Park Avenue Armory (Manhattan, NY)

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      Review: Kate Lindsey Brings Women’s Tales to the Armory

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      Kate Lindsey, accompanied by the pianist Justina Lee, programmed cycles of life, love and creation by Schumann and Fauré.At her recital at the Park Avenue Armory on Monday night, the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey told the stories of two women, each in her own way an originator.There was Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und -leben,” one of the first song cycles written from a woman’s point of view, a worthwhile artifact of a time when the genre was only a few decades old, and one that persists on concert programs despite its hidebound social mores. And there was “La Chanson d’Ève,” a spare, late-career work from Fauré that excises the first man from the Creation story and wraps its heroine in music of sensual mysticism.For an artist with a daring, theatrical sensibility, it was a retrograde pairing, as though Lindsey were achieving an element of surprise by playing against expectations. Her inventive portrayals at the Metropolitan Opera have included a slick, untrustworthy Nicklausse in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” and a wired Nerone bursting with nervous energy in Handel’s “Agrippina.”In the Armory’s Board of Officers Room, though, Lindsey was serene, her voice sheathed in obsidian, as she enlivened women created as companions for men who were nowhere to be found. “I don’t know where Adam is; he’s never mentioned,” she said of the Fauré, to much audience laughter.“Frauenliebe und -leben” is the opposite. The lover is mentioned constantly, everywhere, shaping practically every utterance. The piece sees a woman through the milestones she creates with a man: falling in love, getting married, having a baby, mourning his death. Lindsey tinged the narrator’s first blush of love with russet colors and a penetrating glint. A luscious line wove through “Du Ring an meinem Finger,” an almost sacred intimacy through “Süsser Freund, du blickest.” But the gushiness of “Ich kann’s nicht fassen, nicht glauben” felt forced.The intimate Board of Officers Room can make some vocal instruments sound big and overwhelming, but in Lindsey’s case, it allowed the audience a luxurious communion with her voice that isn’t possible in the Met’s cavernous auditorium. Her timbre, dark and occluded, is at once compelling and withholding; in vulnerable moments, she uses a threadlike straight tone.In the 10 Fauré songs, Lindsey was often enchanting: the profound whispers of “Paradis,” the conversational warmth of “Prima verba,” the gorgeous exaltations of “Comme Dieu rayonne.” The poetry’s endless talk of sighs, sun, flowers and fruits, though, took on a certain sameness; in Lindsey’s interpretation, Eve is more demigod than human. Justina Lee’s piano, at times plodding, made Eden feel earthbound rather than exquisite, the hardiness that made her Schumann comfortingly solid rendered the Fauré stolid.The concert ended with a brief set of Stephen Sondheim songs that introduced an imbalance to the evening. But only a pill could argue against hearing these wonderful pieces. Lindsey’s gentle, honest vibrato was disarming in the most poignant lines of “Losing My Mind,” but she struggled a bit with fitting her operatic technique to “Take Me to the World” and performed an abbreviated, less powerful version of “Being Alive.”The Schumann and Fauré cycles both end with meditations on death, which is where Lindsey summoned her stagecraft. In the long postlude for piano that closes “Frauenliebe,” a motif from the first song emerges as a sad, mournful echo, a memory of happier times. Lindsey’s protagonist, with no words left to sing and no man left to love, seemed to age a lifetime in a moment. There was a sense that now her life, and the person she was to be, would begin.Kate Lindsey and Justina LeePerformed on Monday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan. More

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      ‘Doppelganger’ Review: A Soldier Confronts His Mortality

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      At the Park Avenue Armory, an imaginative and viscerally shocking staging of Schubert songs from the director Claus Guth and the tenor Jonas Kaufmann.In the classical tradition, a song often evokes intimacy and solitude: a poet baring vulnerability, a composer painting a miniature. That sense of seclusion extends to the performance as well: a singer and pianist alone onstage, a listener absorbing the work in an intimate recital hall or immersed, alone, with headphones.These conventions surround the final group of songs written by Schubert, known as “Schwanengesang” (Swan Song) and published after the composer’s death in 1828 at age 31. But those expectations were upended in “Doppelganger,” which had its world premiere Friday at the cavernous Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall. The director Claus Guth, the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann, the pianist Helmut Deutsch and a raft of collaborators transformed “Schwanengesang” at the Saturday night performance into an entire wartime narrative.Kaufmann is a soldier who lies dying in a military hospital. Far from being alone with Deutsch onstage, he is one of nearly two dozen injured and sick soldiers being tended by a fleet of six nurses, the rest of the cast is made up of dancers. Deutsch and the piano are dead center among more than 60 hospital beds that stretch across the hall’s immense floor. Kaufmann’s soldier spends the last hour of his life revisiting his memories in a cascade of Schubert’s songs, stitched together with ominous new music by the German composer Mathis