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    Review: In ‘Brooklyn Laundry,’ There’s No Ordering Off the Menu

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    John Patrick Shanley’s new play, starring Cecily Strong and David Zayas, is a romantic comedy with a penchant for the resolutely dismal.Fran and Owen have been chatting for only a few minutes, not all that companionably, when he asks her out. It’s a risky thing to do, since she’s a customer at the drop-off laundry he owns. To Owen, though, Fran resembles his ex-fiancée: “Smart, one inch from terrific, but gloomy,” he says.So bone-tired of being single that a casual insult from a guy she’s just met isn’t a deal breaker, Fran warily agrees to dinner.“But I don’t get why you want to, really,” she adds. “I’m not your old gloomy girlfriend. I’m somebody else.”Owen counters: “Well, whoever you think I am, I’m somebody else, too.”This is truer than he comprehends. Starring Cecily Strong as Fran and David Zayas as Owen, John Patrick Shanley’s enticingly cast, rather lumpy new play, “Brooklyn Laundry,” can get you thinking about warning labels — those heads-ups that we all ought to come with, so people know what they’re in for when they encounter us.Fran’s warning label would be long and convoluted, Owen’s even more so. Each of them would be surprised if they read their own. They realize that they’re a little bit broken, in need of repair. They just don’t understand quite how.Side note to Fran: While Owen seems potentially quite sweet (gruff adorability is Zayas’s bailiwick), he is way more hidebound and a whole lot more self-pitying than he lets on. Run, maybe?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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      ‘Jelly’s Last Jam’ Review: A Musical Paradise, Even in Purgatory

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      Did Jelly Roll Morton “invent” jazz, as he claimed? A sensational Encores! revival offers a postmortem prosecution of one of the form’s founding fathers.That painful history can be alchemized into thrilling entertainment is both the central idea and the takeaway experience of “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the jaw-dropping Encores! revival that opened on Wednesday at City Center. Especially in its first act, as it tells the intertwined stories of Jelly Roll Morton and the early years of jazz, it offers up wonder after wonder, in songs and dances so neatly conceived and ferociously performed that in the process of blowing the roof off the building they also make your hair stand on end.It might not be immediately apparent from its strange framework that the musical could produce such an effect. The book, by George C. Wolfe, who also directed the 1992 Broadway original, introduces us to Morton (Nicholas Christopher) at the moment of his death. That’s when he is greeted, in a kind of nightclub limbo, by Chimney Man — so called because this forbidding psychopomp, played by the fascinatingly strict Billy Porter, sweeps souls to their destination. Accompanied by a trio of louche, bespangled “Hunnies,” he first puts Morton through a recap of his life, with an emphasis on his lies, betrayals and musicological self-aggrandizement.Tiffany Mann as Miss Mamie, a local blues singer. One of her powerhouse numbers points Morton on the road north.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow many of those lies and betrayals really happened is unclear; most of the musical’s specific situations and supporting characters seem to be inventions or conflations. But the self-aggrandizement is all too real. Morton, not content to be merely a great pianist and composer in the early years of jazz, repeatedly claimed to have “invented” the genre. It is for this sin — a sin against history but also against Blackness — that the show seeks to prosecute him.If only real trials were as entertaining. Morton’s privileged but stifling youth in a wealthy, light-skinned New Orleans family is sketched in a series of numbers that efficiently establish the expectations of the Creole class and his rebellions against it. Like most rebellions, his involve exposure to different kinds of people; when the boy (beautifully played by Alaman Diadhiou) sneaks into the dives and brothels on the Blacker side of town, the sounds of tinkers, ragpickers, beignet men and voodoo vendors, layered and compressed and powerfully polyrhythmic, open his ears to a new kind of music.As presented here, that music is sensationally catchy. (Though mostly Morton’s, it also includes material written by Luther Henderson for the 1992 production.) Somewhat miraculously considering its knottiness, it has been set with lyrics, by Susan Birkenhead, that spark and sparkle. In numbers like “The Whole World’s Waitin’ to Sing Your Song,” she weaves scat and slang and classic Broadway wordsmithery (“Slide that sound/Roll that rhythm/Syncopate the street-beat with ’em”) into a multipurpose dramatic net.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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      ‘Jelly’s Last Jam’ Returns, Bringing a Jazz Tale to a New Generation

