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    In Chicago, 3 Shows That Keep the Audience in Mind and Engaged

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    Musical adaptations of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “The Lord of the Rings” as well as a new Samuel D. Hunter play were on our critic’s itinerary.The musical adaptation of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” that’s playing at the Goodman Theater incorporates quite a bit of crowd work. In a final coup de théâtre that felt both radical and exhilarating, a character leads theatergoers in a communal use of their Playbills.While the three shows I saw during a recent weekend trip to Chicago were wildly different from one another, my mind kept returning to their relationship with their respective audience. Seeing “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” first set me off on that train of thought.Based on John Berendt’s best-selling retelling of a true crime in 1980s Savannah, Ga., the musical, which is running through Aug. 11, has edited out some colorful figures (goodbye, Joe Odom) and condensed the events (the legal wranglings taking up a good chunk of Berendt’s book whiz by in a few minutes). But the biggest move is a bold change in perspective for the show, which has a book by Taylor Mac and a score by Jason Robert Brown.Berendt’s omnipresent chronicler is now us, the theatergoers, whom the characters often address directly from the stage. This will particularly resonate with those familiar with Mac’s way of integrating the audience into a narrative (as Mac did most notably with the 2016 epic “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music”). Another key Mac preoccupation is the haunting of America by its past, something particularly relevant when it comes to Savannah’s self-mythologizing of its lineage. “Get out of my head, dirty demons of historical pain!” the Lady Chablis (J. Harrison Ghee, a Tony Award winner for “Some Like It Hot”) says at one point. She’s referring to her own history, but it’s hard not to hear a wider reference.Chablis, an exuberant entertainer and insuppressible life force, has moved from the book’s periphery to the show’s center, and Ghee’s performance, languid yet sharply angled, is a delight. The nightclub number “Let There Be Light” could use a little more voltage, but then the director Rob Ashford and the choreographer Tanya Birl-Torres are overall too timid in the splashier scenes.The show’s other focal point is Jim Williams (Tom Hewitt), the wealthy antique dealer and furniture restorer who kills his younger lover, Danny Hansford (Austin Colby). In effect, Mac’s book is structured around two ways of being queer in the South 40 years ago. The outsider Chablis is Savannah’s very own Puck, spreading joyful bedlam and ladling out truths; Jim is both accepted and resented by the city’s elite — personified by the Ladies Preservation League, led by Emma Dawes (Sierra Boggess, revealing previously underused comedic chops).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Grey House,’ Broadway Gets an Expert Haunting

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      A new play about a sisterhood of sorrows brings something scary to the stage, but is delivering shocks and icks enough?Four strange girls, somewhere between 12 and 200 years old, live in an isolated cabin in the woods. Don’t they always?Marlow (Sophia Anne Caruso) is the alpha, bossing the others around — and also bossing the stranded outsiders, because of course there are stranded outsiders in a play that trades on the tropes of a million horror tales. In “Grey House,” the prime trope is coy creepiness. Of the small knife she occasionally brandishes, Marlow, who gives Wednesday Addams vibes, comfortingly says, “If I put it in your eye, it wouldn’t even hit your brain.”Good to know — and basically true of the play itself.“Grey House,” at the Lyceum Theater, is certainly an in-your-face assault, more in the manner of John Carpenter movies than anything seen onstage since the age of melodrama. It is so expertly assembled from spare parts by the playwright Levi Holloway and the director Joe Mantello that you may not notice, between the jump scares and the shivery pauses, how little it has on its mind. Something about cycles of abuse? The legacy of misogyny? Sure, let’s go with that.But mostly let’s go with the freak-out fun of the four telekinetic weirdos and their den mother, Raleigh, played by Laurie Metcalf in a stringy salt-and-pepper wig that’s almost as frightening as she is. Raleigh is not very maternal; Marlow says she is their mother “sometimes.” Other than feeding them and untangling their tresses as if weeding a garden, she generally leaves them to their own devices.At the start of the play, those devices include some kind of gas-mask contraption