Nitschke.Guth’s imaginative and powerful staging for his New York debut recalls history. This drill hall has served as a hospital and shelter; “Doppelganger,” which had originally been intended for a fall 2020 premiere, also invokes the field hospitals hastily erected at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.The inventive and minimalistic set design by Michael Levine is dominated by hospital whites, and the clever lighting is by Urs Schönebaum.Monika Rittershaus/Courtesy of Park Avenue ArmoryMichael Levine’s inventive and minimalistic set design is dominated by the blanched shades of hospital whites and khaki uniforms. Growls of Nitschke’s sound and clever lighting by Urs Schönebaum suggest thunderstorms and bombings.Does the theatrical conceit serve Schubert’s songs? In the hands of Kaufmann and Deutsch, who have long worked together, yes — and it reignites the master’s music in a fresh, intelligent setting without sacrificing the duo’s artistry as classical performers.At one point, the piano becomes a main character in the drama, as Kaufmann and the dancers gather to listen in respite to Deutsch perform the second movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960. It was a rare treat to hear Deutsch, who usually performs an accompanist, take literal center stage.In a concession to the Armory’s sheer expanse, Kaufmann’s voice was lightly amplified. This was occasionally distracting when he turned his head away from his microphone, and his normally crisp articulation was slightly muddied. But Kaufmann’s sweet tone transcended the limits of the technology, particularly in Schubert’s yearning song of desire “Ständchen.”In the evening’s climactic song, “Der Doppelgänger,” Kaufmann’s soldier encounters his ghostly twin at the moment of death. Although the audience knows this was coming, having already seen the soldier being mortally wounded, the theatrical ingenuity and visceral force of “Doppelganger” was so strong that the audience let out an audible gasp of shock. When was the last time you heard something like that in a classical concert hall?DoppelgängerThrough Thursday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      Jonas Kaufmann and Friends Take On Schubert at the Armory

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      The tenor Jonas Kaufmann stars in “Doppelganger,” a staging of “Schwanengesang” by Claus Guth, making his New York debut.In Schubert’s song “Der Doppelgänger,” a piano resounds with increasingly tormented chords as the narrator recounts a realization: that a pained stranger, wringing his hands in the night, is in fact himself.“I think there is something like a moment where your soul steps out, and your body is there,” the director Claus Guth said about the song over coffee in Munich. “It’s this shocking moment: You understand that you’re dying.”That instant, he said, is the heart of “Schwanengesang,” the posthumous collection of Schubert’s final songs, which is often performed as a cycle, like the composer’s canonical “Die Schöne Müllerin” and “Winterreise.” And it’s that harrowing, transitional state that has inspired Guth’s staging of “Schwanengesang,” called “Doppelganger,” which premieres at the Park Avenue Armory in New York on Friday.The production — featuring the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann performing with his longtime collaborator, the pianist Helmut Deutsch — will be the New York debut of Guth, one of the most sought-after opera directors in Europe.Schubert’s music is regularly presented in the Armory’s intimate Board of Officers Room, the site of most of the arts center’s recitals. But the composer’s songs, like those of “Schwanengesang,” originally sung in parlors, are much less expected, and seemingly ill-suited, for the vast drill hall. But “Doppelganger” will unfold there amid an installation (designed by Michael Levine) of more than 60 hospital beds occupied by wounded soldiers. Kaufmann will rise from one of them, to think back on his life at the moment of his death.Kaufmann and Guth at the Armory, whose enormous drill hall will be the site of “Doppelganger,” a staging of Schubert’s intimate “Schwanengesang.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe path to “Doppelganger” was long, and not just because the production, originally planned for fall 2020, was delayed by pandemic closures. Years ago, Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director, approached Guth and Kaufmann about a music theater project for the drill hall, inspired by little more than their prestige and friendship, which goes back to their education at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich.“I gave them carte blanche to propose something,” said Audi, one of the few dreamers in New York who can still commission work on the monumental scale of the Armory. Kaufmann said that he and Guth discussed music by Strauss, Mahler and Wagner, as well as Janacek’s frequently staged cycle “The Diary of One Who Disappeared.”But the idea of mounting, say, Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” didn’t appeal to Guth. “If you have this huge orchestra, it will be the same structure you have at a normal concert,” he said. “So, how to get this very specific situation of not being in the opera house or concert hall? We thought it would be great to have in this huge hall just this lonely singer exposed.”They arrived at the idea of a song recital. And from there, Guth said, “It must be Schubert.”He researched the history of the Armory, and was struck as much by its use as a hospital and shelter as by its housing of a militia regiment. “It’s interesting to think of this place not as a drill hall, but the opposite,” he said.Guth also thought about the “Schwanengesang” song “Kriegers Ahnung,” in which a soldier worries about dying in battle and longs for “how cheerful the fireside glow seemed when she lay in my arms.” “My storytelling is, say, the last hour of this wounded soldier,” Guth said. “And in this last hour you see his flashbacks and his dreams.”Levine — a collaborator with Guth on a Metropolitan Opera-bound production of Janacek’s “Jenufa” — responded to that idea with a design incorporating a dreamily expansive field of hospital beds, in part as an attempt to rise to the drill hall’s size.