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      Jason Michael Webb, the show’s guest music director, said he wants audiences at the musical about Jelly Roll Morton to experience “a time period that does not exist anymore.”The team behind the Encores! revival of “Jelly’s Last Jam” is not looking to reinvent George C. Wolfe’s ambitious 1992 Broadway show. But they do hope that this rendition, opening on Wednesday at New York City Center, will introduce the musical to a new generation.Taking that idea a step further, Jason Michael Webb, the show’s guest music director, said he also wanted audiences “to immerse themselves in a joy in a time period that does not exist anymore.”That joy comes via the story of jazz and the works of Jelly Roll Morton, a ragtime pianist who said he invented the genre in 1902. In “Jelly’s Last Jam,” Morton is portrayed as a conflicted soul, a mixed-race man of Creole descent whose light hue gives him privilege in his hometown, New Orleans. He rebels against his heritage and soaks in the music of economically disadvantaged Black people, stirring up dissension in his family. He goes out on the road and becomes a well-known musician. Yet as jazz music’s popularity swells, Morton’s impact on it is forgotten. He’s a pioneer but isn’t given proper credit for it.John Clay III and Nicholas Christopher rehearsing last week at New York City Center before the show’s two-week run, which begins Wednesday.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesWhile Morton’s music is the centerpiece here, the show also features lyrics by Susan Birkenhead and additional compositions by Luther Henderson. In his review of the production, which starred Gregory Hines and Savion Glover as the older and younger versions of Morton, the Times critic Frank Rich called the first act “sizzling,” adding, “at once rollicking and excessive, roof-raising and overstuffed, you fly into intermission, high on the sensation that something new and exciting is happening.”The Encores! production features slightly tweaked arrangements by Webb, a Broadway veteran and Tony Award nominee for his orchestrations for “MJ the Musical.” Nicholas Christopher (“Sweeney Todd”) and Alaman Diadhiou take on the older and younger Morton roles, respectively, and other cast members include Billy Porter, Joaquina Kalukango, Leslie Uggams and Okierete Onaodowan.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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      How Sutton Foster Juggled ‘Sweeney Todd’ and ‘Once Upon a Mattress’

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      There’s busy, and then there’s bonkers.Sutton Foster, one of musical theater’s most celebrated performers, had already committed to starring in a City Center production of “Once Upon a Mattress,” on top of developing concert shows for Carnegie Hall and Café Carlyle, when she was approached last fall about stepping into the lead female role in the Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd.”She hesitated.“Sweeney” wanted new stars in January, the same month as the “Mattress” production. She would have to simultaneously master two scores and two stagings while building the bespoke concert shows and learning to speak with a Cockney accent. And even if, as it turned out, “Sweeney” was willing to wait until her “Mattress” run ended, she’d still have to do double duty — rehearsing “Sweeney” during the day while performing “Mattress” at night.She said yes.On Feb. 9, she took her first bows as Mrs. Lovett, the shamelessly resourceful pie shop owner in “Sweeney Todd,” alongside Aaron Tveit, also in his first night, as the bloodthirsty barber (the show’s title character). It was just five days after she took her final bows as Princess Winnifred the Woebegone, a coarse but determined marriage candidate in “Once Upon a Mattress,” and the applause was thunderous.Foster with Aaron Tveit, who is also new to “Sweeney Todd,” during rehearsals in early February at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.OK McCausland for The New York TimesSo how did she do it?Plenty of people hold down two jobs at once. There are repertory companies in which actors perform in a rotating selection of shows. There are Broadway stars who spend offstage hours filming television shows. And 40 years ago, Cynthia Nixon, while still a teenager, spent three months performing in two Broadway plays at the same time (dashing from one theater to another and back again).But still, learning the starring roles in two vocally and physically demanding musicals at virtually the same time is a feat. And, inevitably, Foster faced hurdles. Among them: Halfway through “Mattress” rehearsals, she came down with Covid (for a third time).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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      ‘Once Upon a Mattress’ Review: Sutton Foster as a Perfectly Goofy Princess

