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      ‘The Daughter-in-Law’ Review: Sons and Wives

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      In this D.H. Lawrence play, a production by the Mint Theater, men are trouble, “pure and simple.”In the darkness before dawn, a sleepless woman and her daughter-in-law keep each other company.There is no love lost between these two — Mrs. Gascoyne, a miner’s widow who keeps her miner sons close in their small English town; and Minnie, a former governess who, just weeks earlier, had the gall to marry one of them. But late in D.H. Lawrence’s play “The Daughter-in-Law,” the women are gentle enough with each other to have a heart-to-heart.“A child is a troublesome pleasure to a woman,” Mrs. Gascoyne tells Minnie, “but a man’s a trouble, pure and simple.”If that’s unfair as a generalization, it certainly applies to Mrs. Gascoyne’s Luther, who has passed 30 without exhibiting the slightest twinge of ambition.An enduring mystery of the play is why Minnie, a go-getter with some money of her own, elected to marry him. As a spousal choice, he seems a distant second even to his aimless brother Joe, who still lives with their mother and, in the play’s opening minutes, sits down to a supper that she cuts up for him.In Martin Platt’s diverting revival for the Mint Theater Company, at New York City Center Stage II, the men are not what’s captivating about this play. Rather, it’s Lawrence’s women, drawn with a capacious, conflicted sympathy that recognizes how frustrating it is for a keen-minded person to try to carve satisfaction from a stifling domestic world.Portrayed with a fine ferocity by Sandra Shipley, Mrs. Gascoyne nurtures a bitterness about Luther’s “hoity-toity” new wife — a resentment that’s about class and clannishness, but also about loss of control, because what if her boy doesn’t need her anymore? When an acquaintance, Mrs. Purdy (Polly McKie), breaks the news that her daughter is four months pregnant with Luther’s child, Mrs. Gascoyne’s desiccated heart swells in anticipation of the humiliation this will bring to Minnie.The gentle-mannered Minnie, in a beautifully nuanced performance by Amy Blackman, has trouble enough already. Her new marriage has descended into bickering, and Luther (Tom Coiner) is a self-pitying grump. Still, when she says in the heat of anger that she would have preferred “a drunken husband that knocked me about” to a mama’s boy, it seems a stretch.Written in a thick, distinctive dialect of the East Midlands, where Lawrence grew up, the text leaves room for Luther to have some appealing qualities, but here he is all roughness and no complexity. There’s not even a sexual spark that would make sense of Minnie’s choice to be with him — which is a problem, because we are meant to have a stake in their relationship’s success.His brother Joe (Ciaran Bowling) is at least kind to her, mostly; when he isn’t, the change of tenor is more confusing than anything.As with many Mint productions, the play’s back story is part of the allure. Lawrence’s father was a miner; his mother, to whom he was exceptionally close, came from a slightly higher class. He wrote the script in the years after her death in 1910, around the time he wrote his novel “Sons and Lovers,” which has similar themes.Not staged in Lawrence’s lifetime (and previously directed by Platt for the Mint in 2003), “The Daughter-in-Law” feels at times like a purgation — a 20-something playwright rebelling at last against the beloved mother who demanded too much of him emotionally. When Minnie blames Mrs. Gascoyne for hobbling Luther, as if he had no agency, she can sound like she is channeling the playwright’s own wounded outrage. Rebellion, though, is not the same as revenge.“The world is made of men for me, lass,” Mrs. Gascoyne tells Minnie.But in the world of Lawrence’s play, the women are the stars.The Daughter-in-LawThrough March 20 at New York City Center Stage II, Manhattan; minttheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘The Tap Dance Kid,’ Still Out of Step With the Times

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      The Encores! series returns with a 1983 musical that, despite its pleasures, wasn’t quite right then and isn’t quite right now.When 8:30 p.m. was a typical curtain time for Broadway musicals, the main character’s biggest number, crystallizing the crisis and ensuring an ovation — think “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy” — often came at 11.The curtain for Wednesday night’s opening of the Encores! revival of “The Tap Dance Kid” went up at 7:30, so the so-called 11 o’clock number came closer to 10, but it was still recognizably the main event. That’s when Joshua Henry, playing William Sheridan, the conservative father of a Black family thrown into chaos by a son who wants to be a dancer, let loose with a tirade that ripped the fabric of the rest of the show to pieces, expressing with fury and unbridled terror the character’s disdain for what he sees as the performative Blackness of tap.“I keep on smilin’ through the worst of times,” he snarls while shucking and jiving monstrously. “Lettin’ the white man toss me his nickels and dimes.”It’s an astonishing performance, in the best way hard to watch. If only William were the main character it might even make sense at the end of a mostly lighter-hearted story. But he’s not, and it doesn’t, and the biggest number, whenever it comes, should not be his.That “The Tap Dance Kid” is never sure which of the members of the Sheridan family it’s about — the focus seems to change every 10 minutes — is just one of the oddities afflicting this tonally bewildering but intermittently appealing 1983 musical, which Encores!, in its return to live production after a two-year pandemic hiatus, is offering through Sunday at New York City Center.Is the main character, as the title leads you to expect, William’s 10-year-old son, Willie (Alexander Bello), the one who wants to dance despite his father’s prohibitions? Or is it Emma (Shahadi Wright Joseph), William’s 14-year-old daughter, who wants to be a lawyer like him but can barely get his attention because she’s a girl?Bello, left, with Adrienne Walker, who plays his mother, Ginnie.