“You want to address the space itself,” he said on a recent afternoon at the Armory, gesturing to the set as it was being arranged. “It’s a thrilling space to put anything in, and in a way it’s your responsibility to do justice to it. I’ve seen some beautiful, beautiful things here, but it’s not an easy space to get right.”He first submitted his designs in early 2020, just as he was reading about how Wuhan, China — a city of roughly 8.5 million people — was shutting down because of Covid-19. He couldn’t imagine that; it would be like New York City doing the same. Once that happened too, he began to see pop-up hospitals similar to the one he had conceived for “Doppelganger.”Now it has taken on an eerie resonance. Set vaguely in the first half of the 20th century, the production, with its rows and rows of beds, seems like a darkly familiar sight, especially to New Yorkers. And, Levine said, the isolation of a temporary hospital — whether during a war, as in “Doppelganger,” or somewhere like the Javits Center in the early days of the pandemic — is supported, even amplified, by Schubert’s music.“There’s something lonely about these songs,” Levine said, “and there’s something quite lonely about this space.”Kaufmann will be lightly amplified, but the concept of “Doppelganger” still relies on a performer with his immense presence, Audi said. “You need a personality like this,” he added, “because he’s alone onstage, and this is all taking place inside his head.”He won’t be entirely alone. Among the beds will be dancers, who play the parts of fellow soldiers, as well as actors playing hospital workers. And Schubert’s score will be joined by Mathis Nitschke’s original music — which joins the songs together, picking up the harmonic thread of one and transitioning to that of the next. (Deutsch also has a showcase in the form of an interlude pulled from a late Schubert piano sonata.)All this is possible, Kaufmann said, because “Schwanengesang” isn’t really a cycle. “We’re allowed to do something different with it,” he added, in a collaborative process among friends. “That’s our privilege, that we can present our ideas in a new package.” More

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      Review: In ‘The Doctor,’ a Rare Case of Physician, Harm Thyself

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      Robert Icke’s surgery on a 1912 play about the disease of antisemitism turns it into a riveting debate about identity. But at what cost to the patient?After attempting an abortion at home, a 14-year-old girl lies dying of sepsis at the Elizabeth Institute. No one questions her treatment there; by the time she was admitted, it was too late to save her. But when Ruth Wolff, the Institute’s head doctor, refuses to let a priest perform last rites because it would cause “an unpeaceful death,” ignorance amplified by social media turns a medical decision into a maelstrom. Soon the web is saying Wolff assaulted the priest and killed the girl.Yet it is not simply a question of tweets and misinformation. Wolff is a Jew.So far, the plot of “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s adaptation of the 1912 play “Professor Bernhardi” by Arthur Schnitzler, aligns closely with the original, except that Bernhardi is a Viennese man in 1900 and Wolff a British woman today. Yet ultimately the two works could not be more different. The production that opened on Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory, directed by Icke and starring Juliet Stevenson, is less the exercise in Shavian moral argument that Schnitzler rather airily called a comedy than a tragic thought experiment about the failure of identity politics.The thought experiment runs like this: If everyone represents only the group they belong to, instead of an overarching humanity, and if those groups get sliced finer and finer, what hope can there be for a common language, let alone a common achievement? Wolff’s medical ethics are gibberish to a person of faith, as a politician’s equivocation is nonsense to her. When an online petition states that “Christian patients need Christian doctors” it comes close to suggesting a system in which no one can be a doctor at all — and indeed, soon enough, Wolff is forced to resign.That conundrum, honed to a sharp edge in the plotty first act, gets a satirical round table treatment in the second, when Icke puts Wolff before a panel of extreme antagonists on a portentous television program called “Take the Debate.” Faced with an anti-abortion lawyer, a “CreationVoice” activist, a post-colonial academic and a researcher of unconscious bias, Wolff, despite her excellence, gets eaten alive.Attacking identity from every direction, Icke moves bravely into the danger zone of heightened sensitivity and calls for cancellation, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut I have left out a fifth panelist: “a specialist in the study of Jewish culture.” He seems to feel that Wolff, a “cultural” Jew, is somehow not Jewish enough.I felt that way about “The Doctor.” Not because of Icke’s and Stevenson’s faith, whatever it may or may not be; as I don’t believe in matching Christian patients to Christian doctors (nor in a similar matching of critics to plays), I likewise don’t want to limit portrayals of a culture or religion only to its adherents. But it soon became