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      The Encores! series returns with a concert staging of the 1959 musical, which also stars the very funny Harriet Harris and Michael Urie.Some casting choices are blindingly obvious. That does not make them lazy; it makes them right.Such is the case with Sutton Foster as the eccentric Princess Winnifred in the Encores! revival of “Once Upon a Mattress,” which opened Wednesday at City Center. The central role in this broadly goofy musical was exuberantly, indelibly originated by Carol Burnett in 1959.While Foster has displayed range over the course of her musical-theater career — she’s stepping into Mrs. Lovett’s kitchen in “Sweeney Todd” on Feb. 9, five days after completing this show’s two-week run — many of Foster’s best roles, like Janet Van De Graaff in “The Drowsy Chaperone” and Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” are imprinted with an ebullient, joyful relish in the very act of performance. And Winnifred, described by another character as “a strangely energetic swamp girl,” is an ideal outlet for that sensibility.“Once Upon a Mattress” is nobody’s idea of a great musical, but it is many people’s idea of a fun one. Based on the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea,” this vaudevillian lark — which The New York Times described, possibly not in a good way, as “a child’s introduction to Broadway” in a review of a 1964 CBS telecast — is celebrated for helping to kick-start Burnett’s career and for being the composer Mary Rodgers’s sole Broadway hit.That last clearly represents a loss: Rodgers, paired with the lyricist Marshall Barer, demonstrates startling ease with musical-theater idioms and the late-1950s vernacular. (Winnifred’s “The Swamps of Home” works as both an earnest ballad and a sly spoof of the goopy nostalgic yearnings of some numbers by Richard Rodgers, Mary’s father, and Oscar Hammerstein II.)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?  More

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      ‘Pal Joey’ Review: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildering

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      Joey is still a heel in this major revision of the 1940 antihero musical, but he’s now a Black artist trying to find his true voice.It’s not often that the standout star of a show is its music supervisor, arranger or orchestrator, but in the gala presentation of “Pal Joey” at New York City Center through Sunday, all three are one man, Daryl Waters. More than the authors of the ambitious, bewildering revival’s new book, Waters, who has served similar roles on musicals as varied as “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” “After Midnight,” “The Cher Show” and “New York, New York,” makes a clear case in beautiful sound for its investigation into the melting pot of American music.That the rest of the revival (really a new creature, made from spare parts) is more suggestive than convincing is no crime; there has never been a satisfactory “Pal Joey.” Though the 1940 original featured some soon-to-be standards by Rodgers and Hart — “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” chief among them — its book by John O’Hara, based on his epistolary novel and New Yorker stories, didn’t match them in tone or dramatic serviceability.Back then, the problem was thought to be the nature of Joey himself, a greasy heel trying to scheme his way from itinerant crooner to supper club smoothie. Along the way he picked up and discarded an innocent named Linda English, traded sex for financial support with a socialite named Vera Simpson and generally ruined everything he touched with his grifty hands. The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson concluded that the show was distasteful because you couldn’t “draw sweet water from a foul well.”But the rise and triumph of the antihero show, with protagonists like J. Pierrepont Finch, Sweeney Todd and Evan Hansen, has since proved such characters ripe for musicalization. The problem faced by the various would-be saviors of “Pal Joey” — there were Broadway revivals in 1952, 1963, 1976 and 2008 — is rather what new throughline to impose and how to make the best use of its songs.In choosing to alter the racial frame of the story, the current version’s adapters, Richard LaGravenese and Daniel Koa Beaty, have made a powerful and promising intervention. Their Joey (Ephraim Sykes) is Black, with the tortured soul of a true artist. The Chicago club in which he sings is now a Black establishment, run by Lucille Wallace (Loretta Devine), a former star of Harlem nightspots. Linda (Aisha Jackson) is a Black singer, too, but one who prefers radio to live performance so as to be “judged by what people hear, not by what they see.”Sykes as Joey and Elizabeth Stanley as the socialite Vera Simpson, who financially supports Joey.