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat about William’s wife, Ginnie (Adrienne Walker), who must “tap dance” around her husband’s temper while trying to make things right for her children? Or Ginnie’s brother, Uncle Dipsey (Trevor Jackson), a dancer and choreographer? Dipsey, depending on your point of view, is either leading Willie astray by teaching him the “shim-sham-shimmy” or upholding the joyful traditions of an art form mastered by men like his late father, Daddy Bates (DeWitt Fleming Jr.).Yes, even a ghost gets two big numbers.The musical was always something of a hodgepodge. The original book, by Charles Blackwell, based on the bracingly dour young adult novel “Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change” by Louise Fitzhugh of “Harriet the Spy” fame, never resolved the problem of making peppy entertainment out of such downbeat material.The score — by Henry Krieger and Robert Lorick — fully absorbed that confusion of tone, offering songs that are either purely high-spirited (“Fabulous Feet”) or baldly prosaic (“Four Strikes Against Me”) with little in between. There are times when you don’t know why someone is singing or dancing and other times when you do but wish you didn’t.The Encores! production, directed by Kenny Leon, does not solve those problems. Lydia Diamond’s “concert adaptation” (though the production is amply staged) does make some improvements, moving the story, which in the 1983 production was said to take place in “the present,” to 1956, where it in some ways makes more sense. The family’s interpersonal and often gender-based conflicts — Emma wants to wear pants, Ginnie chafes under her husband’s authority — feel more apt in the earlier period, as does Krieger’s swingy music, which is oddly retro for the composer of “Dreamgirls.” Still, it’s beautifully performed by the 24-piece Encores! orchestra under the direction of Joseph Joubert.But in further revising the jumbled tunestack used for the original production’s national tour, Diamond’s adaptation exacerbates the show’s scattershot approach. (At the start, we get three establishing numbers in a row, for Willie, Dipsey and Emma, thus establishing little.) And the heavy cutting of spoken scenes that is part of the Encores! brief is especially detrimental to such a busy yet unfocused story. In one scene, I realized that Willie was on a bus only after checking the program to find that the number was called “Crosstown.” I’d thought he was in a dream sequence.Foreground from left: Kurt Csolak, Jodeci Milhouse and Justin Prescott. The show’s ensemble numbers, choreographed by Jared Grimes, are suitably spectacular, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe choreography by Jared Grimes is suitably spectacular in the ensemble numbers, and the demonstration of the changing styles of tap as they pass from Daddy Bates to his children and then, via Dipsey, to more familiar Broadway versions, is fascinating to watch. Jackson (along with Tracee Beazer as his girlfriend, Carole) is an especially exciting dancer, and an appealing crooner as well. And Bello, in a tradition of Willies that includes Alfonso Ribeiro, Dulé Hill and Savion Glover, makes a charming show of learning and then quickly personalizing the steps that are part of his heritage.I wish that were the focus of the story — or that there were a focus at all. If the musical numbers are sometimes hard to grasp visually, the staging of the book scenes is too often undifferentiated. And at least on opening night, after just 11 days of rehearsal, the technical elements were not yet cohering. For a show about the excitement of dance, the pace is strangely languid.That’s partly built into the haziness of the original material. And though one of the things Encores! is designed to show us is what musicals, for better or worse, felt like when they first opened, I’m not sure this production, the first under Lear deBessonet, the new artistic director, succeeds.Perhaps it shouldn’t. That “The Tap Dance Kid” tells the story of an upper-middle-class Black family (“Don’t you buy all of your clothes on the Upper East Side?” William asks his wife rhetorically) made it somewhat ahead of its time in 1983. That it was mostly the work of a white creative team makes it somewhat behind the time now. Letting Black artists take a new look is the only sensible thing to do — except for leaving it be. Not every historical relic needs to be on display.The Tap Dance KidThrough Feb. 6 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Calling All Tap Dance Kids (It’s Not the Acting Kid or the Singing Kid)