clear to me that, unlike “Professor Bernhardi,” written by a Jew, “The Doctor” is not very serious about antisemitism. How could it be, when the sentimental attachment to identity of any sort is precisely its boogeyman?Icke develops the idea very cleverly. His casting across race and gender ensures that you will be forced to re-evaluate your reactions when you discover, quite belatedly in some cases, that the characters are not as they may look. Is the interaction between a Jewish doctor and a priest with a Scottish accent different when you assume the priest to be white (because the actor is) than when you later learn he is Black? Does it matter whether Wolff’s partner, named Charlie and dressed indeterminately, is a man or woman?Attacking identity from every direction, Icke moves bravely into the danger zone of heightened sensitivity and calls for cancellation. Perhaps he goes too far in stacking the deck: Though some of Wolff’s antagonists, especially the girl’s yahoo of a father, make clearly antisemitic remarks, Wolff herself is almost worse. Not merely complacently sure of herself, like Bernhardi, she is, in Stevenson’s unflinching performance, a completely unsympathetic blowhard. However well done, the success of that interpretation backfires: As she howls, insults and snaps her fingers at underlings so relentlessly you begin to wonder whether her enemies are right, even if for the wrong reason.That’s in line with Icke’s generally over-caffeinated production, which includes a needlessly rotating turntable set (by Hildegard Bechtler), a scrape-your-nerves sound design (by Tom Gibbons) and a drum kit accompaniment from an aerie above the action (performed by Hannah Ledwidge) as if the breakneck story needed additional propulsion.Stevenson and Juliet Garricks, whose drama mainly unfolds offstage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt probably needs less. Its themes, constantly broadening, also thin out. Wolff’s transgender friend, Sami (Matilda Tucker), seems to exist only to be betrayed; the drama of Charlie (Juliet Garricks) occurs mostly offstage.And in the end, antisemitism gets dropped completely. A long final scene, lovely in itself, allows the priest who was at the center of the problem in the first place (John Mackay) to confess and be absolved. Not Wolff. She is asked to re-evaluate her hubris, examine her hidden bias and accept her fallen state with humility. The Jew-baiting of everyone else is, if not excused, forgotten, which is much the same thing.This has been a season of Jews blamed or blaming themselves for the emotional, physical and indeed genocidal violence against them. Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” seems to argue that the assimilated Jewry of Vienna (among whom Schnitzler was a star) should have seen the Holocaust coming and bought a ticket out. In the musical “Parade,” it is not enough that Leo Frank is lynched; to make him fully human he must be transfigured by love. (He’s dead either way.) And now “The Doctor” subjects its main character to antisemitic dog whistles but, in the end, sees her downfall as her own fault and an opportunity for growth.Well, that’s drama, and all three shows are riveting. No question they are also timely; Icke may even be warning us with that alarming drum kit that time is short. That might explain why his version of the Elizabeth Institute is not a general teaching hospital, as in the original, but a facility dedicated to the study of Alzheimer’s disease. Though it doesn’t make much medical sense for a girl with sepsis to be treated there, it does make sense for the play. Wolff describes Alzheimer’s as “a fire burning hot on the top” — scorching a path down through the brain from the newest to the earliest memories.You need only glance at the news to know what Icke means. As the memory of the unity and selflessness that once saved the world is all but burned through, how will we remember to never forget?The DoctorThrough Aug. 19 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Juliet Stevenson Returns to ‘The Doctor,’ and the New York Stage

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      The British actress is reprising her role as the Jewish physician at the center of an ethical drama. “It’s like a tailored suit,” the director Robert Icke said.At the start of Robert Icke’s “The Doctor,” the actress Juliet Stevenson stands alone in a spotlight onstage. “Am I sure? Yes. Yes!” she says crisply as if to an invisible interlocutor. “I’m crystal clear. I’m a doctor.”As the play’s title character, a grammatically exacting neurosurgeon named Ruth Wolff, Stevenson will repeat those last two phrases many times as events unfold and Ruth’s clarity and intellectual certainties erode. Eventually they will transmute into something far more inchoate as her life unravels, and self-doubt begins to permeate her conviction that being a doctor is all that matters.“The Doctor,” which opens Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, is a reworking of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 drama, “Professor Bernhardi,” about a Jewish physician who refuses entry to a Roman Catholic priest trying to administer last rites to a patient dying from sepsis after an abortion. In Icke’s version, the issues go beyond questions of medical ethics and religious affiliations to include identity politics and cancel culture.The play, and Stevenson, received rave reviews when “The Doctor” was first presented in 2019 at London’s Almeida Theater, where Icke was then the artistic director, and later after it transferred to the West End. “One of the peaks of the theatrical year,” Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian, adding that “while Stevenson shows how integrity can turn into obduracy, she also beautifully portrays the