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      Review: Rachel Bloom Shines in ‘Death, Let Me Do My Show’

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      The writer-performer wanted to avoid the pandemic, but couldn’t. Her new solo show dives into birth, death and cosmic confusion.Rachel Bloom came to perform her latest live show in New York, and she really wanted to do it as if it were 2019. That was the year when her musical-comedy series, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” ended its four-season run on the CW, and Bloom was getting ready to hit the road. But in 2020, some things happened.Now that she’s finally able to face a live audience again, the writer-performer wanted to treat the coronavirus pandemic as a parenthesis: She was keen, as she put it at the Lucille Lortel Theater a few days ago, to “go back to my old material unsullied by trauma.”Some things, however, can’t be brushed aside easily, even with the help of gleefully blunt songs, or a few jokes.Fate, life, inspiration, rumination, grief, time, a dark power greater than even the gods of comedy: Whatever you want to call it, something derailed Bloom’s plan, and “Death, Let Me Do My Show” deals with what she was trying to avoid talking about onstage. (Spoiler alert: the “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” cast member David Hull plays one of the aforementioned forces.)Which is that in the spring of 2020, she found herself in a conjunction of events so chaotic, so intense and so scary that had they been part of a Hollywood movie, critics would have accused the screenwriter of being a tad too melodramatic and over-reliant on far-fetched coincidences.In the early days of the pandemic, Bloom gave birth to a daughter. The baby had fluid in her lungs and was placed in intensive care. At the same time and on the opposite coast, Bloom’s close collaborator on the series, the musician Adam Schlesinger, was also in the hospital, with Covid-19.Bloom’s child lived; her friend died.Those harrowing days form the conclusion of Bloom’s memoir, published in November 2020, “I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are,” and are the crux of her almost-one-woman show. Bloom bounces from incomprehension to fear to regret to anger to cosmic confusion (she starts questioning her atheism) and back again. All the while, she expertly deploys a jokey, graphic candor that telegraphs honesty and forthrightness — that, after all, is what we expect from a woman who brightly talks about bodily fluids and whose perky song about trees that smell like semen feels like a deep cut from a bizarro “Mary Poppins” cast album. (The music director Jerome Kurtenbach leads a three-piece backing band.)Directed by Seth Barrish, a regular Mike Birbiglia collaborator, “Death, Let Me Do My Show” lands closer to Birbiglia’s classic self-examination than to the recent solos by Kate Berlant and Liz Kingsman, which toyed with the genre’s form and conventions, and reflected on the very nature of narcissism.Bloom is an old-fashioned vaudevillian — because this is the 21st century, she got her start not at a borscht belt resort but by uploading videos on YouTube. (Do look up her 2012 duet with Shaina Taub, “We Don’t Need a Man“; Taub and Kurtenbach are two of Bloom’s several co-songwriters in the new show.) Bloom is also a bona fide theater kid who is fluent in both displaying va-va-voom extroversion and mining her anxieties and struggles for art. The new show toes, often dexterously, the line between confidence and vulnerability, earnest emotion and winking self-dramatization — a number sending up “Dear Evan Hansen” captures the way that hit musical relies on rooting for an unreliable, somewhat unsympathetic lead character.The songs are the highlights here. Bloom is especially good at puncturing emotion with surreal detail, as when she sings the tender “Lullaby for a Newborn,” then reminds us she had been cradling her bottle of water swathed in a towel. More than blunt language — a tool that loses its sharpness with use — this absurdist vein effectively draws laughs, but it also underscores the show’s real subject: the often cruel arbitrariness of life.Death, Let Me Do My ShowThrough Sept. 30 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; rachelbloomshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      in Television

      Aubrey Plaza Has Found Her Scene Partner

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      “Oh, put it down. Down the hatch,” Aubrey Plaza said while eating pizza for breakfast, in a downtown Los Angeles restaurant that was otherwise deserted on a late-August Friday morning.Her colleague, Christopher Abbott, was assessing the spread of carbs, dairy, prosciutto and espresso on the table, declaring it a “nightmare for the gut.”“You have your fiber pills in the car. Why don’t you go get them?” Plaza said, teasingly, unleashing objections from Abbott before she hastily backpedaled. “They’re mine, they’re mine. I take them.”Four years after meeting on the set of the comedic thriller “Black Bear,” the actors are working together again, this time on an Off Broadway revival of John Patrick Shanley’s play “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” in which they will portray strangers who become lovers after meeting at a dive bar in the Bronx.Plaza is making her theatrical debut in the two-person play, which begins performances on Oct. 30 at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village, and the only person she could see herself sharing it with was Abbott, an experienced stage actor with whom she shares both an artistic symmetry and a knowing, playful rapport.After years spent proving that she could be much more than versions of April Ludgate, the comically unaffected, scowl-prone intern in “Parks and Recreation,” Plaza, 39, has become one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood. Her performance as a jaded lawyer in Season 2 of the HBO series “The White Lotus” was an audience favorite, and her role as a budding scammer in the big-screen thriller “Emily the Criminal” was praised by critics for its ferocity and nuance.