that an ethereal deaf girl named Bernie (Millicent Simmonds) is making. (Hint: It’s not a gas mask.) What Squirrel (Colby Kipnes) is making is even worse: a kind of tapestry of innards. (She is presumably called Squirrel because of her tendency to gnaw things like phone cords that if left un-gnawed would short-circuit the plot.)Luckily, the fourth girl, A1656 (Alyssa Emily Marvin), is just making nice. She translates for Bernie and, when the outsiders arrive, calms them with good humor. Explaining her name, she admits that it may be unusual but “it’s no A1655.”The outsiders, a childless couple, need calming because they’ve just wrecked their car on a requisitely dark and snowy mountain road. Max (Tatiana Maslany) was driving; swerving to hit a deer, she hit it anyway. The accident has left Henry (Paul Sparks) with his ankle mangled, or maybe his leg or maybe his soul — it’s a restless manglement, moving through him as the play’s 95 minutes tick by. In any case, Raleigh splints him up, and the girls give him moonshine as an anesthetic.Well, not really moonshine.“Grey House,” which comes to Broadway from Chicago, where it had its world premiere at A Red Orchid Theater in 2019, keeps its secrets as quiet as its shocks are conspicuous. Only gradually do we get any sense of how the marriage of Max and Henry was crashing even before the accident, or why the coven of girls, if not their minder, has such an interest in helping it come apart completely. By the time we do begin to put together a possible explanatory scheme, it’s too late to matter; the trappings of horror, if not any meaningful horror beneath, have scared the bejesus out of the psychological drama.From left, Sophia Anne Caruso, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Millicent Simmonds in “Grey House” at the Lyceum Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least those trappings are superb. Though I’ve left undescribed the two other humans (at least I think they are humans) who fill out the cast, it gives nothing away to discuss the even-more-prominent title character. As designed by Scott Pask and lit by Natasha Katz, and especially as given voice by the sound designer, Tom Gibbons, the house seems to be the repository of feelings and history that everyone else is mostly sidestepping. It moans while they tease.That teasing quality, though sometimes charming — and often, if you are a scaredy-cat, a relief from the hard-core jolts — is the giveaway that “Grey House” should not be taken too seriously, regardless of its allusions to real-world horror of the past and present. (Yes, the Holocaust gets a hat tip.) We know too much about the rules of the genre, how information and staging will be manipulated to scare and delight us, to give much credence to anything deeper. In that way, “Grey House” is like a jukebox musical, squishing familiar arias — gore, ghosts, what have you — into a chic and enjoyable if mostly empty new container.Letting go of meaning in the theater in favor of sensation is a big ask today. The ambition of playwrights to speak directly to our times through emotional naturalism has largely wiped horror, mystery and their ilk from our stages. One of the last such plays to appear on Broadway was an adaptation of Stephen King’s “Misery” in 2015, starring Bruce Willis as an author of mystery novels and, as the psychotic fan who nearly nurses him to death, once again the great Laurie Metcalf.So another thing that has to be said for “Grey House” is that it has given artists who want to explore the opportunities and particular language of an unfashionable form a rare chance to do so. Metcalf and the rest of the cast turn that opportunity into a meal; by investing in its clichés without condescension, they do much to de-cliché them.But what makes the effort meaningful to artists — Holloway began thinking about the story after a family tragedy — may not make it meaningful to us. And though the theater is already a kind of haunted house, filled with odd beings and strange noises, horror may simply work better in a less live medium. When Max and Henry show up at the cabin, unaware that anyone is there, they look around at the spooky surroundings, listen to the wind howling, and somehow find it all so familiar.“I’ve seen this movie,” Henry says. Which is the problem exactly.Grey HouseAt the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; greyhousebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      In Broadway’s ‘Grey House,’ Something Nightmarish This Way Comes