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      The challenge of casting the Encores! revival of “The Tap Dance Kid” exposes some of the complications of tap, show business and Black history.If you’re going to stage a revival of the seldom performed but dearly remembered 1983 Broadway musical “The Tap Dance Kid” — as Encores! at New York City Center is doing, Wednesday through Sunday — one of the main challenges is to find someone to play the title role.That character is Willie Sheridan, a 10-year-old boy whose dream is to become a Broadway tap dancer and who has the talent to do it. The performer who plays him has to be like Willie: a young Black boy who can act and sing and tap dance at the center of an old-fashioned musical. And in recent decades that particular combination hasn’t been very common.Some reasons are right there in the show’s story. It’s about a family — an upper-middle-class Black one, groundbreaking for a Broadway musical in 1983 — and the main conflicts are generational. The principal obstacle to Willie’s dream is his father.Hinton Battle in a scene from “The Tap Dance Kid” in 1984.Martha Swope/New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsTo the father, a lawyer, tap is not just antiquated but also shameful, tied to slavery and the racial humiliations from which he has worked to insulate those he loves. To the boy and his dancing uncle and the ghost of his dancing grandfather, tap is beautiful, something to be proud of.This is an argument about the past and progress, and it reflects some of the real-life attitudes that continue to affect the popularity of tap, especially among Black people, and the potential pool of tap dance kids.“I knew that it was going to be tough to find a Willie,” Jared Grimes, the choreographer of the Encores! revival, said in an interview.“I knew that it was going to be tough to find a Willie”: Bello and Grimes, rehearsing at City Center. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesDuring auditions, Alexander Bello stood out — for his acting and singing. His tap skills weren’t quite up to the level that Grimes was expecting. “I was not going to settle,” Grimes said. “This show isn’t called Acting Kid or Singing Kid.”But Bello — who once put “Broadway audition” on his Christmas list and is already a Broadway veteran at 13 — was determined to get the part. “I was amazed that almost all the creatives were Black,” he said. “I had never seen a room so melanated and I wanted to be in that room.” And so, while attending school and doing eight shows a week of “Caroline or Change” on Broadway, he squeezed in a month of tap boot camp with DeWitt Fleming Jr. (who plays Willie’s grandfather).“Alex earned that role,” said Kenny Leon, the director of the Encores! production.Bello, here with Trevor Jackson, squeezed in a month of tap boot camp. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesIn certain ways, this was an echo of the 1980s. Danny Daniels — who won a Tony Award for choreographing the original production and who, like most of the original creative team, was white — once told me about the trouble that team had finding a Willie.“I asked the producers, ‘Where are you going to find the Black kids? Black kids don’t tap anymore,’” said Daniels, who died in 2017. “So we put out a call for Black kid tap dancers. Nobody showed up.’”More precisely, nobody showed up who didn’t need tap training. Daniels started a tap boot camp. The first Willie it produced was Alfonso Ribeiro, who soon left for a successful TV career (and later showed off his tap skills as Carlton on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”). Among the many to follow during the show’s two-year run and national tour was Dulé Hill, whose own successful TV career, most recently in “The Wonder Years” reboot, is keeping him too busy to appear in the Encores! revival.Savion Glover in the 1980s Broadway production of “The Tap Dance Kid.” PhotofestAnother Willie was Savion Glover, the tap dance kid who most changed what it meant to be one. Under the guidance of Gregory Hines and older Black tap dancers, Glover became the heir apparent to their tradition in the Broadway shows “Black and Blue” and “Jelly’s Last Jam.”The 1996 show “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk,” which Glover choreographed and starred in, reclaimed tap as Black history, both polemically and rhythmically, and brought it into a hip-hop present that people his age could see as their own. In a monologue, when Glover rejected Broadway styles as “not even tap dancing” but “arms and legs and a big ol’ smile,” he could have been describing Daniels’s choreography for “Tap Dance Kid”: the sequins and high kicks, more razzle-dazzle than rhythm.After “Bring in ‘da Noise” closed, tap on Broadway mostly reverted to its old ways. But Glover, with his unsurpassed virtuosity and more streetwise image, had inspired a generation of young hoofers. While deeply connected to tap’s roots in jazz, they made the form contemporary and pushed it to new technical heights — and largely away from the singing and acting of “Tap Dance Kid.” Among this cohort was Grimes, now 36.Bello, rehearsing with the actor Adrienne Walker.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesAs Grimes demonstrated in the 2013 Broadway production “After Midnight,” he is a tap dancer of astonishing head-to-toe ability. But, unlike many Glover inspired hoofers, he also sees himself in the all-around entertainer line of Hines. Alongside his flourishing performing career — he’s in the upcoming Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” — he’s found acclaim as a choreographer of regional productions, including an updated “42nd Street.”Grimes said that he jumped at the chance to revisit “Tap Dance Kid,” which he called “the musical that every tap dancer dreams of getting a hold of.”The context has changed from the early ’80s, and from the late ’90s, too: “When I was coming up,” Grimes said, “if I looked to my side, there were other Black kids that were already tap kings and queens, but now almost none of my students are Black.”Kenny Leon lifting Bello after a rehearsal.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesSpeaking for kids today, Bello said tap is the dance style they “are most likely to overlook.”