human cost of making medicine one’s god.”During an interview, Stevenson, 66, said the piece “takes a lot of the preoccupations of our time and plays them out on a very large, Shakespearean scale. Nobody’s right. Nobody’s wrong. We can explore all the angles because it’s safe. We’re on a stage, it’s a play!”After a long rehearsal, she was enthusiastic and voluble during our conversation at the Bishopsgate Institute, a cultural center in East London. “I have always wanted to put myself at the service of great writing, share it with people in the dark,” she said. “Every culture has that ancient ritual.”In Britain, Stevenson is a familiar face who has taken on a variety of roles onstage and on-screen since graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1978. But to U.S. audiences, she is probably best known for the 1990 Anthony Minghella film, “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” a romantic comedy about a woman mourning her dead lover, who returns as a ghost.“I don’t want to play King Lear any more. I want to tell women’s stories,” Juliet Stevenson said about the lack of roles for women over 40. An image of a wolf, her inspiration animal, is affixed to her dressing room mirror.Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesShe never aspired, she said, to a Hollywood career. “I am not at ease in the industry and no good at all that glamour stuff,” she added. “I am not an actress because I felt this face has to be on a screen.”And despite playing lead roles in major West End productions that have moved to Broadway, including “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” her only previous appearance in New York was a 2003 City Opera production of Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music.”“I never wanted to leave my children for long stretches while filming or acting outside the U.K.,” Stevenson said. “But now my youngest is 22, and I am free!”She comes “with this relish,” she said for a first-time move from the West End to New York: “It’s amazing to have a first time at my age!”“The Doctor” is Stevenson’s third collaboration with Icke, after playing Gertrude in his 2017 production of “Hamlet,” starring Andrew Scott, then alternating with Lia Williams in the roles of Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I in his update of Friedrich Schiller’s “Mary Stuart.”Stevenson first met Icke in 2010 at the Almeida Theater, where he was then an associate director. “We did a gala with a whole lot of famous actors doing Shakespeare, and I offered to run lines,” Icke recounted in a telephone interview from New York. “Juliet was the only person who wanted to rehearse and wanted notes. She was performing a very difficult bit of ‘As You Like It,’ and there was something about the rhythm and music of what she was doing that was amazing, and I stored it up.”They kept in touch, and, in 2015, when Stevenson congratulated Williams backstage, after watching her performance in Icke’s “Oresteia,” the director had a flash of inspiration. “I had been thinking about “Mary Stuart” for a long time, and looking at Lia and Juliet, I realized if I solved the problem of how to cast it by not solving it and doubling the roles, I had the key.”These parts in Icke’s productions have been important moments in her career, Stevenson said, adding that she would never have taken on Gertrude in “Hamlet” without his insistence. “I thought, ugh, these voiceless women in Shakespeare,” she said, “but he took that problem, that silence, and put it in the center.”But there have been many important moments, starting when she was around 10 and performed a W.H. Auden poem, “If I Could Tell You,” at school, she said. “It was the first time I felt a light bulb go on, felt I had to be a vessel for the poem to pass through me to an audience.”Jeremy Irons and Stevenson in New York City Opera’s 2003 production of the musical “A Little Night Music” at the New York State Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStevenson, the youngest of three children, lived abroad with her family as her father’s job with the British Army’s Royal Engineers took them to Germany, Australia and Malta. At 9, she encountered “an amazing drama teacher, Bess Jones,” at a boarding school just outside London, and started to go to the theater in her teens. When she saw “King Lear,” she immediately wanted to play the title role. “I was just possessed by it, the size of his anger, passions, love, regret, grief,” she said. “I stomped around being Lear for months; of course he is just like a badly behaved adolescent!”She successfully auditioned for the Royal Academy — “a culture shock” — where she felt lost and insecure until a teacher harshly criticized her performance of a speech from “Antony and Cleopatra.” “My anger found its way into the words, and I could feel the temperature of the room change,” she said. “I thought, OK, this is what acting is.”After graduating, she found ensemble work (“Shape No. 2, Sea Nymph No. 2 and Hellhound No. 3”) in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “The Tempest,” and stayed for eight years playing lead roles in Shakespeare productions and new plays, and working with directors like Peter Brook, Trevor Nunn and Howard Davies.She had also started working in film, appearing in Peter Greenaway’s “Drowning by Numbers” and “a couple of forgettable movies” before working on “Truly, Madly.” Also in 1990, she performed in “Death and the Maiden,” winning the best actress Olivier Award in 1992, and met her future husband, Hugh Brody, an anthropologist. Over the next two decades she had two children and played a dizzying number of roles onscreen (“Emma,” “Bend It Like Beckham,” “Departure”) and onstage (“The Duchess of Malfi,” “Private Lives,” “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” “Duet for One”).