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      Levi Holloway on his psychological thriller starring Laurie Metcalf: “It wears the jacket of horror. But I think it’s more heart than horror.”When it comes to plays that inspire fear, unsettle the audience or display horrific intensity, only a handful come to mind. Martin McDonagh’s gruesome “The Pillowman” is one. Tracy Letts came up with two: the gleefully nasty thriller “Killer Joe” and the paranoia tale “Bug.”This certainly makes Levi Holloway’s “Grey House,” now in previews at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater, an oddity. The premise is classic horror: Stranded in a blizzard, a couple (Tatiana Maslany and Paul Sparks) end up in an eerie house filled with rather unusual children and their minder (Laurie Metcalf).“It wears the jacket of horror,” Holloway said of his play, which premiered in Chicago in 2019. “But I think it’s more heart than horror.”Paul Sparks, center, as a stranded traveler who finds shelter in a house occupied by, clockwise from left: Colby Kipnes, Sophia Anne Caruso, Eamon Patrick O’Connell, Millicent Simmonds and Alyssa Emily Marvin in “Grey House.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe genre may be scarce onstage but none of the major players here are strangers to works investigating disturbing tensions or the boundaries of reality. Metcalf and Sparks share a Stephen King connection: she starred in “Misery” on Broadway, and he was in Season 2 of Hulu’s “Castle Rock,” which is set in King’s fictional universe. Maslany’s virtuosic portrayal of numerous clones in the series “Orphan Black” earned her an Emmy Award. Millicent Simmonds played Emily Blunt’s daughter, Regan, in “A Quiet Place” and “A Quiet Place Part 2,” while Sophia Anne Caruso played Lydia in the “Beetlejuice” musical on Broadway and starred in the Netflix fantasy film “The School for Good and Evil.”Even the director, Joe Mantello, has partaken, putting on his actor’s cap to play a reporter in “American Horror Story: NYC.”During a series of interviews that took place in the Lyceum’s appropriately atmospheric basement lounge, members of the show’s cast and creative team discussed what horror means to them, and the particular challenges and rewards of “Grey House,” which opens on May 30. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.Levi HollowayWhen Holloway was 5, his father took him to see “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in a movie theater. “The skin was taken off of me,” Holloway said, “I was so scared.”Undeterred, his father eventually bought him a subscription to the horror film magazine Fangoria, so young Levi could understand the mechanics of fear. To encourage his kid to read, Dad gave him books by Stephen King, starting with “The Stand.”As a playwright, he has embraced horror partly out of genuine love (he mentioned John Carpenter’s “The Thing” as a favorite, and don’t get him started on why “The Exorcist III” is the best of the series) but also as a way to process a major trauma: In 2016, his twin sister was killed at the age of 35. “It was so meaningless and pointless, and such a baffling event that it got me thinking about the why of it,” he said.“I started thinking about predestination and fate and how no matter what direction we’re going, we’re going to end up where we have to be,” Holloway continued. “So I wanted to write about that, and I wanted to write about grief, where you put it and the house that holds it.”Caruso, left, and Metcalf, who plays a minder of a group of children, in the play, directed by Joe Mantello.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSophia Anne Caruso“Mind games, manipulation, psychological thrillers in general are the scariest genre of quote horror to me,” Caruso said. “And I think that this play definitely sits in the ‘psychological thriller’ section of horror.”The young actress has her issues with the genre, in which she sees women as often losing power. “But throughout this story, we are holding a lot of power without people directly realizing it,” she said of the play’s women. (Well, maybe not all of them.)“What I love about my character is I feel like she’s always one step ahead,” Caruso said of her role, which makes the most of the actress’s gift for sardonic delivery. “She knows exactly where we’re going but she doesn’t show it, and that’s a fun frustration to play with.”Joe MantelloBefore rehearsals began, Mantello watched “The Shining,” in which he saw parallels with Holloway’s play. “It’s a psychological thriller and, yes, there are elements of gore in it, but I think it was the isolation of that family in a very wintry landscape,” he said of the Stanley Kubrick film. “And some presence that is altering the trajectory of their lives.”As one of Broadway’s most in-demand directors, Mantello is used to figuring out exacting scripts, but he initially found the one for “Grey House” to be elusive. So he asked Holloway what animated the play’s inner logic. “I think that it’s important in this genre that this world has a particular set of rules, this house has a particular set of rules,” Mantello said. “Though the audience may not ever completely comprehend exactly what those rules are, we all have to be crystal-clear about them and adhere to them.”The “grey house” is not just a physical place, either: it seems to connect to a generalized anxiety that feels very modern, even though the show is set in 1977. “I feel that the world is in an incredibly dangerous place right now, and I’m very connected to the idea of people in peril,” Mantello said. Laughing, he added, “In this particular case, the danger is seemingly benign children, mysterious children.”