was most painfully the case with the new gender-switched revival of “Company,” because I spent a lot of the running time trying to convince myself that I was enjoying it when in fact, as I had to accept when I got home, I wasn’t.Katrina Lenk in the director Marianne Elliott’s gender-flipped revival of “Company.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPHILLIPS That is difficult! I admire that you stuck to your guns there, especially because I think a lot of people went in expecting to enjoy it because of the cast, because of the reputation of the show, and of course because Stephen Sondheim died this fall. With “Company,” you had context I didn’t have going in. I’d heard the songs and knew the story, but this was my first time seeing the show. And yet again, I agreed with your points, especially about the elaborate set overwhelming the content, but found the gender swap, with some small exceptions, more interesting and relevant. There were definitely some awkward lyric changes, but I thought the way the dialogue was changed and how the characters’ relationships with a now-female Bobbie changed created fresh tension that worked. And I found it refreshing to see a female lead who might be passive and aloof, yes, but is able to own that — and the fact that she’s single — in a way that a man can in society. It’s much more rare to see that kind of female character, and I loved Katrina Lenk’s performance.GREEN Did you feel that way about Victoria Clark in “Kimberly Akimbo,” the new musical by Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire about a teenager (played by Clark) who, because of a rare disease, looks like she’s in her 60s? I gave it (and her) a rave review but you told me you weren’t convinced.PHILLIPS Yes, I enjoyed Clark’s performance but had a similar experience to the one you had at “Company” during this show — I sat there wanting to enjoy it but had to admit to myself that it just wasn’t clicking for me. I admired what it was trying to do, and I welcome bonkers new musicals like this one, but I thought the book just needed a lot more work. The funny but random scheming aunt, who takes up so much room in the show; the awkwardly incorporated student chorus; Kimberly’s relationship with her parents; her relationship with her own disease — there were so many places where I felt the show could have cut or expanded and refocused itself while still maintaining its quirkiness. And to be honest, the songs weren’t very memorable to me.Victoria Clark as Kimberly, with Justin Cooley, center, and Steven Boyer in “Kimberly Akimbo” at the Atlantic Theater Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGREEN Oh, that stabs me in the heart! But that’s what it means to accept that theater, like all experience, is subjective, and therefore so is criticism. You’re going to hurt sometimes. People have told me — most recently at a funeral! — that they dislike my reviews because they’re “so mean.” When I engage those people further, it often turns out that it’s not the supposed meanness but the disagreement itself that makes them angry. Some people just can’t be happy unless everyone loves “Diana, the Musical” and “Flying Over Sunset,” to name two shows I didn’t — and you didn’t, either. Do you get that?PHILLIPS I do get that! But more so on Twitter, with random internet trolls, and more so with fandoms other than theater. I often am seen as a curmudgeon or contrarian by my family and friends, but then when they read my reviews they always tell me I’m fair. Sometimes it is fun to be the one with the controversial opinion. But I’m interested in discourse; disagreement is just part of the job, and we need it. We’re not the same people with the same experiences. Our differences of opinion reveal the differences in our experiences, which in turn highlight different dimensions of what we’re critiquing. As long as that criticism is thoughtfully considered and argued, it’s all useful.GREEN I grew up arguing with my family about everything we saw. In a way, that’s how you learn that other people exist as much as you do, and how you come to understand what you experience more fully. In that sense, unexpected or outré or at least strongly worded positions are necessary. Even when they are quite negative they can be seen, I hope, as joyful contributions to the mutual project — as “Company” has it — of being alive. More

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    On Broadway Stages, the Beautiful Rooms Are Empty