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat is all worth exploring, and sometimes succeeds in snapping the tired old setups into vivid life. Because Vera (Elizabeth Stanley) is still white, her dalliance with Joey takes on new overtones and evokes new dangers. Though Joey remains acquisitive of both women and wealth, and Sykes, a Tony nominee for “Ain’t Too Proud,” is excellent at making his cunning charismatic, he is no longer shallow. Instead he’s deep, trying to find a way to render his true voice in a white world. Ancestral spirits who, according to the script, represent “soul, authenticity, power and freedom,” encourage him through percussive sound and movement; the often-astonishing choreography, part tap, part stomp, part African dance, is by Savion Glover.Interesting as all this is, or could be with further time and elaboration, race was the wrong problem to solve in “Pal Joey.” What really never worked, and still does not, is the way the songs hang with the story. Innovators though they were, Rodgers and Hart had only just begun to explore, as Rodgers would continue to do much more deeply with Oscar Hammerstein II, how to make song an expression of narrative itself, not just a character sketch or appliquéd decoration. In particular, Hart’s delightful lyrics (“I’m vexed again./Perplexed again./Thank God I can be oversexed again”) kept pulling focus from the show’s heart of darkness with their sparky wit.The new “Pal Joey” doubles down on that problem. Not counting two reprises, it features all or parts of 21 songs, only seven of which were written for “Pal Joey.” (Another eight of the originals were cut.) Because the added songs come from a variety of other shows, mostly “The Boys From Syracuse” and “Babes in Arms,” these are naturally even more decorative and disengaged than the originals. It does nothing to turn the vanishingly minor Melba Snyder — a society reporter who sings (and strips to) the great but obviously shoehorned “Zip” — into Melvin Snyder (Brooks Ashmanskas), who bravely does the same. You still have no idea why the character is there.Sykes, Aisha Jackson and ensemble members in the gala production, which features Savion Glover’s often-astonishing choreography.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn the other hand, the giant and varied new tunestack — including standards like “Where or When,” “My Funny Valentine” and “Blue Moon” — gives Waters some gorgeous raw material to work with. It’s a mystery to me how he creates so many conflicting kinds of sound, representing different strands of American popular music, from just four players onstage (including the devastating trumpeter Alphonso Horne) and five offstage. Sometimes the original songs are barely recognizable in their new clothing; at other times they have the uncanny familiarity of a post-facelift face that makes you want to say: You look different.Satisfying as that then-and-now duality is in theory, it adds to a rather large list of confusing and incomplete choices overall. What does it mean that Vera almost outdoes the Black characters in the use of scat singing and melismatic riffs? (Stanley is pushing way too hard.) Why does the relationship between Vera and Joey provoke racist threats while Lucille’s with a white gangster (Jeb Brown) provokes nothing but laughs? (Devine is a welcome source of humor and good spirits in the otherwise nearly humorless production.) Why is Linda barely integrated into the action, performing most of her songs (rendered modestly by Jackson) in the no-context of a recording booth?And though the roughness of the sound (many lyrics were unintelligible as of Wednesday night) and the longueurs of the staging (by Tony Goldwyn and, again, Glover) can be written off to the usual City Center problem of under-rehearsal, a show with such evidently large ambitions — Emilio Sosa’s glamorous early-1940s costumes, a monumental under-the-el set by Derek McLane, lit moodily by Jon Goldman — needs to be more than intriguing. It needs to be coherent.You can certainly count on coherence from the songs themselves, no matter how randomly they sometimes seem to have been placed in one Rodgers and Hart show instead of another. Even completely shorn of plot relevance, they are evergreen for a reason. Though this “Pal Joey” rightfully questions the appropriation of Black voices in American popular song — referring to the King of Jazz, Paul Whiteman, and the King of Swing, Benny Goodman, Joey says, “Awful lot of Kings out there playing our music” — it’s strange to build that argument on the back of these standards. If they’re the problem, why celebrate them, and make them sound so good in the process?Pal JoeyThrough Nov. 5 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Poor Yella Rednecks’ Review: A Writer’s Origin Story Remixes Conventions