“Leading the audience through the laughs into where we’re headed is a real fun actors’ path to take,” said Metcalf, above right, with Holloway at the Lyceum Theater.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesLaurie Metcalf“The thing that shook me the most was ‘The Exorcist,’” Metcalf said of her earliest encounters with horror films. “I think I was in my early teens and that did me in for horror for the next 50-something years.”And now here she is, starring in “Grey House.” Metcalf was drawn by the prospect of working again with Mantello, her frequent collaborator, and she was curious as to how he would handle a script that, she admitted, she did not “completely understand” the first time she read it. “I knew that Joe saw something in it that I wanted to be in the room to discover also,” she said.The show has to balance a tricky combination of dark wit and unsettling atmosphere. “The audience is going to teach us that piece of the puzzle — their reactions will definitely tell us a lot,” Metcalf said of how the comedy and horror genres thrive on viewers’ feedback. “We’ll learn how far we can go with the humor and the thrills.”She added, “I had the same feeling in ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane,’ which is horrific and funny,” Metcalf said, referring to performing in the Steppenwolf production of Martin McDonagh’s play, back in 1999. “Leading the audience through the laughs into where we’re headed is a real fun actors’ path to take.”Millicent SimmondsAs Caruso pointed out, genre cinema, especially horror, can be a fraught place for women. For Simmonds, who is deaf, there is an additional layer. “It’s rare to see Deaf people who actually have that kind of power and agency to navigate a world,” she said of her character, through an interpreter. “They’re often portrayed as victims, a pity creature, somebody to help. When I read the script,” she added, “it was about just a person, not necessarily that they’re a Deaf person.”Simmonds said that in general she has a hard time dealing with spiders and graphic violence in films, and cited Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” as having affected her “because you don’t know what’s real and what’s not” — something that also applies to “Grey House.”Cagey, like her colleagues, about discussing the play in detail, Simmonds allowed that she sees it as a maternal story. “It investigates this question of what is a mother,” she said. “What does a mother mean to each of us? What do you need to sacrifice to be a mother? How do you raise a family?”Paul SparksLike Mantello, Sparks connected the show to a larger sense of dread that is haunting our society, a sense that our world is unsettled. “There’s a lot of things that we can’t control and things that we don’t understand, and things that aren’t what we think they are,” he said. “All that stuff is in this play.”The actor pointed out that “Grey House” uses a major horror trope, the cabin in the woods. But Holloway spins it in a novel way, inserting a cryptic side to the story that made Sparks want to pick it apart, and decode it.But he hopes audiences show some restraint in how much they share after seeing it. “I’ve been really going out of my way to not tell people anything about what’s going on,” he said. “These actors, these kids — I think people are not going to know what to expect. And it’s not even going to be close to anything they can imagine.“I think you’re going to be shocked,” he added. “I really do.” More

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      ‘Somewhere in Queens’ Review: Rooting for the Underdog

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      Ray Romano plumbed the absurdities of family life on his sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond.” For this, his feature directing debut, he sticks to an Italian American milieu.Someday, when conventional wisdom gives way to common sense, “Everybody Loves Raymond” will be recognized as one of the best network situation comedies. Incisively written and superbly acted, it explored with surgical precision the bottomless hostility animating passive-aggressive family dynamics. Ray Romano, whose standup comedy fueled the series’ themes, very successfully bridged the skill set of a standup comedian with that of an ensemble comedic actor. And yet. No respect, or