    In recent musicals, hyperdesign is outstripping writing and direction for clarity, expressiveness and excitement.When Bobbie’s balloons are more fascinating than she is, your production of “Company” has a serious problem.I’m speaking of the inflatable Mylar numerals that, in the current Broadway revival of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, keep drawing the eye away from the main character as she is feted by friends on her 35th birthday.Those balloons — stand-ins for Bobbie’s disappearing youth — aren’t the only scene stealers. Bunny Christie’s ingenious design for the revival is filled with visual gimmicks that in representing the production’s themes keep crowding out the characters.During the song “Another Hundred People” — a barbed tribute to the missed connections of urbanity — large neon letters that spell the show’s title start wandering about the stage, as if stalking the cast. Eventually, three of the letters regroup to spell “NYC”: a neatly made point, though I couldn’t help wondering what happened to the other four.Then there’s the warren of interconnected spaces, some joined by trap doors, that paints Bobbie’s path to companionship as a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Chutes and Ladders.But for all the cleverness of Christie’s designs, they don’t so much nourish Marianne Elliott’s production as overwrite it, filling its many dramatic holes with eye candy.That’s no news on Broadway, which never met a conceptual problem it couldn’t attack with confetti cannons and other weapons of what we might call hyperdesign. Spectacular effects are part of the brand, and when used smartly can both thrill and inform.Yet, looking back at the shows that have opened or reopened in the last few months, it seems to me that designers, bringing evermore astonishing prowess to bear, too often outshine the work they are meant to support. As if to compensate, the stories are getting dimmer; their beautiful rooms, to paraphrase Kafka, are empty.In “Diana, the Musical,” Buckingham Palace was thinly suggested by some electric bulb tracery.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTake “Diana, the Musical,” which I won’t rake over the coals again except to say it was phony from first to last. (It closed, after just 49 performances and previews, on Dec. 19.) Nor were its sets especially assertive: Buckingham Palace and other locations were thinly suggested by some electric bulb tracery.But apparently having decided that what audiences would want most from a fantasia on the life of the People’s Princess is a jaw-dropping parade of extravagant costumes, the producers budgeted accordingly. The 38 outfits designed for Diana by William Ivey Long dramatized how she transformed herself from kindergarten teacher to royal frump to executive princess to international fashion plate far better than the writers did.No wonder those dresses — and the quick-change artistry that in one scene allowed her to change them six times — won applause. Unfortunately, in the process, the character herself was rendered about as expressive as a clothes hanger. That was almost literally so in her wedding scene, as Jeanna de Waal, who played Diana, disappeared inside a gown built like a cage.A clever enough metaphor, but why was the costume design forced to do so much work that the story should have done itself?The problem is even more evident in Lincoln Center Theater’s production of “Flying Over Sunset,” though it is a far more interesting musical. In Act II, its book, by James Lapine, imagines a weekend at the end of the 1950s during which Cary Grant, Aldous Huxley and Clare Boothe Luce experiment with LSD simultaneously. Their hallucinations are meant to address the unresolved conflicts carefully set up in Act I.But how do you dramatize a hallucination? Even if you can describe it in words, it will never be as interesting to those not tripping as it is to those who are.How do you dramatize a hallucination?“Flying Over Sunset,” starring, from left, Robert Sella, Harry Hadden-Paton, Carmen Cusack and Tony Yazbeck, tries to pull it off with psychedelic light and sound design.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLapine’s book does not overcome that obstacle, but as the director, he has been able to assemble a team of designers who at least get close. In this case, it is not the set or costumes doing the heavy lifting so much as the lighting (by Bradley King) and projections (by 59 Productions) working in concert with the sound design (by Dan Moses Schreier). In their hands, psychedelic imagery, amplified footfalls and intensely colored light become a trip in themselves, peeling away the skin of everyday life to reveal a richer world inside.It’s not a real solution, though; the often-beautiful imagery has the side effect of making ordinary perception, unenhanced by pharmaceuticals, seem banal. As soon as the characters talk, the illusion of richness evaporates. If it’s arguable whether the trips change the characters, as Lapine posits, it’s certain that they do not change us.