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      Qui Nguyen’s crowd-tickling comedy about a Vietnamese family in Arkansas mixes hip-hop and martial arts with soapy twists and turns.The playwright Qui Nguyen has made a career of imagining marginalized people as heroic leads. That includes his parents, who emigrated from Vietnam and met in an Arkansas refugee camp, a story Nguyen chronicled in his raunchy rom-com-style play “Vietgone.”“Poor Yella Rednecks,” which opened Wednesday in a rollicking, comic book-inspired production at New York City Center, picks up five years later, in 1980, when their marriage hits the rocks and the playwright is a 5-year-old struggling to learn English.Commissioned by Manhattan Theater Club and South Coast Repertory, where it premiered in 2019, “Poor Yella Rednecks” functions as the playwright’s own superhero origin story: Nguyen has become not only a wizard of language and form, but also an expert M.C., subverting and remixing conventions to confront abiding questions about displacement and assimilation. How can immigrants become legible to the American-born generations of their own families, and to audiences who are so white, the playwright’s mother says, that they resemble a Fleetwood Mac concert?Nguyen’s answer is an expletive-filled fusion of hip-hop and martial arts with the soapy twists and turns of addictive serial television. Under the wry and nimble direction of May Adrales, “Poor Yella Rednecks” is a crowd-tickling comedy that squashes preconceptions in order to place hearts in a vise grip.Framed as recollections Nguyen gathered from his mother, Tong, in 2015, the show begins with the playwright (portrayed onstage as a middle-aged man by Jon Norman Schneider) interviewing Tong (a dynamite Maureen Sebastian), who speaks with a pinched face and a thick accent. But Tong soon demands to have her son’s “pot and a mouth” style of talking in the play he is writing, and for white characters to sound the way she hears them, as a garble of slang and empty signifiers (so he has them squawk exclamations like “Yeehaw!” or “Mitch McConnell!”). From then on, we hear Nguyen’s family talk in frank, and often crass, English when they are understood to be speaking Vietnamese. (Nguyen’s parents were heartbroken when they met, Tong says, “so we comforted each other with our crotches.”)Though his family’s history is rooted in upheaval and loss, Qui Nguyen presents it with a delicate balance of over-the-top humor and unforced sincerity, our critic writes.Richard Termine for The New York TimesRewind 35 years, and Tong tears away her granny garb (thrifty southwestern costumes designed by Valérie Thérèse Bart) to play a younger version of herself. Tong and the playwright’s father, Quang (Ben Levin), who looks like a matinee idol but can’t find work, are nearly broke and are each being drawn back into previous relationships. Tong, a waitress at a diner, partly blames her mother, Huong (a dry-as-gin Samantha Quan), for the difficulty that her son, known as Little Man and represented by a wide-eyed puppet, faces fitting in at school. Huong, who only speaks Vietnamese, worries that learning to talk like his peers will turn Little Man (endearingly designed by David Valentine and maneuvered by Schneider) into a stranger.As in “Vietgone,” “Poor Yella Rednecks” shows Nguyen’s onstage parents expressing their most vehement feelings, and occasional exposition, in verse, rapping over uncomplicated beats composed here by Shane Rettig, who also designed the game show-like sound. (“Cuz I’m more than just pretty, my brain is damn witty,” Tong raps. “Gimme one hot second Imma run this city.”) For the title song, Nguyen borrows a familiar declaration about the work ethic of immigrants from the musical “Hamilton,” though his own less sophisticated lyrics, which are better at illuminating conflict than romance, may not exactly hold up in comparison.Though rooted in upheaval and tragic loss, Nguyen’s family history is presented with a delicate balance of over-the-top humor and unforced sincerity. Jon Hoche, who plays Quang’s best friend Nhan, is a boisterous bro with a soft underbelly, while Paco Tolson is almost pitifully hapless as Bobby, Tong’s bumbling white ex. Tolson also plays the godfather of Marvel, Stan Lee, whose presence as a sporadic narrator adds to the show’s graphic-novel aesthetic; the set by Tim Mackabee spells out “yella” in big, rotating letters, lit in emphatic color by Lap Chi Chu.For all of its surprises, including action sequences I won’t spoil here, the play falters only when it tips into obviously earnest territory. Nguyen doesn’t need a surrogate to detail his intent; the story soars on its own.Poor Yella RednecksThrough Nov. 26 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Joey Evans Is Back. This Time He’s a Struggling Artist.