“I like to just throw things out the window also and laugh and mess around and not take it so seriously,” Plaza said. Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAt the same time, she has reached a level of celebrity where, to some, she has become less known for her association with any particular character than for just being herself: an internet darling known for impassively delivering outlandish, sometimes sinister commentary that can leave late-night hosts unsure if she is joking.In Abbott, 37, who played a lovelorn boyfriend with a dark turn in the HBO comedy “Girls,” Plaza has found a co-star who seems to know exactly when she’s joking, gamely joining in on the weirdness with which she has become associated.While mulling the menu, Abbott responded with an exaggerated Italian accent when Plaza assumed one, later testing aloud his gruff Bronx brogue for the play. (“Do you wanna hee-yuh what I’m wuh-kin on?” Abbott blurted. “I’m going for an Andrew Dice Clay kind of thing.”)“He cares but he also doesn’t care; it’s the best recipe for me for a scene partner,” Plaza said, resembling a mid-20th-century movie star with her shoulder-length hair loosely curled and dark-rimmed sunglasses propped atop her head. “It’s fun and it’s also good and it’s also safe. I like to just throw things out the window also and laugh and mess around and not take it so seriously. It’s a hard combo to come by.”The feeling is mutual. “We’re both unafraid to be ugly and weird and strange,” said Abbott, who started his professional acting career 15 years ago in an Off Broadway production of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s “Good Boys and True,” about a scandal at a prep school.Plaza’s first play as a professional actress is not a tame one. Her character, Roberta, is a lonely divorcée who is both desperate for love and confident that all she deserves is punishment; Abbott’s character, Danny, is a lonely brute who will start a fight over the most minor of slights. Together, they fall into a cycle of screaming, crying, slapping, choking and expletive-laced bickering. There is also kissing, cuddling, tender touching and musings on fairy-tale love.PLANS FOR THE PLAY were solidified well before Hollywood writers and actors went on strike, resulting in the industrywide shutdown. Over a year ago, Jeff Ward, an actor (“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) who is directing “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” pitched the idea to Abbott, a friend and former roommate. Abbott immediately agreed, and in reading the short description of Roberta in Shanley’s script, he thought of Aubrey.“I don’t want to paraphrase it,” Abbott began, “but it was something like — —”“Sexy…,” Plaza suggested. “Beautiful … broken?” (In fact, it was Roberta’s “nervous bright eyes” that made him think of Plaza for the role.)If not for the strike, Plaza would have spent much of the summer filming a movie, “Animal Friends,” alongside Ryan Reynolds and Jason Momoa. Abbott would have been traveling to the Venice Film Festival for the premiere of the surreal comedy “Poor Things” (where it would go on to win the Golden Lion) and Ward would have been in Japan promoting the live-action manga series “One Piece.” It just so happened that amid the strike, the actors and their director had time to simply talk about the play and what they might do with it.“It feels like the secret ingredient to this whole thing might be time,” Ward said. “A little extra time.”Abbott “cares but he also doesn’t care,” Plaza said. “It’s the best recipe for me for a scene partner.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesPart of what they are working through is an idea that Ward said came to him years ago, when he and Abbott were living in Bushwick. They met about 14 years ago at an audition for a play: Abbott got the job, while Ward was hired as his understudy. At parties, Ward, an experimental dance enthusiast, noticed that Abbott was a good dancer, and thought they might one day collaborate on something involving movement.Then last year, while thinking about ways to incorporate choreography into a production of “Danny,” Ward picked up a copy of the script with the work’s full title: “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea: An Apache Dance.”The subtitle is a reference to a French dance style, developed into a popular cabaret act in the early 1900s, that mixes a seductive kind of tango with a violent domestic battle in which the dancers fling each other around in between loving détentes.It was a common pop cultural reference in the 1950s and ’60s, when Shanley was growing up in the east Bronx. The dance appears in old movies like “Can-Can,” with Shirley MacLaine; cartoons like “Louvre Come Back to Me!,” featuring Pepé Le Pew; and sitcoms like “I Love Lucy.” In that show’s first season, Ethel Mertz describes it as the dance “where the tough Frenchman grabs the girl by the hair and throws her over his shoulder and slams her down on the floor and steps on her.”A reader of the script will quickly see what Shanley meant with the subtitle. After Danny and Roberta meet, their encounter swings between desperate affection and uncontrollable, instinctual aggression. (Shanley based Danny’s proclivity for fistfights on his own teenage tendencies.)