“Flying Over Sunset” left me trying to decide whether muscular design takes over because the ideas are too frail or the ideas retreat because design hogs all the attention. Either way, it’s a predictable problem, and some productions have developed workarounds. “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” for instance, is smart enough to keep dialogue to a minimum as it inundates the theater with sound and color. If it ever lets the audience come up for air, the silliness of the story might be revealed as the wrong kind of distraction.Which is not to say there’s a right kind of distraction. A show with enough on its mind, with a minimum of muddles and longueurs, doesn’t require bombarding with extraneous sensory excitement. That doesn’t mean it should be visually dull, even if for economic reasons that’s often the case.Take “Kimberly Akimbo,” one of the finest and most feelingful new musicals of 2021, with music by Jeanine Tesori and words by David Lindsay-Abaire, based on his 2000 play. The Atlantic Theater production might have been even better with a more exciting design to support those feelings and a bigger frame to set off the prodigious performance by Victoria Clark as a teenager who ages too quickly. Perhaps we’ll have the chance to find out, if the show, which is scheduled to close on Jan. 15, transfers to Broadway in the new year.“Kimberly Akimbo” might have been even better with a more exciting set design to support the wonderful performances by Victoria Clark, left, and Justin Cooley.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn other words, Broadway pizazz is not the problem; often enough, it’s the solution. A set that can change locations instantaneously, or costumes that pin down time and class with almost taxonomic exactitude, can anchor while also heightening the illusion of life.That’s true even in nonmusical plays that have become much more visually abstract in recent years. You seldom see sofas and kitchen sinks onstage anymore, and even more seldom miss them. The 164 years of American commerce covered by “The Lehman Trilogy” take place convincingly in a rotating glass box.But for the most part, hyperdesign is a hint that something fundamental is missing. Often that missing element is the conceptual discipline that allows a piece of theater, even when set on an empty stage, to hang together and score its points. You can see it working perfectly in shows as wide ranging as David Byrne’s “American Utopia” (with its sleek aluminum chain curtains) and “Dear Evan Hansen” (with its hypnotic walls of online data) — productions in which design and direction go hand in hand.And you can see it, perhaps most vividly, in “Six,” which turns conceptual discipline into a fetish. Each of the wives of Henry VIII depicted in this sing-off gets her own theme color, song genre and pop star queenspiration. And though the set is minimal — it might have worked just as well for “Diana” — the lighting (by Tim Dieling) and costumes (by Gabriella Slade) are rock concert maximal, expressing the story’s ambition to thrill.Which it totally does, because sometimes the secret to effective design is proportion — and knowing when we really need the confetti. More

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    Jeanine Tesori’s Gift: Conjuring the Storytelling Potency of Music

    In shows like “Caroline, or Change” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” the composer excels at translating her astute insights about characters into music.Jeanine Tesori can take apart music and put it back together as well as any composer who’s put note to paper. She can write a recitative worthy of Janacek, or a pop tune that could have charted on 1970s AM radio. She can conjure a gospel number, a tap soft-shoe, or a folk-rock confessional like a seasoned pro.And as the co-creator of “Caroline, or Change” (now in a widely acclaimed revival on Broadway) and the Tony-winning “Fun Home,” she has helped to expand the boundaries of the American musical in a way that recalls such forebears as Stephen Sondheim and Elizabeth Swados.But you don’t come away from a Tesori musical — not the soulful “Violet,” the jazzy “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” the snarky “Shrek the Musical,” the meta-cultural “Soft Power,” nor the offbeat “Kimberly Akimbo,” now in a well-reviewed premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company — marveling at her formal innovation.For all her formidable tools and training, Tesori understands that “craft is the conduit for a really fresh and profound encounter with human experience,” her “Fun Home” co-writer Lisa Kron said. “It’s not an end in itself.”Said David Lindsay-Abaire, with whom she adapted “Shrek” for Broadway, and who adapted his play “Kimberly Akimbo” with her: “She thinks like a playwright. She understands story and narrative and character, and the architecture of a scene.”It’s not just structure she’s attuned to, said Tony Kushner, with whom she wrote “Caroline, or Change,” but subtext as well.“She either comprehends or intuits, not what necessarily is the most obvious choice for dramatic action or dramatic events, but what’s under the surface, where the real meaning of a piece lies,” Kushner said. “I’ve never met anybody more wide open to that, or more emotionally intelligent about human beings than she is.” While that’s surely a fine quality in any person, here’s the key: “She has this absolutely uncanny ability to translate that into music.”From left: Nya, Sharon D Clarke, Harper Miles and Nasia Thomas in the Roundabout Theater’s revival of “Caroline, or Change” at Studio 54.