“Juliet pours her life and love and soul into everything,” said the theater director Natalie Abrahami, who worked with Stevenson in Beckett’s “Happy Days” and “Wings,” by Arthur Kopit. “She is always pushing, really good at asking instinctive, actor-led questions: ‘Why would the character act this way? What memory is triggered here?’ She is always making the map of a character’s life as three-dimensional as possible.”In “The Doctor,” Stevenson “climbs an extraordinarily difficult mountain with Ruth,” said Naomi Wirthner, who plays Ruth’s antagonist, the surgeon Roger Hardiman. “It’s a rock face that she climbs every night, every rehearsal, and just when you think she is at peak Ruth, she will find a deeper, stronger layer.”While writing “The Doctor,” Icke said, he was thinking about “the genius archetype, cancel culture and how society deals with the exceptionally abled. The examples are usually men, like Picasso, but I was interested in the interaction of genius and femaleness.”He knew, he added, that he wanted to write “a virtuosic, lead-actor play, like ‘Jerusalem’ with Mark Rylance. There is something about watching a great actor shoulder a big boulder and drag it up the hill. This was very specifically written for Juliet. It’s like a tailored suit; there isn’t a line of Ruth Wolff that is innocent of the knowledge that it will be spoken by her.”When he sent Stevenson the script, it spoke to a long-harbored frustration. “I had got really fed up with the lack of roles for women over 40,” she said. “And I don’t want to play King Lear any more. These are men’s stories, and I want to tell women’s stories.”She added that coming back to “The Doctor” after a break “was like holding up a mirror to so many cultural tensions: the demonizing of otherness, George Floyd, antisemitism, the agonizing history of abortion in the U.S.” The play also responds through its eclectic casting, she said, to the policing of which actors can play which characters. “When you see a white actor and discover the character is Black, it forces you to think, would I have reacted differently to that situation had I known that?”Warming to the theme, she continued.“My job description as an actor is to tell other’s stories, to imagine myself into other people’s lives,” she said. “Let’s not lose our richness. Let’s throw all these subjects up in the air and let them catch the light as they fall.” More

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      The Pianist Pavel Kolesnikov Makes a Rare Visit to New York

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      Pavel Kolesnikov took on a test of pianism, the “Goldberg” Variations, and assembled a conceptual program inspired by Joseph Cornell.Few pieces in the piano repertoire are as revealing of a performer as Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. With few indications of tempo or articulation, they force constant interpretation. It’s hard to think of a better personality test.Except, perhaps, programming. A pianist’s choice of what to play can be more illuminating than the performance itself. A recital might focus on a single composer or group together a few sonatas; but there’s also another route, more conceptual, of compiling something more akin to a playlist.Over two evenings at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan this week, the pianist Pavel Kolesnikov shared his artistry with both routes, with one concert devoted to the “Goldbergs” and the other a moodily nocturnal collage inspired by Joseph Cornell’s assemblage “Celestial Navigation.”Kolesnikov, a Russian-born pianist who lives in England, is at 34 already a stalwart of the London music scene. He has recorded the “Goldbergs” and performed them alongside the choreographer-performer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. But he has been virtually absent from New York’s stages.He shouldn’t be. His two Armory recitals exhibited pianism of poetic freedom, assured interpretive choices and a D.J.’s ear for subtle musical connections.His Bach was boldly argued — the kind of performance that invites disagreement but is defended so persuasively, even detractors can’t help but appreciate it. His take on the “Goldbergs,” an Aria followed by 30 variations and a return to the original theme, was openly personal, the score more like a coloring-book outline filled in with a palette of Kolesnikov’s creation.In Bach’s mathematical construction, the 32 movements are mirrored in the Aria’s 32 measures, which are split into two 16-bar passages that are both repeated — a structure that recurs throughout. Like most pianists, Kolesnikov approached the first run of each passage straightforwardly, with a clarity that rendered the score’s precise architecture in vivid detail.On the repeat, however, he seemed to put that structure through a stress test. Near-constant pedalwork shaded phrases with anachronistic nuance. One variation might bleed into another, such as the closing G of the Fifth being held into the first measure of the Sixth, which starts with the same note; the Quodlibet variation emerged from a haze of sustained, hammered chords at the end of the 29th.This was a reading of the “Goldbergs” too modern for purists of historically informed performance, yet also far from the slack indulgence of Lang Lang’s divisive recording. I didn’t remember, until I returned to my notes for Kolesnikov’s second recital, that I had described his treatment of the Aria’s return as Chopinesque — which turned out to be just the word to describe his program “Celestial Navigation (After Joseph Cornell).”Cornell’s sculptural assemblage — a muted evocation of how humans have made sense of the night sky, with references to mythology and science — doesn’t exactly lend itself to musical translation in the way that, say, a synesthetic