“Because you either think of it as Shirley Temple or as something guys did in the ’70s,” he said. “To other kids, it seems like tap never really modernized, but that’s not true.”Ayodele Casel, a tap dancer of the post-Glover generation whose career has been soaring lately, said that pockets of young Black tap dancers exist but that they don’t necessarily see themselves on Broadway because opportunities have been scarce. Yet, speaking more broadly, she noted the significance of someone like her, steeped in tap culture, being specially hired to handle the tap choreography for “Funny Girl.”“There is still a gap,” she said, “between the actors and singers, who have long been able to get by with tap basics, and the serious tap dancers, who haven’t had much incentive to train in acting and singing. But I think people, artists and producers, are starting to think about tap differently now.”Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesAlong these lines, the background of the creative team, more than of the cast, might be the most significant change in the Encores! revival. The music remains the same, by Henry Krieger in a mode similar to his “Dreamgirls.” But Lydia Diamond, who has adapted the book for the Encores! production, has shifted the story from the 1980s to the 1950s — when the lines of racial struggle were more legible and tap was losing its place at the center of American popular culture.“We’re trying to show how something as precious as the history of tap is affecting this family who’s fighting to find a place in the ’50s,” Grimes said. He said that he’s been helping to get more accurate (and Black) tap history into the script and a sense of tap in transition into the choreography.“I want to show tap as storytelling and crazy rhythms,” he said, “but also tip our hat to vaudeville and comedy and what might be seen as what we had to do to get into the door. We can do that with integrity.”Grimes said this after a long day of rehearsal, eager to rehearse some more. “The security guards have to kick me out,” he said. “That’s love, man. I hope that ‘Tap Dance Kid’ will get a whole new crop of people to feel like that about tap.” More

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      4 Things to Do This Weekend

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      Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually and in person in New York City.KIDSRides and More RidesFrom left, a metal swing ride with detachable riders (1906-20) and a Ferris wheel featuring six gondolas and a music box (1906-20), which are on view in the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition “Holiday Express: Toys and Trains From the Jerni Collection.”New-York Historical SocietyAlong with ice cream trucks and trips to the beach, amusement park fun tends to vanish when the weather turns cold. But Manhattan now offers one place where children can still enjoy some of the splendor of Ferris wheels, roller coasters, carousels and more: the New-York Historical Society.For the first time, its annual winter show, “Holiday Express: Toys and Trains From the Jerni Collection,” includes vintage 19th- and 20th-century carnival playthings. On view through Feb. 27, the exhibition includes such highlights as the collection’s largest toy Ferris wheel (1906-20), made in France with six gondolas, a music box and 17 tiny occupants; a miniature German roller coaster (1886-1917); and blimp rides from the early 1900s with little zeppelin-like compartments.Young visitors, who can pick up a guide to go on a scavenger hunt through the show, will also see the collection’s signature trains — some are chugging merrily — along with model stations.Want more vicarious time travel? Families can register for the society’s latest program in the Living History series, which, like the exhibition, is free with museum admission. At 12:30 p.m. on Sunday, it invites children to learn about 18th-century holiday traditions and make their own decorations.LAUREL GRAEBERClassical MusicFixing a Problem PieceA scene from Janacek’s “Osud” (”Destiny”) at National Theater Brno, a recording of which is available to stream on Operavision’s platform and YouTube channel through May.Marek OlbrzymekThanks to “Jenufa,” “Kat’a Kabanova” and “The Makropulos Case,” the music of the Czech composer Leos Janacek is a core part of the 20th-century repertoire in opera. However, another effort — “Osud” (“Destiny”) — is something of a problem piece. As a result, it has proved to be of interest mainly to scholars and hard-core fans.A new production overseen by Robert Carsen — one of the most consistent directors working — aids the dramatic arc, and thus allows viewers another encounter with Janacek’s masterly musical style. (The opera’s tricky narrative timeline is presented cleanly, but with two singers playing the central role of Zivny, the composer.) Carsen’s approach to this tale of snuffed-out love and throttled creativity was produced for the National Theater Brno, and is available to stream free on Operavision’s platform and its YouTube channel through May.SETH COLTER WALLSPop & RockA Pinc Louds ChristmasClaudi from Pinc Louds performing in Tompkins Square Park. The band will present its “Christmas Tentacular” at Elsewhere on Friday.Bob KrasnerThe Hall at Elsewhere is a more conventional concert space than Pinc Louds have recently been accustomed to. During the pandemic, the band — headed up by Claudi, a Puerto Rico-born singer and guitarist who writes punkish, jazzy songs inspired by love and city life — took up residence at Tompkins Square Park, where they played for fans and passers-by twice a week. Before that, Claudi, an avid busker, was a fixture at the Delancey Street subway station on the Lower East Side.A Pinc Louds show is anything but conventional, though. The audience at their “Christmas Tentacular,” which comes to Elsewhere’s main space on Friday, can expect a colorful, whimsical affair, complete with covers of holiday tunes, puppets and festive