“I put that in there to give some guidance as to how the play might be done,” Shanley said of the subtitle in a phone interview. “It’s really about the interior life of these two people and how they meet and explode by touching each other.”Shanley, who has won an Oscar (for “Moonstruck”) and a Tony (for “Doubt: A Parable,” which is receiving its own starry revival on Broadway in February), gave Ward, a first-time director, his blessing to revive “Danny.” It premiered in 1984 at the Humana Festival in Louisville, Ky., with John Turturro and June Stein, before transferring to New York. (In his New York Times review, Mel Gussow wrote that the play “is the equivalent of sitting at ringside watching a prize fight that concludes in a loving embrace.”) Shanley is also allowing Ward to develop movement beyond the script’s stage direction, though he said he would make his feelings known if he disliked the additions.Those additions will be choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, whose gestural, sometimes pedestrian movements have depicted the inner lives of a couple, with an intimacy that almost makes observers feel as if they’re witnessing something they shouldn’t.For Abbott and Plaza, whose dance background consists of Irish step dancing as a child, a sense of voyeurism is exactly what they want the audience to feel as Danny and Roberta fall into mad, improbable love.“We’re doing this play every night for an audience, but I think you also have to do it for each other,” said Abbott, who looked character-appropriate in a white T-shirt and chain necklace, a fishing hook tattoo visible on his forearm. “We want to entertain the audience, but I personally want to entertain Aubrey.”“I guess I like to entertain him as well,” Plaza said, adopting a voice like a hostage reading from a script before breaking into a smile.“We’re doing this play every night for an audience, but I think you also have to do it for each other,” Abbott said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesPLAZA AND ABBOTT both grew up far outside the Hollywood machine: she in Delaware, he in Connecticut. Both developed their love for movies working in video stores, and after deciding that she wanted to become an actor as a child, Plaza started out in entertainment as a “Saturday Night Live” set design intern and an NBC page. Abbott discovered acting later, in a drama class at a local community college, which led him to drop out and move to New York to study it more seriously.More than 15 years later, both actors have become recognizable faces onscreen and have gradually broken free from the association of the roles that made them famous.Since “Girls,” Abbott has taken on complex, often tortured parts in films like “James White,” about an unemployed man facing the weight of his mother’s terminal illness, and “Sanctuary,” about a hotel scion determined to break up with his longtime dominatrix. In one of his most prominent roles, he starred as the spiraling Air Force bombardier John Yossarian in the 2019 television adaptation of the novel “Catch-22.”“He has an explosive side to him,” Shanley said of Abbott. “There’s always a feeling of instability and danger.”Since “Parks and Recreation,” Plaza has hosted “S.N.L.,” received her first Emmy nomination for her performance in “White Lotus,” and taken on producing roles to gain more control over scripts she feels particularly drawn to, including “Emily the Criminal” and “Ingrid Goes West,” in which she plays an Instagram-obsessed stalker. She has stepped away from the comfort of dark indie comedy to take on a glamorous, gun-wielding action film role in this year’s “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre,” and she recently fulfilled a dream of working with Francis Ford Coppola on his long-awaited epic “Megalopolis.”“Black Bear,” a movie within a movie set in the Adirondack Mountains, was one of those scripts that Plaza leaped at, becoming both a producer and lead actress opposite Abbott.“Unfortunately we can’t really talk about that movie,” Plaza said, citing the continuing strike by SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, that prohibits actors from promoting films and TV shows that have already been completed. (Plaza picketed last month alongside a miniature horse named Li’l Sebastian, a local celebrity in the Indiana town where “Parks and Recreation” is set.)But contained in that psychological thriller are hints of what could take place onstage in “Danny,” including Abbott’s wrestling, sometimes messily, with his character’s masculinity, Plaza’s talent for portraying the unhinged, and moments of crackling intimacy between them.Their characters’ relationship in “Black Bear” is shape-shifting: At first, Abbott, a soon-to-be father, can’t suppress his attraction to a houseguest (Plaza) despite the presence of his pregnant girlfriend. In the movie’s second half, the women’s roles are flipped, and Plaza is a wife tortured by jealousy, eventually descending into a drunken fit of rage and hopelessness.“From ‘Black Bear,’ it was clear that it was going to be electric. There was no ‘getting to know you’ section,” Ward said. “There’s just something about the way they match up.”“There are all different kinds of love stories, and this is just one of them,” Plaza said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesTHE TWO ACTORS encountered “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” in acting school — not uncommon since the play, with a surplus of opportunities to emote, is a favorite of theater classes and auditions. The actor Sam Rockwell, one of the revival’s producers, recalled doing snippets in auditions for “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (he got the part) and “The Godfather Part III” (he didn’t).Abbott approached Plaza about the role unsure if she would be open to it. Although she had acted in community theater as a child — “Miracle on 34th Street” and “Cinderella,” in which she played a stepsister — and trained in improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade, this would be something new altogether.But after Plaza read “Danny,” she knew they had to do it.“I cried. I laughed. I loved it,” she said.Despite its ubiquity, the play has had only one other Off Broadway production since its premiere — in 2004, starring Adam Rothenberg and Rosemarie DeWitt — and there has never been a Broadway production.In a phone interview, Rockwell said he suggested the production keep it that way, at least for now, even though Abbott and Plaza’s name recognition could potentially rake in ticket sales on Broadway. “I think a lot of plays have failed on Broadway because they were really meant to be Off Broadway,” said Rockwell, who is working on the show with his producing partner Mark Berger. “They had that funky quality.”After all, “Danny” is not the kind of inspirational, affirming fare that is likely to prompt theatergoers to buy T-shirts or bring their children. It’s about two damaged, shame-ridden people trying to find a way out of their own misery.