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      Joey Evans is a charming cad, a heel, an unapologetic womanizer, a gigolo. He’s a second-rate nightclub entertainer who breaks the heart of an ingénue and seduces a rich older woman, trading sex for money.In 1940, some people found Joey, the protagonist of the 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical “Pal Joey,” repellent. “Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” Brooks Atkinson famously wondered in his review for The New York Times.In the decades since, though, the main charge against the show hasn’t been foulness so much as incoherence. Production after production — the last one on Broadway was in 2008 — has attempted to rescue a handful of great Rodgers and Hart songs from the weak book that John O’Hara cobbled together from some of his demotic short stories published in The New Yorker.Seven years ago, the director Tony Goldwyn — best known as an actor — decided to try his hand at a rescue operation. He brought in the screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, and together they came up with an idea: What if Joey were a gifted, struggling artist? That way, it wouldn’t just be a story of sex and betrayal but also one of art versus ambition. After a few readings, though, that twist didn’t seem reason enough for a revival, so they added another: What if Joey were Black?Ephraim Sykes, who plays Joey Evans, with Marshal Davis, left, and Glover. “Playing this part has been freeing,” Sykes said. “Music is the lifeblood of this man, and it just so happens that one of his instruments is his body.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesTo tell that story, Goldwyn and LaGravenese, who are white, felt they needed Black collaborators, which is why their production of “Pal Joey,” opening at New York City Center on Nov. 1, is co-directed by Goldwyn and the tap dancer Savion Glover, who also did the choreography; and has a new book by LaGravenese and Daniel Beaty.The new story, set in the 1940s, is, as Beaty put it, “about the evolution of a Black artist” — a forward-thinking jazz singer — “in a world where there was no space for him to be his authentic self and what that costs him.” This is a story, he added, with contemporary relevance: “We’re still wrestling with a world where those the system has not been built for are fighting to have a voice.”It was Beaty’s idea to add some characters who would have been very surprising in any previous production of “Pal Joey” — Black ancestral spirits called the Griots. “At the start of the show, we have this character who is brokenhearted because of the absence of space for him,” he said, “but these ancestors appear, like an energy that lives within him, and give him some hope.”In this iteration of the play, Sykes’s Joey has a soul, and ancestors appear in the form of extraordinary tap dancers.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThose ancestors appear in the form of extraordinary tap dancers, including Dormeshia and Glover. And they keep reappearing throughout the show to remind Joey of his authentic self. This Joey, played by Ephraim Sykes, has a soul, and that soul expresses itself in the deeply rooted sound of Savion Glover’s tap dancing.The Griots are “a connection to something very old,” Beaty said. “The artists who have danced, sang and acted this path before. I have sat with many of them: Ossie Davis, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte. Ruby Dee told me, ‘We have always had to dance with a gun at our feet, but still we must dance.’”Glover, too, has always been an artist attuned to his ancestors, especially the veteran tap dancers who mentored him when he was a child. His solo shows can feel like séances, his jazz improvisations quoting those dead teachers and summoning their spirits. “Those Griots could be Jimmy Slyde, Lon Chaney, Chuck Green and Buster Brown,” he said, listing four hoofer-mentors he celebrated in the 1996 Broadway musical “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” for which he won a Tony Award for choreography.“Wherever I am, they will be,” he added. “They walk with me.”And not just in the Griot sections. At a recent rehearsal of one of Joey’s nightclub numbers, Glover stressed that he was stealing a rhythm from Henry LeTang, who choreographed “Black and Blue,” the 1989 Broadway show in which a teenage Glover shared the stage with Slyde, Chaney and other tap masters.“I appreciate the platform for dance to be part of the storytelling,” Glover said. “But if I have a side agenda, it would be to remind people of the contribution of those old cats.”The first Joey, in 1940, was a then-little-known Gene Kelly, who vaulted from the part into Hollywood fame. Frank Sinatra played Joey for the sanitized 1957 film. Revivals at City Center in the 1960s starred Bob Fosse, years before he directed shows like “Chicago” that made Joey’s sleaze into a dominant style.But Beaty and Glover are connecting “Pal Joey” to another history, another well. Like many productions Glover has been involved with — from “Jelly’s Last Jam” in 1991 to the 2016 reimagining of “Shuffle Along” — this “Pal Joey” is concerned with the transformations of jazz.Glover has always been an artist attuned to his dance ancestors. “They walk with me,” he said.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesWorking with Glover “is a master class, to put it lightly,” Sykes said.