sets. Doors are at 6 p.m., and Tall Juan, whose music spans rock, cumbia and reggae, will start his opening set at 6:30. Tickets are $20 and available at elsewherebrooklyn.com.OLIVIA HORNTheaterAudio Drama RevealedFrom left, Jordan Boatman, Marcia Jean Kurtz and Lance Coadie Williams in Deb Margolin’s “That Old Perplexity,” one of two audio dramas featured in Keen Company’s “Hear/Now: LIVE!” Carol RoseggIf the expertly produced audio dramas that have flourished since the start of the pandemic have led you to ask, “How did the artists accomplish this?,” now you have the opportunity to solve that mystery with the Keen Company’s “Hear/Now: LIVE!”The 90-minute performance will feature two world premieres commissioned to be performed in what the company calls “an exciting live format,” showcasing original music and foley effects executed in front of the audience. In “The Telegram” by Mashuq Mushtaq Deen, two cowboys encounter the strange realities of the Wild West as they pay homage to a genre that captivated American listeners during the 1920s. In Deb Margolin’s comedy “That Old Perplexity,” two women develop a connection triggered by the turmoil and grief of a post-9/11 New York City.Tickets are $31.50 and available at bfany.org. Performances will take place at Theater Row on Thursday at 7 p.m., Friday at 8, Saturday at 2 and 8, and Sunday at 3.JOSE SOLÍS More

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      Gwen Verdon, Bob Fosse’s Wife, Gets Her Due This Fall

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      A dance is never just about the steps. But what if Gwen Verdon hadn’t happened to Bob Fosse?Nicole Fosse, their daughter, has a suspicion that her mother had a good deal to do with Fosse’s steps. Nicole was there when he would ask Verdon to show him a few. He would rearrange them, change the angle. He would connect them.“He’d be trying to find something in his body, and she would get next to him and start imitating him,” Nicole said. “He’d look at her and then all of a sudden there was this symbiotic thing that happened between them: And then there was the step.”This October, as part of the Fall for Dance Festival at New York City Center, Nicole is giving her mother credit where she believes credit is due. In a festival commission, the Verdon Fosse Legacy — which Nicole formed in 2013 to promote, preserve and protect the work of her parents — presents “Sweet Gwen Suite,” a trio of short dances originally performed on “The Bob Hope Special” in 1968 and “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1969. Each featured Verdon, who will be credited, alongside Bob Fosse, with the choreography. (Verdon died in 2000; Fosse in 1987.)Hat tip: Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon in “I Wanna Be a Dancin’ Man” on “The Garry Moore Show” in 1962.via The Verdon Fosse LegacyLinda Haberman, a former director of the Radio City Rockettes and a former assistant to Fosse, is providing direction, reconstruction and additional choreography to give the works a sense of flow and arc. “Sweet Gwen Suite” is scheduled for Oct. 13 and 14 (other festival commissions are by Ayodele Casel, Lar Lubovitch and Justin Peck).While it may be impossible to know the exact degree of Verdon’s input, her artistic connection with Fosse — they met in 1955 and married five years later — created dancing that was brazen, lasting and so impossibly stylish that Beyoncé borrowed some of it for her “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” video. If only she had asked.Nicole has no hard documentation to prove what Verdon contributed to the dances in “Sweet Gwen,” but she has studied her parents’ work — and been in the room while they worked. When she was 18, her father choreographed a ballet for her: “Magic Bird of Fire.” Verdon was there, too, and she helped when he would get stuck.“She’d say, ‘Leave the room, Bob, come back in 10 minutes, come back in 20 minutes,’” Nicole said. “And he would peek in, and he’d go, ‘Can I come in?’ And she’d say, ‘No, give us a little bit more time.’ And she would have constructed something. It was like she could read his mind. She knew what he was after. She could sense where he was going with something and then she could create that.”But their creative symbiosis wasn’t limited to rehearsals. “Maybe what even happened in the studio wasn’t their first pass at it,” Nicole said. “Maybe it was in the living room. There was a lot of dancing in the living room. A lot, a lot.”Where does a choreographer stop and a dancer begin? The importance of dancers in the creative process is unassailable, yet power dynamics persist. Should dancers who make up original casts be compensated for their contributions? In the more experimental, contemporary dance world, dancers are regularly cited for their choreographic collaboration, but in ballet and on Broadway — where the chances of making money are higher — dancers are rarely given credit.The situation of a choreographer and muse is murkier. Verdon’s dance lineage includes years with Jack Cole, the Broadway and film choreographer, whom she danced with and assisted beginning in the 1940s. “She trained in Afro-Caribbean and flamenco and East Indian and several disciplines of modern,” Nicole said. “So that’s what she brought with her.” As for Bob Fosse: “You see his style change after he meets my mother,” Nicole said. “It goes from Fred Astaire, Mr. Showbiz to something else.” (Mr. Showbiz being her father.)“Sweet Gwen” is certainly a celebration of that meeting — and of Verdon herself. Taking over her parts is another spirited dancer: Georgina Pazcoguin, the New York City Ballet soloist who has appeared on Broadway and can blaze her way across a stage.