“There are all different kinds of love stories, and this is just one of them,” Plaza said. “And I don’t like the idea that every piece of art that’s out there has to have some kind of social commentary or political message. It’s a play. They’re characters.”Over the remaining slice of pizza, Abbott agreed — “the ‘why now’ question is always like, ‘why not?’” — and explained that like Plaza, he had learned over the years to care about the work without caring how that work was going to benefit his career.“I don’t know — I just want to do it,” Abbott said. “I’ve let go of the question of what is it going to do for me.”Plaza squinted down at the crumb-covered pizza peel. It had hearts and the phrase “Happy Galentine’s Day” carved into it, a reference to a bit from “Parks and Recreation” that has caught on to the point of becoming a full-fledged holiday.“Is this a joke?” she asked, turning around to see if anyone might have been behind this. “It’s like I can’t escape. I’m trying to do a play. Can’t I just do a play without somebody reminding me that I was on network television?” More

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      in Television

      Rachel Bloom Enjoys the Ride

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      The writer and actress visits Coney Island as the New York leg of “Death, Let Me Do My Show” arrives Off Broadway.“My grandfather went on this one time,” Rachel Bloom effused on a recent afternoon. “He thought he was going to die.”A writer-performer best known for the cult musical comedy “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” Bloom was standing at the base of Coney Island’s Cyclone, the 96-year-old wooden thrill ride designated as a landmark by American Coaster Enthusiasts. She was in town to begin technical rehearsals for the New York leg of “Death, Let Me Do My Show,” a mostly one-woman comedy about existential dread at the Lucille Lortel Theater.That dread is familiar to her. And personal. She first experienced it as a school-age child, after emerging from Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion attraction. “I just had this thought of, we’re all going to die someday,” she said. “And I couldn’t shake that.”She has since learned coping mechanisms — how to stop the thoughts before they start or, if that fails, to do something that returns her to her body. Something like riding the world’s second-steepest wooden roller coaster, which boasts 60-mile-per-hour speeds and an 85-foot drop. Bloom — brisk, animated, with a mind that sometimes outraces her mouth — apparently finds a 3.75 G-force relaxing.“When my brain is spinning about something that I cannot solve, the only way to actually fix it is to not think about it and not engage and to be present and in my body,” she said. “What’s the encapsulation of that? It’s being on a roller coaster.”Bloom as Rebecca Bunch (with Santino Fontana, left, and Vincent Rodriguez III) in an episode of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.”Robert Voets/The CWAs with existential dread, Bloom came to coasters young. Having grown up in Los Angeles, within driving distance of the Disneyland, Six Flags, Knott’s Berry Farm trifecta, her favorites include the GhostRider, the Incredicoaster, the Riddler’s Revenge. Though she graduated from New York University, she had never ridden the Cyclone.Bloom had arrived on the boardwalk frazzled from subway hassles. She wore dark pants, a printed shirt over a lacy bra, a baseball cap bought at Mel Brooks’s Vegas show, hoop earrings, Ray-Bans. A young man had hit on her on the train ride over and she had pretended to be a graphic designer named Jessica, then given him a fake Instagram handle. To prepare for the ride, she primed herself with a Nathan’s hot dog (a person should never coaster on an empty stomach), an application of sunscreen to her décolletage and a warm-up cruise on a kiddie coaster, the Sea Serpent. (This was the most intense coaster I could handle, and Bloom now owns a picture of me surrounded by children and looking absolutely terrified.) Then it was time to approach the Cyclone.Her director, Seth Barrish, a solo show veteran, had warned against it, revealing that the last time he had ridden the Cyclone, he had popped a rib. But Bloom was undaunted.“I trust it,” she said, as she approached the ticket booth. She was going to think about drops, thrills, camelback humps. Not injury. Not death.“I think it is very important to not ignore death,” Bloom said. “And to acknowledge that it’s coming for us, but to not let it overwhelm us.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesFor what it’s worth, Bloom didn’t set out to write a show about the fear of death. She began work on it in 2019, just as “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” was ending. (Owing to the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, she could neither discuss that CW comedy nor her short-lived showbiz series “Reboot.”) At first, the stage show was resolutely silly. Its big number concerned a tree with blossoms that smelled like ejaculate. She became pregnant that year and planned to film the show a few months after her due date, then release it as a special.But the world and the novel coronavirus had other ideas. She gave birth in late March, just as she learned that her songwriting partner, Adam Schlesinger, had been admitted to the hospital and was on a ventilator. Her daughter needed a week in the NICU and some time on a ventilator, too. And then, just as her daughter was discharged, Bloom was told that Schlesinger had died from