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesIn the years after the premiere of “Pal Joey,” Rodgers and Hart’s last show together, jazz artists, more than any others, kept the songs of Rodgers and Hart alive, as ground for improvisations. This production’s new story has the benefit of justifying the inclusion of more of those songs. Along with eight from the original, including “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book,” this “Pal Joey” borrows 15 from other Rodgers and Hart shows, standards like “My Funny Valentine,” “Where or When,” “This Can’t Be Love” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.” Musically, the show is now a Rodgers and Hart songbook, rearranged by Daryl Waters and Glover.But the production’s jazz approach, evident in each number, is about more than just musical style. “Savion lives in the realm of possibility,” Goldwyn said. “Like: ‘Let’s not nail this down. Let’s see what it might begin to become.’ That creates an environment of constant discovery. It’s very fertile.”“We’re trying to create creation,” Glover said. “We want the audience to feel it is happening, like they’re at the club.”That kind of improvisational freedom requires a particular cast, especially a particular Joey. Sykes, who played David Ruffin in “Ain’t Too Proud,” the 2019 Broadway musical about the Temptations, trained as a dancer at the Alvin Ailey school.“I always spoke first with my body,” he said. “Learning to act standing still is something I’m still learning. Playing this part has been freeing. Music is the lifeblood of this man, and it just so happens that one of his instruments is his body.”“Savion lives in the realm of possibility,” Tony Goldwyn, center behind Glover, said. The pair are co-directors of this reimagined version. Amir Hamja/The New York TimesWorking with Glover, Sykes said, “is a master class, to put it lightly. He operates on such a different plane of thinking. He’s always pushing me past what I thought was my limit, and we’re all being pushed to create jazz, to make a different show every night.”A new character, a club owner named Lucille, is played by Loretta Devine, who was in the original cast of “Dreamgirls” in 1981. “She’s the closest to the language we’re trying to summon,” Glover said. “She’s the living proof.”LaGravenese said that the addition of the Lucille character, “the one closest to the ancestors,” was part of an idea to surround Joey with strong women. Linda, the ingénue, is now a confident equal, played by Aisha Jackson. Joey’s relationship with Vera, the rich older woman, played here by Elizabeth Stanley, is now interracial, which raises the stakes, but Vera’s character is also more complex.“In some earlier workshops, our Vera was the beautiful Marin Mazzie,” LaGravenese said. “And Marin” — who died in 2018 — “said ‘What if Vera really loves Joey?’ And that opened up another door to making her more human.”“Marin is an ancestor now, too,” Beaty said. “I think the energy we’ve been feeling in the rehearsal room is the presence of the ancestors. In the cultures I come from, Ghanaian and Cherokee and Blackfoot, we believe that when you invite in the ancestors, they show up.” More

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      ‘The Light in the Piazza’ Through an Asian American Lens at Encores!

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      A new Encores! staging of the 2005 musical, starring Ruthie Ann Miles, considers what it is like to feel like an outsider, at home and abroad.Inside a New York City Center studio, at a rehearsal for the Encores! revival of “The Light in the Piazza,” two young lovers in 1950s Italy were meeting for the first time.“This is my mother, Margaret Johnson,” Clara, a suddenly smitten American tourist, said to Fabrizio, a local Italian.“Johnson,” Fabrizio repeated, connecting the name to a then-popular Hollywood star. “Van Johnson?!”“Yes!” Clara enthused.“You are — relative?” Fabrizio asked.“No, no,” the mother, Margaret, cut in.And then, so too, did the director, Chay Yew. He turned to Ruthie Ann Miles, the Tony-winning actress playing Margaret, with a note.“Van Johnson is white,” Yew said, gesturing at his own Asian face.The group nodded. They started the scene again, and when Miles got to her line, she drew out the “noooo” while encircling her own Asian face with her finger to make the contrast exceedingly clear to the lovestruck Fabrizio.The move sent onlookers into a fit of laughter.“In the great works of art, there are ways to find more life between sentences and scenes,” said Chay Yew, who is directing the Encores! production.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNothing in the book, music or lyrics of this Tony Award-winning 2005 Broadway musical has been changed in the revival, which opens on Wednesday for a short run. But the casting of Asian American actresses in two of the main roles has reframed the musical to emphasize its exploration of the otherness — an otherness that some Asian Americans often feel in the United States and elsewhere. Without revisions, that point of view will have to come through in Yew’s direction and the actors’ interpretations.When Miles (“The King and I”) agreed to play Margaret, Yew began thinking about homing in on her background as a Korean American to further explore the experience of feeling like an outsider. The spike in anti-Asian violence during the pandemic, Yew said, was still very much front of mind.“No matter how Asian American you are, you’re always going to be the perpetual foreigner. The face that we wear,” Yew said, “always makes you feel that you do not belong in this country.“So I was interested in, well, what does it really mean to explore the outsider status in this particular musical?” Yew, a playwright and director of shows like “Cambodian Rock Band,” added. “It actually helps open up the music a little bit more. I think in the great works of art, there are ways to find more life between sentences and scenes.”