“I am in no way, shape or form saying that like, ‘Oh yes, I know this,’” Pazcoguin said. “And that’s what drew me to the project: This chance to really steep myself in a new dance language.”Haberman, who performed in “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” (she was in the original workshop) and “Pippin,” was an assistant choreographer to Fosse on the Broadway show “Big Deal.” In “Sweet Gwen,” the dances, which never had formal titles, are named after the music: “Cool Hand Luke,” “Mexican Shuffle” and “Mexican Breakfast,” which inspired the Beyoncé video. To Haberman, that final number — with its jaunty head bobs and frisky, hip-gyrating walks — feels the most like Verdon.“What I actually think is really interesting about these three pieces is that they’re very soft and sweet, and there’s no dark thing,” Haberman said. “There’s no irony.”They’re also, she said, straightforward. And they add up to more than a pose with a derby hat. In other words, Haberman is drawing out nuance and humor, along with — following Verdon’s lead — generosity and playfulness. It’s what made her dancing so delightful. “To me, that’s why it’s so attractive, and that’s why I hate so much of the interpretations now,” Haberman said of Fosse’s work, “because it’s hard — it all has hard edges and it doesn’t have any intention except kind of like counts and sex.”At a rehearsal in July, Haberman broke down the movement, fixing accents and shifting focus, but also urging the dancers — two men along with Pazcoguin — to be as effortless as possible. “I keep saying, when we get there, it has to be like nothing,” Haberman said. “I mean the beauty of watching Gwen in those videos, it’s just like ahhh. There is just this ease. It was kind of Gwen’s brilliance. It just was easy.”For the new suite of dances, Lynne Shankel has orchestrated and arranged the music, by Herb Alpert, Lalo Schifrin and Johnny Mandel. While Haberman sees the first two works as being choreographed by Fosse in terms of their clear structure, “it doesn’t really matter to me in some way who choreographed it,” Haberman said. “Bob and Gwen — she gave him stuff, he gave her stuff.”“What I actually think is really interesting about these three pieces is that they’re very soft and sweet, and there’s no dark thing,” said Linda Haberman, here rehearsing with the dancers. “There’s no irony.”Their approaches were different. Haberman said that while Fosse would give dancers images for inspiration — “you should feel like a horse behind the starting gate” — Verdon was driven by narrative. Haberman didn’t work with Verdon closely but spent some time with her after “Dancin’” opened and Fosse left to work on his semi-autobiographical movie, “All That Jazz” (1979). Verdon was there to keep an eye on the production. Haberman was rehearsing a pas de deux when Verdon asked her why she was leaving her partner at a particular moment in the dance.“I said, ‘Because that’s the step?’” Haberman said. “And she goes: ‘No. Why are you leaving him?” She wanted a narrative right there. “She’s got a whole dialogue going on in her head, and that’s what’s informing everything she does, but it’s so simple and sort of so innocent. She makes an instant connection with whatever is coming out of her brain.”Haberman’s staging of “Sweet Gwen” is taken from Verdon’s point of view. For the first section, a trio, Haberman told the men they should think of themselves as being Pazcoguin’s best friends. “But for Georgina, it’s how you felt when you were a young dancer and you were starting to make it,” she said. “There’s still a great innocence, and it’s fun and light, and you don’t even know how good you are yet. That’s the beauty of it.”The second section, a solo for Pazcoguin, has to do with being in the middle of a journey, not just as a dancer but as a woman. The dances were created at a particular time in Verdon’s life, after the film adaptation of the musical “Sweet Charity,” in which Verdon originated the title role on Broadway. (The screen role went to the younger, better known Shirley MacLaine.)“By then she had Nicole, and she was older and a mom,” Haberman said. “It’s that time of life when you’re like, Oh. It’s not sad, but it’s all of those feelings. It’s mourning for the past when you were young but hopeful that the future has got better things for you.”It also requires a quality of vulnerability, which doesn’t come completely naturally to Pazcoguin. Generally, she dances strong roles. But it’s happening at a good time: Pazcoguin recently published “Swan Dive,” an incendiary memoir about her life as a ballet dancer.“It’s been a huge practice of vulnerability, just sharing my story in that way,” Pazcoguin said. “I’m looking back to the past and being like that is the past. The past is fact, and the future is possibility. And I think that’s where it bubbles up in my chest and makes me want to cry. That’s what I hope to be able to portray and make the audience feel.”The third piece, Haberman said, is about owning it. “This is like, I can come out here and be sassy and have a good time,” she said. “I can turn around and do my take right back to Beyoncé.”Haberman is drawing out nuance and humor in the dances, along with — following Verdon’s lead — generosity and playfulness. The dancers, in that moment, look into the direction of the audience and give a purposeful nod — as if to say, yes, we know about the video. To Haberman, “people will get it maybe if they’re dancer nerds or they won’t — it doesn’t matter,” she said. “But I think it’s just feeling of a grown, confident woman who owns everything about herself. And that, again, creates an ease because you’re comfortable in your own skin and you can have a good time.”To Haberman, the suite is not about celebrating some sort of Fosse style — she doesn’t buy into that anyway — it’s about dancing. The simple joy of good dancing. That’s what Fosse was after. And Verdon, too. Lee Roy Reams, an original dancer in both trios, said that when Verdon danced, “it was more than that just her body.”“She danced with her face and everything else that went with it,” he said.And with “Sweet Gwen,” Nicole Fosse is hoping for something else. “I would like some of my father’s and mother’s work to have a home outside of being embedded into a Broadway show,” she said. “I think that there’s a dozen or more pieces that can live in the concert dance world.”“Dancin’” is aiming for a Broadway revival in 2022. “I imagine it’s going to have a wonderful run,” Nicole said. “But then when the show closes, it’s gone. And it’s a shame that ‘Big Deal’ or ‘Sweet Charity’ has to run on Broadway for those dances to be seen.” More