complications of the coronavirus.She’d been thinking about death already. (Pregnancy and maternal mortality rate statistics have a way of forcing that.) After Schlesinger died, those thoughts worsened. “It was awful,” she said. “It was just too profound.”Months later, in the home office that has since become her daughter’s playroom, she looked up at the run order for the show. There was the song about the tree, a bit about pregnancy tests. “This is all moot,” she remembered thinking. “The world is falling apart, my friend’s dead. What is this? It just seems so absurd.” She began to ask herself if a world that felt fundamentally terrible could still support the raunchy, the frivolous. Could she still sing about ejaculate now?As she put it, “What is the place of laughter and silliness when you’ve stared into an abyss?”About a year after that, she felt ready to offer an answer: Onstage, with the abyss as co-star. As she kept working on the show, most of the material that didn’t concern life and death fell away. (Somehow, the tree remained.) The show that emerged and which she has since performed in a half-dozen cities still begins breezily. “Who’s ready to just have fun and pretend it’s 2019?” Bloom announces in the opening moments. Not Bloom. The transformed show becomes a way — in song, video and bits about vaginal bleeding — to work through dread and despair.“I think it is very important to not ignore death,” she said. “And to acknowledge that it’s coming for us, but to not let it overwhelm us.” (In this, the show dovetails with the last sections of her recent essay collection, “I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are.”)Bloom said she doesn’t include anything in her show that “I’m not ready to stand behind 100 percent or any emotion that isn’t processed.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe show isn’t bleak. Or even especially raw. Bloom is a practiced comedian. Barrish is an experienced director. While she admits to having a “a lower level of embarrassment or shame” than most people, she doesn’t include anything that she hasn’t already worked through. “Anything that I’m not ready to stand behind 100 percent or any emotion that isn’t processed,” she said. The character she plays in the show is a Rachel Bloom that hasn’t yet dealt with birth and loss. But she gets there. And the show ends with a revelation that she actually had, in the ocean, on vacation, about her daughter and her dog and an acceptance of her own mortality.“It’s almost like when I start the show I’m pretending to be myself years ago, and then by the end of the show, I’m caught up,” she said.This mental equilibrium suggests that a ride on the Cyclone wasn’t absolutely necessary. But a lack of immediate anguish wouldn’t stop her. After buying a ticket she strode through the gate and then into a seat toward the back of the train, the lap belt tight. Then with a jerk and the sound of juddering metal she was off, hair gleaming in the sun, one arm up to wave as she hurtled down the drops.Two minutes later she returned to the street, breathless and elated, enthusing about the speed, the dips, even the bumps. Worry, if she’d had any to begin with, had been banished.“That was great!” she said. “That was wild. It was like the subway turned into a roller coaster.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Cat Kid Comic Club’ Review: Tiny, Big Imaginations

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      In a musical based on works by the creator of Captain Underpants, an anthropomorphic feline urges young swamp dwellers (and the polliwogs in the audience) to let their creativity run wild.“Oppenheimer” isn’t the summer’s only work of popular culture in which atomic bombs detonate. The other such production, however, draws laughter and aims for an audience that probably worries more about long division than about nuclear fission.That show is TheaterWorksUSA’s “Cat Kid Comic Club: The Musical,” which opened on Sunday at the Lucille Lortel Theater. This family-oriented romp, set in a swamp “right this minute,” features obstreperous tadpoles, a bionic butterflyfish and a sweet-natured feline hero — all characters that spring from the imagination of Dav Pilkey, the delightfully subversive author of such best-selling children’s graphic-novel series as Captain Underpants and Dog Man. Now the writer and lyricist Kevin Del Aguila, who’s also an actor in “Some Like It Hot,” and the composer Brad Alexander, who in 2019 winningly adapted the Dog Man books for TheaterWorksUSA, have returned to bring Pilkey’s Cat Kid Comic Club series to the stage.The new production begins as the tadpoles, who have been endowed with telekinetic powers, are destroying civilization, but soon morphs into a humorous tale of redemption. Cat Kid (Sonia Roman), a feline friend to all the swamp’s residents, has an antidote to the evil force controlling the polliwogs, and Flippy the fish (Jamie LaVerdiere) adopts them. But when they still prove to be disciplinary challenges, Cat Kid starts the club in the musical’s title, hoping that teaching the tiny frogs to create comics will help tame their behavior.Drawing comics certainly helped Pilkey, who has written about his early attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But just as his irreverent novels dismay some adults, the tadpoles produce comics — all acted out hilariously onstage — that horrify their adoptive father.Curly (Brian Owen) delivers one in which a failed baby superhero inadvertently causes nukes to explode, ending the world. And Poppy (L.R. Davidson) draws “The Cute, Little, Fluffy Cloud of Death,” whose lonely, lisping title character finds friendship with a ghost girl and her skeleton dog. (Emmarose Campbell created the dog; AchesonWalsh Studios did the other ingenious puppets that augment the nimble human cast, and Cameron Anderson designed the inventive set.)Now, parents who think gallows humor is inappropriate for the young may not buy tickets to “Cat Kid.” But they would be depriving their