painting by Kandinsky would. But Kolesnikov’s program is cleverly similar in its juxtapositions, unlikely pairings united not in aesthetic or time but in something loftier.It’s always refreshing to see musicians interacting with other mediums, and for Kolesnikov this isn’t even a first: He has also put together a recital inspired by Proust. As a conceptual thinker he resembles the pianist Vikingur Olafsson. But while Olafsson approaches programming like an essayist laying out a constellatory argument, Kolesnikov cultivates a mood. His performance at the Armory was a gathering of congenial poets.At the heart of the evening was a trio of suites that followed a basic construction: a Messiaen piano solo, a Chopin Nocturne and a fragmentary reprise of the Messiaen. Surrounding those were a Pavane by Louis Couperin (not the more famous François); Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l’Océan”; and Thomas Adès’s Dowland-inspired “Darknesse Visible.” Then, in the second half, Kolesnikov closed with Schubert’s D. 935 Impromptus.Covering nearly 350 years of music history, these pieces couldn’t possibly belong to the same sound world. But Kolesnikov nudged them as closely together as possible — again applying modern pedalwork to the Baroque, and using Chopin as a stylistic anchor. The result was often disorienting; Messiaen’s colors shone more brightly, and Schubert leaned with blunter emotions toward the Romantic.Kolesnikov’s blanket dreaminess lent a memory-like remove even to passages of storminess and, in one of the Chopin Nocturnes, a moment of “I could have danced all night” bliss. These were idiosyncratic interpretations in service of a greater whole.As in the “Goldbergs,” some of this could be seen as sacrilege. Maybe. What is inarguable, though, is that given two opportunities to reveal himself to New York, Kolesnikov came out and declared what kind of pianist he is: entirely, confidently, eloquently himself. More

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      Jeremy Strong to Star in Broadway Revival of ‘An Enemy of the People’

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      The production, with a new script by Amy Herzog and directed by Sam Gold, will begin early next year.“Succession” is ending. So what’s next for Jeremy Strong? He’s returning to Broadway.Strong, whose celebrity has skyrocketed with his portrayal of the scheming Kendall Roy in HBO’s “Succession,” will star next year in a Broadway revival of the classic play “An Enemy of the People.” Strong will portray the title character, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a physician who becomes a pariah when he decides to reveal that the water in local spa baths is contaminated.The play was written in 1882 by Henrik Ibsen and has been staged on Broadway 10 times, most recently in 2012. There have been other New York productions, too; a socially distanced one-woman version of the show was staged at the Park Avenue Armory in 2021, while the coronavirus pandemic was raging.This new production will feature a script rewritten by the playwright Amy Herzog, who is no stranger to reimagining Ibsen: Her revised version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” is now on Broadway, with Jessica Chastain in the starring role.Strong, who won an Emmy award for his work on “Succession,” previously appeared on Broadway in a 2008 revival of “A Man for All Seasons.” He has also appeared in several Off Broadway productions.The “Enemy of the People” revival will be directed by Herzog’s husband, Sam Gold, who won a Tony Award for directing the musical “Fun Home,” and whose more recent Broadway ventures have been polarizing productions of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and “Macbeth.”“An Enemy of the People” is scheduled to run for 16 weeks in early 2024; an announcement on Friday did not specify the exact dates or the theater, and did not reveal any further casting. The producers are Seaview (Greg Nobile and Jana Shea) and Patrick Catullo, who previously collaborated on Mike Birbiglia’s one-man show “The Old Man & the Pool.” More

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      Review: Holding Hands With the Homeless, in ‘Love’

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      Alexander Zeldin’s heartbreaking play set in a temporary housing facility retunes our attention from the big picture to the small accommodations.Whether with a gun, a mastermind or a monster, most thrillers thrill by invoking the specter of death: Who’s going to die and how? But “Love,” which opened on Tuesday at the Park Avenue Armory, keeps the audience ears-up anxious for 90 minutes without recourse to any of that. Its most alarming prop is a coffee cup, accidentally purloined, and what passes for a mastermind is a housing bureaucracy that’s evil only in its inefficiency. No one dies, yet the emotional threat level is off the charts and peculiarly personal. Call it a moral thriller: The monster is us.And make no mistake, “Love,” written and directed by Alexander Zeldin, implicates its audience. Quite literally in some cases: About 75 of the 650 seats in the Armory’s vast Drill Hall are placed onstage with the set, which represents the dingy common room of a temporary housing facility. At times, the characters, who are residents of that facility, will glance suspiciously at us ticket holders, as if we too were unhoused residents, and might have stolen a sandwich. Other times they sit among us or, at one point, reach out for solace.Yet even though “Love” is the middle play in a trilogy called “the Inequalities,” there is very little preachy or overtly political about it. The characters certainly have no time for treatises; each is desperate, for different reasons that add up to the same one, to get out of the facility as