“The Light in the Piazza,” which originally starred Victoria Clark as Margaret and Kelli O’Hara as Clara, tracks a woman and her daughter on vacation in Italy. Love is at its heart: Clara (Anna Zavelson) falls for Fabrizio (James D. Gish); Margaret wants to disrupt the romance to protect her daughter, who suffered a brain injury as a child that renders her childlike even as an adult; and Margaret herself is stuck in a seemingly loveless marriage to a husband who stayed at home in North Carolina.It is the Johnsons’ status as tourists — outsiders in a foreign land — that allows preoccupations with Clara’s disability to fade, her love to blossom and Margaret’s perspective to shift such that she can begin to let her daughter go. In leaving home, both women, in a sense, find themselves.Nothing in the book, music or lyrics of “The Light in the Piazza” has been changed in the revival, which opens on Wednesday at City Center.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFor Asian Americans, determining exactly what and where feels like home can be tricky. Clint Ramos, who designed the set with Miguel Urbino and is part of the Encores! leadership team, recalled having seen the show 10 times during its original run. He had moved to New York from the Philippines, and the idea of becoming totally immersed in a new place — and loving it — resonated. “Every time was ugly crying,” he said of seeing the musical.Miles was at the top of the Encores! list for the role of Margaret. (In his 2005 review of the show, Ben Brantley wrote that the character “qualifies as a blessing for those in search of signs of intelligent life in the American musical.”) They felt Miles “was virtuosic enough to actually handle the score, but also such an excellent actor,” Ramos said.With the role cast, Yew and Miles studied the history of Korean immigration and determined, for subtext, that Miles’s Margaret could have come to the United States in the early 1900s to study art and learn English, then met her white husband, settled in the South and eventually had a child.Miles, who has been juggling this show with her Tony-nominated role as the beggar woman in the Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd,” was born in the United States, then spent a few years as a young child in South Korea before returning to the U.S. with her mother. She recalled learning English while growing up in Hawaii as her Korean language skills diminished and becoming frustrated with her mother’s stubborn accent and lack of concern, unlike her friends’ parents, about things like having nice clothes. Over time, she said she even developed a sort of bitterness toward her mother.“And so I carry all of these stories and these ideas with me when we’re building Margaret,” she said.Zavelson, who graduated from high school last year and is making her professional New York debut in the musical, has always wanted to sing the score, but said she had never seen someone who looked like her play the role of Clara. Zavelson said she is Japanese American and Jewish.Anna Zavelson, as Clara, above with Gish, who plays Fabrizio, said she never “pictured myself being able to sing that role” because it’s usually filled by a white actress. Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“I don’t think that I had pictured myself being able to sing that role,” Zavelson said, because Clara has usually been played by a white actress. “Growing up, I think every kid is like, ‘Wouldn’t that be fun if I did this?’ But once you get to middle school, high school, and start to realize that you’re perceived differently by certain people, I think a lot of me was kind of like, ‘Oh, well, I’ll let that role die.’”“But seeing that Ruthie was attached to it just kind of lit something inside of me,” she continued. “I’m from Texas and Margaret and Clara are from North Carolina. So it’s not the same geographically, but having a Southern Asian American with a last name like Johnson isn’t actually that far from me.”And despite the effects of Clara’s injury, she is a generally upbeat, optimistic young woman who is warmly embraced by Fabrizio’s family, Zavelson said.So although the actors were still exploring their characters during rehearsals last week, Zavelson said she suspected many of the race-conscious nuances layered into the performance would manifest through Margaret, and the mother-daughter interactions between Clara and Margaret. To what extent does Margaret have an internalized fear of racism that makes her more hesitant to embrace Fabrizio and his family? How have her experiences as an immigrant toughened her? And how does that toughness play out in Margaret’s interactions with Clara?Exactly how to integrate the feeling of racial otherness into the show was also an ongoing challenge for the cast.“Maybe it’s slight racism from other people in Italy, whether it’s a gesture or a look,” Miles said.Miles also saw “The Light in the Piazza” on Broadway, and said she immediately noticed the “sweeping orchestration and beautiful vocals and this really human story of love and grief and regret.”But as she has played back the music in the years since, it speaks to her differently.It is no secret, she said, that she and her husband, Jonathan Blumenstein, have endured tragedy. In 2018, their daughter, Abigail, 5, was killed, and Miles herself critically injured when they were struck by a car while walking in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Miles was pregnant at the time, and two months later, near her due date, lost the baby.“I really feel the ways that Margaret tries to be strong and wants to let everybody know that she is in control and everything is OK,” Miles said. “But then what happens when the doors are closed?”When Margaret finally allows herself to be vulnerable for the audience, she continued, it could become a way for her personally “to finally take a breath and show perhaps a little bit more of the true me.”“Hopefully it’s not until the end of the show,” she added. “Because I won’t recover.” More