children of not only the wit of the musical’s book and the inventiveness of its numbers — they range from Bon Jovi-esque power ballads to bluegrass to rap — but also of its serious import.In addition to urging its audience to be fearlessly imaginative, the show promotes equity for girls in a subplot involving the combative tadpole Naomi (Markia Nicole Smith) and her smug brother, Melvin (Dan Rosales). The action reveals that Naomi’s prickliness derives partly from having to work harder for the rewards that boys like Melvin take for granted.But the musical, deftly directed and choreographed by Marlo Hunter, also endorses a more global inclusiveness. At one point, Cat Kid announces a lesson on perspective, which led a little boy at the performance I attended to whisper, “What’s perspective?”The show answers by demonstrating how the concept plays a role in society as well as in art. At a time when some communities are banning certain children’s books — Pilkey’s included — “Cat Kid” emphasizes the value of learning about diverse points of view and encouraging creativity in young people. And if what they create makes their parents uncomfortable? It’s not the end of the world.Cat Kid Comic ClubThrough Aug. 27 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; twusa.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      ‘The Knight of the Burning Pestle’ Review: Wielding His Trusty Kitchen Tools

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      With a 17th-century grocer as its hero, Red Bull Theater and Fiasco stage a 400-year-old comedy that’s both a satire of the theater and a valentine to it.When did audience members become so wanton and disorderly? Since theaters reopened a year and a half ago, reports of fights, vomiting, public urination, public sex, and the verbal and physical abuse of staff have proliferated. Early in April, police were called to a theater in Britain hosting “The Bodyguard,” because some ticket holders wouldn’t stop singing along, precipitating a near riot. And on Monday night, at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village, a grocer and his wife stormed the stage — well, maybe she didn’t storm so much as prance on up — to demand that the company revise its show and hire their apprentice, too. Is there an usher in the house?Of course, this particular disruption was planned more than 400 years ago. It’s right there in the script of Francis Beaumont’s “The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” a tricksy, loopy, wildly self-referential 1607 play that parodies both city comedy and chivalric romance. Excepting the uptown revival of “Camelot,” these aren’t genres with a lot of currency. But Red Bull Theater and Fiasco, the co-creators of this revival, don’t seem overly concerned. Keep the jokes popping, keep the songs coming, the directors Noah Brody and Emily Young seem to believe, and the contemporaneity will take care of itself.When the play begins, a troupe of actors, costumed in skirts and breeches that gesture toward the Elizabethan, are about to put on a new show, “The London Merchant.” George (Darius Pierce) interrupts them. He doesn’t think that local business owners have been represented fairly by the theater. With the help of his wife, Nell (Jesse Austrian, a Fiasco founder and a cherry bomb of comedy), he forces them to remake the piece with a grocer as its hero. So Rafe (Paco Tolson) is transformed into the Knight of the Burning Pestle, a cavalier with a colander for a helmet and a pestle for a sword.The problem with topical comedy, even backward-looking topical comedy like this, is that the references don’t always survive. That’s true enough here. What’s also true is that the play within the play — the story of a merchant, a daughter, the daughter’s lover — isn’t so engrossing. It also includes a scene in which the lover, Jasper (Devin E. Haqq) threatens to murder the daughter, Luce (Teresa Avia Lim), in order to test her devotion. It’s a frightening moment and categorically abusive. The comedy can’t contain it.But the adventures of the knight and his horse (Royer Bockus) and squire (Ben Steinfeld) are beautifully silly. The interruptions of the grocer and his wife are better still, especially when Nell is pulled onstage to play a pan-Slavic princess who talks like Dracula. Best of all, though, is the Fiasco mien, which favors a giddy, affable, let’s-put-on-a-show quality. The actors are clearly enjoying themselves (Steinfeld, who sings most of his lines, often accompanied by Bockus and the actor and multi-instrumentalist Paul L. Coffey, even more than the rest). And their performances carry with them a swaggering sense of rehearsal room experimentation and delight. They seem to be performing for the sheer pleasure of it, with the audience a welcome afterthought.This probably explains their attraction to “The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” however antiquated and rickety. It’s a satire of theater that is also a valentine to it, to the transport of becoming swept up into a play, to the wonder of seeing someone just like you onstage. Or as in the case of Nell, playing a part yourself. It’s an invitation to all of us: To put on our colanders, take up our kitchen implements and give ourselves over to make-believe.The Knight of the Burning PestleThrough May 13 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; redbulltheater.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      A24, the Indie Film Studio, Buys New York’s Cherry Lane Theater