soon as possible. Colin, an unemployed man in his 50s, and his mother, Barbara, teetering on the edge of senility, have lived in Room 4 for nearly a year, trying to fend off impending indignity. This even though, as a new resident named Emma insists, “it’s six weeks maximum by law.”Emma, too, has a deadline: Very pregnant, she does not want to give birth before finding a proper home. She is naïvely confident that her stay in Room 5 — along with her partner, Dean, and Dean’s two children from a previous relationship — is temporary.The arrangement seems fine for the girl, Paige, who is still young enough at 8 not to mind much her bleak and reduced surroundings; she’s more interested in rehearsing the school Christmas pageant. But for her 12-year-old brother, Jason, the sudden change of circumstances — the family could not afford a sudden rent hike where they’d been living — comes at a time when external disappointment finds too much fuel in the onset of garden-variety adolescent dismay.Naby Dakhli, left, and Hind Swareldahab in the play. They discover a common language in Arabic, and erupt in conversation, becoming real to themselves and thus to us, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat “Love” — first performed in London in 2016 and seen across Europe since then — is in fact set at Christmastime, with a few decorations and the promise of mince pies, is (aside from some unnecessarily scary sounds between scenes) the play’s only obvious heart-clutcher. Still, it’s apt: Dean is, after all, an out-of-work tradesman, and the promise of a late-December baby puts us in mind of injustice as old as the Bible.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.So do the other two residents we meet, both apparently refugees. Tharwa, from Sudan, and Adnan, from Syria — played by Hind Swareldahab and Naby Dakhli — are mostly silent in the presence of the native-born English characters, and are thus misunderstood or suspected of vague wrongdoing. Only when they discover a common language in Arabic and erupt in conversation that we get the joy of, if not the gist, do they become real to themselves and thus to us.Merely remaining real — surviving the deprivation of home and privacy that most of us take for granted — is here a kind of victory. But just as Zeldin isn’t interested in stripping the dignity from his characters any further than the system has done already, he also refuses to sanctify them.Yes, there are acts of kindness (Barbara offers Paige a gift), moments of unexpected diversion (Adnan watches “Billy Elliot”) and simply ordinary observations of family life (Paige is thrilled by Colin’s constant cursing). The play’s title is neither an irony nor a plea; it’s an emotion that survives as a lullaby sung over a cellphone or a casual nickname or a serious declaration of commitment.But if the system were not dehumanizing there would be no drama; without its broken trust, no betrayals. For Dean (Alex Austin), the betrayal is bureaucratic; to advance in line for housing he must get a new job, but waiting in lines is a full-time job itself. For Barbara (Amelda Brown), the betrayal is physical and mortifying. For endlessly practical and even-tempered Emma (Janet Etuk), it’s the constant scraping down of patience that finally results in a crushing act of unsympathy.Alex Austin and Janet Etuk as a couple who are new to the facility, and hoping to find a new home before their baby arrives.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat these expressions of systemic despair feel so specific and personal is no accident. Zeldin developed “Love” in a series of workshops that included families who had experienced homelessness. (Swareldahab had never been in a theater before joining one of them.) The set and costume design, both by Natasha Jenkins, have the same feeling of lived-in authenticity: Your eye notes the stray single sneaker, abandoned on the roof of the shared bathroom, and the barely translucent windows scrunched high up in the corners of the room as if they too are trying to escape.Yet despite this and Marc Williams’s aptly harsh lights, which remain lit above the audience when they’re lit above the stage, “Love” is shaped by the poetics of drama as opposed to the logic of documentary. The characters are too particular to be placards, filled by the cast with so much subtext you’d think they would burst. And perhaps they do; among the uniformly excellent actors, Brown, as Barbara, stands out for her devastating portrait of dementia, Queen Lear in a shelter instead of on a moor.But unlike Lear she is a mother; Colin, though often rough and gross, is in Nick Holder’s wonderful portrayal surprisingly babyish and dainty underneath. Tharwa is a mother, too, but for reasons we don’t quite know, she is, as the script says, “without her children.” And Emma will be a mother any day. Together, the three women give “Love” a spine that would keep it standing as drama even if the armature of enforced homelessness were one day, thankfully, dismantled.I say “enforced” because bureaucracies are man-made and, with sufficient political will, reformable. We can sit around and argue that. Meanwhile, about 274,000 people are without homes in England, and about twice as many in the United States.Though “Love” is a great piece of theater — funny, beautifully staged, and with the kind of excitement that retunes your attention to tiny heartbreaks instead of just huge ones — I couldn’t help but wonder why it was easier to engage the subject inside the Armory than on Park Avenue. (There were several homeless people on the subway I took home.) When one of the characters reaches for audience members’ hands, they freely give it. How freely outside?LoveThrough March 25 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 1 hour and 30 minutes. More