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      City Center Announces Its 2021-2022 Season

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      The theater will reopen for in‐person performances with the Fall for Dance Festival in October.New York City Center will resume live, in-person performances in October with the Fall for Dance Festival, one of its signature events. The dance showcase will kick off the theater’s 2021-2022 season, which is also set to include a Twyla Tharp birthday celebration, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s annual holiday season engagement and two new dance series.“We really wanted to reaffirm our commitment to New York audiences, as a very New York institution, and to New York artists,” Arlene Shuler, City Center’s president and chief executive, said of the ambitious season.“It’s such a huge opportunity for artists,” added Stanford Makishi, the vice president and artistic director of dance programs. “The ones with whom I’ve been speaking over the last 16 months, they’ve all been really dying to not only get back on the stage, but also to actually have the interaction with the audiences.”City Center announced four commissions for this year’s Fall for Dance on Tuesday. Ayodele Casel, Lar Lubovitch and Justin Peck will create new pieces that will be sprinkled throughout the festival’s five programs; and the Verdon Fosse Legacy, an organization dedicated to preserving the work of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, will reconstruct three dances for the festival. The full lineup and schedule will be released at the beginning of September.In November, Twyla Tharp will celebrate her 80th birthday with “Twyla Now,” a program featuring two world premieres as well as signature works. A host of stars, Sara Mearns and Robert Fairchild among them, will perform, supported by an ensemble of young dancers.City Center’s new dance programming will begin in 2022. Tiler Peck, a principal at New York City Ballet, will inaugurate Artists at the Center, which gives an accomplished dancer the opportunity to craft a program; Peck’s program, March 3-6, will feature works by William Forsythe, Alonzo King and others. City Center Dance Festival, a spring counterpart to Fall for Dance, will follow, March 24 to April 10. It will showcase several New York companies, including Martha Graham Dance Company, Dance Theater of Harlem and Paul Taylor Dance Company.The Encores! series, which revives rarely produced Broadway musicals, will also return in 2022. The three shows, “The Tap Dance Kid” (Feb. 2-6), “The Life” (March 16-20) and “Into the Woods” (May 4-15), were announced last year. The coming Encores! season will be the first under the artistic leadership of Lear deBessonet, who was announced as Jack Viertel’s successor in 2019.More information is available at nycitycenter.org. More

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      Come to the Cabaret, Old Chum. Or at Least Stream It.

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      New concerts from Sutton Foster, Jeremy Jordan and Marilyn Maye offer examples of what the most intimate art form can and can’t do.Cabaret is a magpie medium, plucking pieces from the world’s songbook and repurposing them to tell more-or-less personal stories.Whether the result is sublime or mortifying (or, more typically, in between) depends on how cleverly singers shape their material to fit the contours of the tales they’re telling. Vocal beauty is a secondary matter — as any number of old-school performers, like the swinging Sylvia Syms and the barking Elaine Stritch, proved by keeping the form alive even when they had almost no voice left.But the pandemic has nearly done the old bird in; the intimacy of most cabaret performance spaces, and the likelihood that a singer may spit in your chicken Kiev, have made live shows impossible. If there have nevertheless been some astounding virtual concerts in the tradition, including one Audra McDonald gave for a New York City Center gala, that doesn’t make the real thing any less valuable.Until live cabaret’s day, or rather its evening, returns, high-profile offerings from Sutton Foster, Jeremy Jordan and Marilyn Maye are here to entertain and instruct us. These three performers sing very well indeed, in very different styles and with very different material. But it’s their completely divergent uses of the form that make them stand out as examples of what cabaret can and can’t do best.One thing it can’t do at all is refuse to tell a story, even if that’s what a singer intends. Foster’s concert “Bring Me to Light,” also for City Center, tries hard anyway, deliberately defocusing its star and keeping psychology on a very short leash. The effect is so extreme that Foster seems more like the host of the occasion than the occasion itself, pushing her spotlight onto guests including Kelli O’Hara, Raúl Esparza and Joaquina Kalukango, who steals the show with “The Life of the Party,” from Andrew