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      The studio’s first venture into live performance follows the move by Audible, Amazon’s audio subsidiary, to stage works at the nearby Minetta Lane Theater.A24, the independent film and television studio barreling into next weekend’s Academy Awards with a boatload of Oscar nominations, is making an unexpected move into live performance, purchasing a small Off Broadway theater in New York’s West Village.The studio, which until now has focused on making movies, television shows and podcasts, has purchased the Cherry Lane Theater for $10 million, and plans to present plays as well as other forms of live entertainment there, in addition to the occasional film screening.A24, whose films include the leading Oscar contender “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” is not the first film studio to make such a move: the Walt Disney Company has been presenting stage productions at Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theater, which it leases from the state and city, since 1997. But Disney, of course, is an entertainment industry behemoth that has mastered the art of multiplatform storytelling.A more comparable move, perhaps, was that by Audible, an Amazon audio subsidiary that since 2018 has been leasing the Minetta Lane Theater, in Greenwich Village, for live productions which it then records and offers on its digital platform. And Netflix, the streaming juggernaut, has in recent years taken over several cinemas, including the Paris Theater in New York, as well as the Egyptian and Bay theaters in Los Angeles.The A24 acquisition, coming at a time when many theaters are still struggling to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, suggests a vote of confidence in live performance. A24 plans to present some events celebrating Cherry Lane’s centennial this spring, and then to close the theater for renovations before beginning full-scale programming next year.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Much remains uncertain about how the company intends to use the theater. A24 declined to make anyone available to speak on the record about the acquisition, but an official there said that the company had not yet decided whether it would develop work for the stage, or present work developed by others. The official, who was granted anonymity to describe the company’s plans, said that the studio hoped the theater would allow it to strengthen existing relationships with writers and performers who work on stage and screen, and to develop new relationships with comedians and theater artists.A24 plans to retain the theater’s existing staff while adding to it with its own team, the official said, and as part of the renovation it plans to install technology so the theater can be used for film screenings.The official said A24’s theater venture is a partnership with Taurus Investment Holdings.“I really believe my theater is going into the right hands,” said Angelina Fiordellisi, who has owned the theater since 1996. “They love to develop and produce the work of emerging writers, and a lot of their writers are playwrights. I can’t imagine a better way to bring future life to the theater.”Fiordellisi, 68, has been trying to sell the theater for some time. “I don’t want to work that hard anymore,” she said, “and I want to spend more time with my family.”The purchase, which was previously reported by Curbed, includes three attached properties, including a 179-seat theater, a 60-seat theater and eight apartments, on the Village’s picturesque, curving Commerce Street. The Cherry Lane, in a 19th-century building that was a brewery and a box factory before being converted to theatrical use in 1923, bills itself as the city’s longest continually running Off Broadway theater.In 2021, Fiordellisi agreed to sell the property to the Lucille Lortel Theater for $11 million, but the sale fell apart. Last week, Lortel announced that it had spent $5.3 million to purchase a three-story carriage house in Chelsea, where it plans to open a 61-seat theater in 2025. The Lortel organization also has a 295-seat theater in the West Village.The Cherry Lane will now be a for-profit, commercial venture; Fiordellisi had operated it through a nonprofit, occasionally presenting work that she developed and more often renting it to nonprofit and commercial producers. Fiordellisi said she will convert her nonprofit to a foundation that will give grants to playwrights and small theater companies. More

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      ‘Small Talk’ Review: The Art of Meaningless Banter

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      In his brisk, low-maintenance Off Broadway show, the workhorse comic Colin Quinn extols the virtues of idle chitchat.After creating solo shows on the American constitution (“Unconstitutional”), the looming civil war (“Red State Blue State”) and the history of the world (“Long Story Short”), the workhorse comic Colin Quinn has decided to take on a subject of real consequence: small talk.It’s not as sharp of a pivot as you might think. Small talk is dismissed as shallow, but I was persuaded by Ruth Graham’s defense of it in Slate as a social glue in an increasingly divided world, or as she puts it, the “solid ground of shared culture.” Quinn clearly believes this, too. Whether you agree or not, there is little doubt we are currently facing a chitchat crisis. As Quinn deadpans in “Small Talk,” a brisk mix of charming comedy, thin history, self-help guide and various digressions that runs through Feb. 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, “Between phones, air pods and self-checkout, small talk is down 87 percent.”That doesn’t even account for the isolation of the pandemic that made us all rusty at saying hello to neighbors and jawing about the weather. Meaningless banter, a subgenre of small talk according to Quinn, is its own art. Ease into conversations, and don’t be abrupt, Quinn advises; he also suggests beginning with an exhale and “whoo.” Dressed casually in button-down shirt and sneakers, Quinn is big on the virtue of long vowel sounds. He also likes nicknames, nodding and starting conversations with “Is it me, or …”Part of his take on America is that while we may not be the most astute, we are the country with the best, or at least the most, personality, an empire built on charm, talk and salesmanship. This is why the decline of small talk matters. Quinn has no time for the idea it’s inauthentic. Its