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis is the mystery of Jeanine Tesori — of any composer for the theater, really. Where does the music come from, and how does it work its magic? A nonverbal language with the power to move us, sometimes literally, music can be wed to words and characters in ways that feel definitive, clarifying. As Lindsay-Abaire put it: “I don’t know if pure is the right word, but something less diluted. You hear the characters’ emotions and know what’s going on inside those heads and hearts,” dramatic content that in nonmusical plays “you rely on the actors to communicate.”George Brant, with whom Tesori is adapting his play about a female drone pilot, “Grounded,” for the Metropolitan Opera, said that Tesori is “able to get at the guts of the piece and transform it into something that still feels like itself, but more.”The question of music’s storytelling potency is sharpened in Tesori’s case because, unlike Sondheim or many of her generational peers (Jason Robert Brown, Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel), she doesn’t write lyrics. Instead, she has worked with playwrights to shape not only her show’s scripts but bracingly original songs as well, in idioms and character voices as wide-ranging as the musical genres she references.Looking at her list of collaborators, Lin-Manuel Miranda said: “It’s as if she’s made it a mission to bring every serious dramatist to swim in the musical theater pool. But the other side of that is she’s bending their skills to our art form, and innovating our art form with every at bat.“It’s how you know she’s the best,” he added “because she works with the best and makes them sing.”It’s not as if she has a cookie-cutter style, though. As Lindsay-Abaire said, “The fact that the lyrics are all so different — that Tony’s are Tony’s, Lisa’s are Lisa’s, mine are mine, is a testament to Jeanine embracing her collaborators and our voices. It’s not like: This is how Jeanine teaches all these playwrights to write lyrics.”For her part, Tesori — who recently turned 60 but retains a youthful bonhomie, with “Fun Home” wallpaper patterns tattooed on her forearm — has a firm grip on what her strengths are.“I’m not a lyricist at all, but I’ll say what my gift is: recognizing lyrics in the sea of words,” Tesori explained during a recent interview in her office at City Center, where she serves as a creative adviser. She immerses herself in her collaborators’ verbiage in various ways. She asks for what she calls “noodles,” which Kron described as “bits of lyric that didn’t make it into the lyric I built for her.” Tesori also has them read their lyrics aloud to her, sometimes “two or three times,” as Kron recalled, to glean intention from inflection.Then, Tesori said, her mind goes to work on fragments of material, in a process she compared to the sequence in “The Queen’s Gambit” when the lead character envisions complicated chess moves on the ceiling. “Things start clicking into place,” Tesori said, “and I think: Oh, there! There!”“Meryl Streep disappears into her characters. You sort of know that she’s there, but also you don’t. I like doing that too,” Tesori said. “I feel like my job is to get out of the way of how they sing.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesHer facility with a wide range of musical styles can be traced to a diverse musical education. She started piano lessons at age 6 with a teacher, she said, who let her play any musical style. “He did not judge anything, and that was really the lesson,” she said. After a rebellious break from music during her teen years, and a brief flirtation with pre-med classes, she studied music at Barnard College and soon got work as a Broadway pit pianist and freelance music director.Most formative, though, was her partnership with Buryl Red, a Baptist choral arranger with whom she ran a music company for 25 years until his death in 2013. Assisting Red on countless recording sessions in Nashville and around the world, she absorbed a range of musical influences, in particular gospel, that have served her well in such scores as “Violet” and “Caroline, or Change.”This broad palette isn’t mere versatility for its own sake. Her colleagues talk about her rigor at winnowing their material, while her peers praise the results. The composer Stephen Schwartz hailed “her ability to always sound like Jeanine and yet to write very specifically for whatever character or milieu that she’s doing,” while Miranda said that she “serves character absolutely and rigorously.”Said LaChiusa: “I never hear the composer screaming, ‘Look at me!’ Instead, I hear, ‘Listen to these words,’ and ‘Feel this character’s joy, this character’s sorrow.’”Honing in on character may get closer to the heart of the matter. By comparison, Tesori recalled of a famous collaborator on the 2006 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Mother Courage,” for which she wrote music. “Meryl Streep disappears into her characters,” she said. “You sort of know that she’s there, but also you don’t. I like doing that too: I want them to be musicalized, not me. I feel like my job is to get out of the way of how they sing.”In the case of “Kimberly Akimbo,” Tesori gives the title character — a teenager with a disease that ages her prematurely — bittersweetly introspective songs, while the callow teenagers and needy adults around her sing in a range of prickly, searching pop and rock. And in the quasi-operatic “Caroline, or Change,” she breathes life not only into the Black and Jewish characters but also into several inanimate objects, from a beatific moon to an angry, mournful city bus.Tesori knows how to translate feeling into song so well that she was even brought in as a vocal producer on the new “West Side Story,” at the screenwriter Kushner’s recommendation. She coached performers on the Bernstein-Sondheim songs, which they recorded in a studio before a frame was shot, and she followed up on set to make sure they maintained consistency.“I love the treasure map of looking into a score as if you’re singing it into being,” she said of the film, though she could also have been describing the kind of information she encodes in her own work. “So you’re not singing ‘West Side Story,’ you’re actually expressing something a character needs in that moment. The tritone in ‘Maria’ is part of an expression, not a famous motif.”Searching for a pre-verbal language to express big feelings, especially unexpressed ones among family members, may be how her musical antennae were formed. Gesturing to the family struggles at the center of “Fun Home,” “Caroline” and now “Kimberly Akimbo,” Tesori said, “I love a household — the counterpoint of the attic, the living room, and the basement.” Growing up as one of four girls in a Sicilian American family on Long Island, she recalled, “There was beauty to it, and there was great chaos to it, and they were all happening at the same time, depending on which fader was up.”She remains tied to her Long Island roots, and photographs of her grandparents are prominently displayed in her office. Her grandmother’s ageless quality, she said, informed her work on the lead character of “Kimberly Akimbo,” while her immigrant grandfather’s thwarted career as a band composer and arranger — he had to pump gas to make ends meet — is part of what fuels the “urgency” she feels about making music.Though Tesori doesn’t typically originate projects, she is careful in choosing them. When David Henry Hwang pitched her the idea of “Soft Power” — a reverse “King and I,” in which a Chinese diplomat becomes an adviser to an American politician — she said she immediately knew: “This is so ambitious and worth failing at, worth spending the four or five years they all take, no matter what.”Victoria Clark, center, as the title character in “Kimberly Akimbo” at the Atlantic Theater Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHwang said she dug with complete commitment into both the show’s irony and its sincerity, and above all she “forced me to take my character seriously, and face my own trauma.” (Hwang was stabbed on a Brooklyn street in 2015 in what was possibly an anti-Asian hate crime.) The show, originally produced in Los Angeles in 2016 and at the Public Theater in 2018, is still aiming for Broadway.With Tazewell Thompson, she wrote the opera “Blue,” about the police killing of a young Black man, which premiered at the Glimmerglass Festival in the summer of 2019. Planned for 2020 stagings scotched by Covid, the opera has new 2022 dates at companies in Seattle, Pittsburgh and Toledo, Ohio, with more commitments to follow. Thompson joined Tesori’s other collaborators in marveling at her ability to make music speak emotionally.“It comes completely from her being in touch with the world, having her ears and eyes always open, watching, peering, getting involved,” Thompson said.That kind of openness can be draining, she said, citing the Sondheim song “Finishing the Hat” for the way her mind will tend to wander to her work. “I feel like I’m always chasing music; I think about it almost all the time,” she said with a note of desperation.While she maintains strong relationships — not only with her colleagues but also with her 24-year-old daughter, Siena, whom she co-parented with her ex-husband, the musical director Michael Rafter — she admitted she struggles with work-life balance and thinks about retiring all the time.“I find it a really hard life,” she admitted. “The loneliness of writing is very difficult. When students say, ‘I want to write for the theater,’ there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Run!’ And there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Stay.’”Making music has been a craft Jeanine Tesori has learned, clearly, but hearing the world as music may just be how she is wired.“Someone came to ‘Kimberly,’ this incredible woman, and she said, ‘Oh, I thought it was WON-dah-ful, it’s bee-YOO-tee-ful,’” Tesori said. The compliment was nice, sure, but “all I could hear was timbre of her voice. I started notating it in my head.” More