Lippa’s “The Wild Party.” Foster even gives a solo — “Here I Am,” from Disney’s “Camp Rock” — to Wren Rivera, a student of hers at Ball State University.In other words, despite having starred in seven Broadway shows and winning two Tony Awards, the first for “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 2002, Foster is a sharer, not a self-aggrandizer. Instead of filling gaps between songs with the de rigueur résumé-by-chitchat, she chipperly interviews her pals. And though the title of the show is taken from the finale of “Violet,” the Jeanine Tesori-Brian Crawley musical Foster led at City Center in 2013 and on Broadway in 2014, the tunestack of “Bring Me to Light” tends to avoid material strongly associated with its star. Mostly, it offers songs she is unlikely to be assigned onstage (“How to Handle a Woman”) or that come from other genres entirely. She and O’Hara make a lovely duet of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now.”This is all professionally rendered — as is the show itself. (The director is Leigh Silverman; the music director, Michael Rafter.) It looks fantastic in the plush if empty City Center auditorium. But at no point does it offer us the Sutton Foster who is so commanding when she plays a role that she can disappear into it before emerging transformed. Actually, at one point it does, when she bounces through the backstage hallways in jeans and then, in a nice jump cut, pops onto the stage in a sparkly gown. The song is the ambivalently titled “Hey, Look Me Over.”From Sutton Foster’s “Bring Me to Light,” at New York City Center.If Foster’s show tells the story of a star who avoids too much drama, “Jeremy Jordan: Carry On” heads in the opposite direction. It is bursting with drama, more than its little canoe of gorgeously sung songs can carry without tipping.The premise is both affecting and overwrought: that when he became a father in 2019, Jordan realized he had to unburden himself of unresolved conflicts from his own childhood before he could properly parent. Hence the pun in the show’s title, which is not just a command to keep going but also an actual piece of luggage filled with keepsakes that represent youthful traumas he must unpack.These are not the kind of traumas that are too piddling to earn a hearing; Jordan tells a brutal tale, involving abuse, drugs and a catastrophic car accident. The problem is that there aren’t many songs available to reflect and shape those traumas, so he must jury-rig existing ones (or, as in two cases, write new ones) to make a case for singing at all. Even so, as in a jukebox musical, they rarely fit, especially the ones associated with his own career, like “Broadway, Here I Come!” from “Smash,” and “Santa Fe” from “Newsies.”From Jeremy Jordan’s “Carry On,” at Feinstein’s/54 Below.Pop songs, including Billy Joel’s “Lullaby,” work better, but overall, the show is too heavy for a cabaret act and too skimpy and unvaried for a musical. (Aside from two medleys, there are only eight numbers.) Attempts to switch up the texture with asides, rueful jokes and painfully scripted banter with his pianist and music director, Benjamin Rauhala, only heighten the feeling that the material is as yet too raw for such a refined format.Perhaps “Carry On,” filmed without an audience at Feinstein’s/54 Below, would have been better off if Jordan hadn’t written, directed and performed it all himself. But learning to calibrate the emotional temperature of a room — and of one’s material — is a skill that comes only with experience. Jordan is 36; Foster, 46; together, they do not add up to Marilyn Maye’s 93 — an age that helps explain the distillation of her gifts and also her preference for classic material. “Broadway, the Maye Way,” another installment in the Feinstein’s/54 Below series that presented Jordan’s concert, consists mostly of show tunes, heavy on Jerry Herman, from musicals she’s been in, although never on Broadway itself.Maye, who started singing professionally in the 1940s, has run the gamut of outlets: radio, television, film, nightclubs, regional revivals, summer stock, concert halls and now cabaret. That is by no means a downward trajectory, but if anyone has the life experience to sing songs like “I’m Still Here,” from “Follies,” she does, with her “three cheers and dammit” verve. That would be enough in this repertoire, but Maye also brings to bear her wonderfully natural phrasing, her generous but not overstated swing and her big wallop of a voice in fantastic shape.From Marilyn Maye’s “Broadway, the Maye Way,” at Feinstein’s/54 Below.It’s hard to say whether she’s so good at singing optimistic Broadway barnburners like “I’m Still Here,” “Step to the Rear” and “Golden Rainbow” because they were written for voices like hers (she recorded the original hit version of “Cabaret” in 1966, and sings it again here) or because she has chosen them carefully to reflect what appears to be her actual personality.Probably, it’s both. The moto perpetuo arrangements by her musical director, Tedd Firth, certainly highlight her bubbliness and drive, but when she sings “Fifty Percent” from “Ballroom,” a number about a widow in love with a married man, the alteration in its effect is clearly coming from her. It’s no longer a torch song but a glass-half-full anthem.What Maye has mastered is the proportioning of restraint and release that allows the safe exchange of emotion between singer and audience. In a small room — and online, every room is small — that’s key. It’s how cabaret even under lockdown can remain an affecting art and not just a jukebox musical with sequins.Sutton Foster: Bring Me to LightThrough May 31; nycitycenter.orgJeremy Jordan: Carry OnThrough June 17; 54below.comMarilyn Maye: Broadway, the Maye WayThrough June 19; 54below.com More