fakery is part of the appeal. Small talk has rules, and following them is more important than being your true self. Like improv, you need to listen and agree. Unlike improv, never escalate.This might be where Quinn runs into problems, because after a promising start, he can’t help but move outside the lines of his framework to ride hobby horses. He digs into social media, how the left and right are their own cults and the distorting dangers of technology. It’s almost as if he doesn’t believe small talk is big enough.Quinn has always been a wandering performer, with an intuitive grasp of openings and closers, but structurally messy in between. James Fauvell directs this piece with a light hand, and the production, on a bare stage, has a stripped-down aesthetic of a comedy club.Quinn once sarcastically mocked those who tell comics to evolve with the times. But he’s done just that, moving from game show hosting to political chat (“Tough Crowd”) to “Saturday Night Live” to Twitter. He has now settled into an essential part of the Off Broadway landscape, adding a much-needed bounty of jokes to the regular theatrical menu. His material doesn’t tend to be personal, though you see hints of a shift in the end of this show, when he movingly brings up Norm Macdonald, whom Quinn rightly describes as a “master small talker,” and briefly mentions a heart attack he suffered a few years ago that nearly killed him. He’s not one to get sentimental (is it me or does that kill small talk?), but, like his last solo show, he ends by imagining how people will look back on us as a civilization when we’re gone.He also speculates that if our country ended tomorrow, our epitaph might sound like something on a Myrtle Beach T-shirt: “America: If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best.”It’s a reminder that while Quinn favored sweeping ambitious subjects, his real gift, and greatest comic subject, is the comedy of language: clichés, slogans, slang. Is this stuff small? It depends on how you look at it.Small TalkThrough Feb. 11 at Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; colinquinnshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Historic Cherry Lane Theater Sold for $11 Million

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      The Lucille Lortel Theater Foundation, which has managed the 97-year-old theater for the past decade, will take over the building in Greenwich Village.The Cherry Lane Theater, the oldest continuously running Off Broadway theater in New York City, has been sold to the Lucille Lortel Theater Foundation for $11 million, the theater announced on Monday.“It has been a great run,” Angelina Fiordellisi, the executive director of the theater, said in a statement. “To stand on the stage where so many of our greatest artists, crews and theater providers have stood is to know what theater history feels like.”The new owner will be the Lucille Lortel Theater Foundation, which is a few blocks from the Cherry Lane Theater on Christopher Street and has managed the building for the past decade. The sale includes the 179-seat main stage and a 60-seat studio theater.Fiordellisi, who has led the 97-year-old nonprofit theater since acquiring the building in 1996, will continue to lead the nonprofit producing group Cherry Lane Alternative, which will have readings — and possibly productions — in the theater’s studio space.She had previously announced plans to sell the building, at 38 Commerce Street, in 2010, citing financial struggles. At the time, she told The New York Times that the theater was operating at a deficit of $250,000, which she attributed to a steep drop in income from government and foundation support, ticket sales and rental fees.“It’s frightening to me, what’s happened to Off Broadway theater,” Fiordellisi told The Times in 2010. “We have to adhere to the formula of having a film star in our productions to sell tickets because it’s so financially prohibitive. I don’t want to do theater like that.”But eight months later, she reversed her decision because of a significantly reduced deficit, a new managing agent and the support of the theater’s neighbors. Cherry Lane Alternative, the resident theater company Fiordellisi established in 1997, currently has a deficit of $100,000, a spokesman for the theater, Sam Rudy, said.The theater, a Greenwich Village institution that has long been a testing ground for new work by emerging artists, reopened at full capacity last month with Jacqueline Novak’s “Get on Your Knees,” a comedy that offers a personal and intellectual history of oral sex. It is scheduled to run through July 31.Under Fiordellisi, Cherry Lane has mentored writers including Katori Hall, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama for “The Hot Wing King”; Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, whose play “Pass Over” will begin previews on Broadway in August after being produced at the theater in 2016; and Jocelyn Bioh, whose “Merry Wives,” a contemporary take on Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” is running at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.Cherry Lane was started by a group of artists who were colleagues of Edna St. Vincent Millay and has showcased work by Samuel Beckett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. But despite its storied history, the theater had not staged a play in two years when Fiordellisi bought it for $1.7 million in 1996 and renovated it for $3 million.Cherry Lane Alternative, the nonprofit producing group, said it expects to resume a scaled-back version of its acclaimed Mentor Project, which pairs emerging writers with established playwrights like Lynn Nottage, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Taylor Mac to develop and stage their work in the studio theater space. It will likely include one production per season instead of the typical three.George Forbes, the Lucille Lortel Theater Foundation’s executive director, said the foundation plans to announce new programming shortly. More