not enough respect.In any event, the series is now a thing of the past, and Romano is taking a turn behind the camera for his feature directing debut, “Somewhere in Queens,” which he co-wrote with Mark Stegemann. Here, Romano sticks to the outer-borough Italian American milieu of his series. The results are mixed.Romano plays Leo Russo, a likable, “Rocky”-obsessed screw-up who’s the underdog of his dad’s family construction firm. His tough cookie wife, Angela (Laurie Metcalf), is recovering from cancer. Their only son, nicknamed Sticks (Jacob Ward), is recessively shy but fiercely talented at basketball. His gift might yield him a college scholarship and has already attracted Dani (Sadie Stanley), a free-spirited girl.But when Sticks crowds Dani, things cool between the two. Leo, in a fit of desperation, approaches Dani with an appalling proposition that will continue the momentum of the young couple’s relationship and keep Sticks on track for his college tryout.This genuinely discomfiting narrative material hits some raw nerves, and the cast, which also includes the great Tony Lo Bianco, doesn’t back down from emotional authenticity. But if you’ve been following the movie’s music choices, which contain a number of songs that are at least wet-noodle adjacent, you won’t be surprised that Romano eventually contrives soft, and arguably goofy, exits for his troubled characters.Somewhere in QueensRated R for language and some sexual material. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Laurie Metcalf to Return to Broadway in a Horror Story, ‘Grey House’

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      The play, directed by Joe Mantello and also starring Tatiana Maslany, had a well-reviewed debut in Chicago. It begins performances in April.Horror films have become a rare bright spot for contemporary Hollywood. Now a group of theater artists is hoping the genre can work on Broadway, too.The producers Tom Kirdahy (“Hadestown”) and Robert Ahrens (“Little Shop of Horrors”) said Tuesday that they are planning to bring an unsettling new play, “Grey House,” to Broadway this spring. The production will reunite the actress Laurie Metcalf and the director Joe Mantello, each of whom has won two Tony Awards. Their most recent collaboration, a revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” never made it to opening night because of the coronavirus pandemic.Metcalf, a veteran stage actress also known for her work on television (“Roseanne”) and film (“Lady Bird”), will co-star with Tatiana Maslany (“Orphan Black”) and Paul Sparks (“House of Cards”). This will not be Metcalf’s first scary story on Broadway: In 2015 she starred in a stage production of “Misery,” based on the novel by Stephen King.Also in the cast: Sophia Anne Caruso (“Beetlejuice”) and Millicent Simmonds (“A Quiet Place”).“Grey House,” written by Levi Holloway, is about a couple (Maslany and Sparks) who, after crashing their car during a snowstorm, wind up taking shelter in a cabin occupied by a group of teenage girls and a woman who claims to be their mother (Metcalf). The play had a 2019 production at A Red Orchid Theater in Chicago, where the critic Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune hailed it as “a savvy, smart, self-aware new play,” and declared that “it just happens to be legitimately terrifying.”The Broadway production, scheduled to begin previews April 29 and to open May 30 at the Lyceum Theater, will not be eligible for this year’s Tony Awards, but instead will be considered part of the 2023-24 season.Holloway, a Florida native who spent much of his career in Chicago and now lives in Los Angeles, has long worked on integrating deaf and hearing performers — he co-founded Neverbird Project, a theater company for deaf and hearing young people — and one of the characters in “Grey House” is deaf. That character will be played by Simmonds, who is deaf.Holloway said in an interview that the first movie he saw was “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” when he was 5 (his father was a horror buff), but that he has mixed feelings about his play being classified in the horror genre.“It’s a word I’m never quite comfortable with,” he said. “I think all good theater is horror. By my estimation horror asks our characters to change, and they must change in order to survive, and that change usually takes the form of the truth. I think that translates to most great stories.”He said the plot of the play “just comes from my nightmares.”“It’s about a lot of things, most of which I don’t know the words for — it’s about love and pain that we carry, and the shelter we build for them both, and about the way we protect the things that hurt us the most, because who are we without our wounds?” he said. “It’s a contemplation on grief and love and how we sometimes feel safe in our pain.” More