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    Francesca D’Uva Works It All Out Onstage

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    With a solo show about grief and life, the comedian and composer brings her experimental musical comedy to an Off Broadway audience.Francesca D’Uva moved across the rehearsal room, singing and dancing, making the space her playground.Her voice jumped from a guttural, emo-metal drone to a high-pitched, almost operatic belt to a soft serenade. She played a surreal cast of characters: a sexy nurse from a Wii game she used to play; British children looking for the nanny of their dreams; Shakira.The show was an emotional pinball machine, seeming to invite laughter and tears. In one scene, she conjured the memory of her kindergarten Nativity play in which she was cast as a cow.“Everybody’s laughing at me, everybody’s mooing at me,” she sang.A familiar face in New York’s alternative comedy scene, Ms. D’Uva, 30, performs regularly at venues around the city and has appeared on television in “Three Busy Debras” and “Fantasmas.” Vulture named her a “Comedian You Should and Will Know” in 2024.Ms. D’Uva’s dramatic instincts find an outlet during the show in a range of characters, including at least one Colombian pop star.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWith the Off Broadway premiere this week of “This Is My Favorite Song,” her solo show at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan, she takes her genre-defying act to a new arena.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two Climate Change Plays Keep the Flames of Hope Alive

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      “Hothouse,” at Irish Arts Center, fends off despair with loopiness; “In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot,” at Playwrights Horizons, is a fuzzy world lacking depth.Critic’s Pick‘Hothouse’Through Nov. 17 at Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.Humans have a habit of averting their gaze from danger, even when it’s upon them. Even when it’s chronic, with one emergency piling atop another.That’s what Barbara did for years and years, staying with her violent husband.“Because you want to think it’s — I don’t know,” she says to her daughter, who grew up in that terrifying home. “A blip on the radar. That things’ll go back to being normal. That all this isn’t normal.”Domestic violence is not a theme you might expect from “Hothouse,” a climate change play from the Dublin-based Malaprop Theater. It’s principally set aboard a cruise ship taking passengers to the North Pole “to say goodbye to the ice.”But this alluringly strange and spangly show, at Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, is not solely or simplistically about ecological catastrophe. It’s about self-destruction as learned behavior through generations of safeguarding failures: the harm that parents do to children, who pass that on to their own, and the harm that humans do to the planet, abdicating their duty of care.It’s like a riff on Philip Larkin’s enduring poem “This Be the Verse” — you know the one, about man handing on misery to man — except that it takes cleareyed exception to Larkin’s grim final lines: “Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself.”Written by Carys D. Coburn with Malaprop and directed by Claire O’Reilly, “Hothouse” is a lament for the present and an elegy for the past that keeps alight a flame of hope for the future. It’s also yet another bit of smart programming from Irish Arts Center at a time when New York’s theater scene is somewhat starved for contemporary European work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Chris Perfetti of ‘Abbott Elementary’ Spends His Sundays

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      On his weeks off from shooting the ABC sitcom, the actor unwinds by whipping up “the biggest salad ever” and seeking out a Sunday-night show.For the actor Chris Perfetti, who lives in a fifth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn Heights, every day is leg day.“It’s worth it for the view,” said Mr. Perfetti, 35, who portrays the sixth-grade teacher Jacob Hill on “Abbott Elementary,” Quinta Brunson’s public school mockumentary set in Philadelphia. The fourth season premiered this month.Mr. Perfetti, a longtime New York theater actor who broke out on the show in 2021, still considers Brooklyn home, though he is also in Los Angeles six months of the year shooting “Abbott.” (He recently bought a 100-year-old cottage in the woods in Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon neighborhood, though he said he has no plans to give up his Brooklyn one-bedroom, where he lives on the building’s top floor.)“I definitely miss New York when I’m in L.A. more than I miss L.A. when I’m in New York,” said Mr. Perfetti, who was born in Rochester, N.Y.He studied drama at the State University of New York at Purchase in Westchester County and spent his weekends taking Metro-North trains into Manhattan to see shows.“I pretty much jet back here as soon as they call cut on ‘Abbott,’” he said.LATE START I wake up before noon, but not by much. “Abbott” requires me to wake up in the wee, wee dark hours of the morning — I’m usually up at 4:30 or 5:30 a.m. to be on set. That requires an alarm every day, so on the days when I’m not shooting, I let my body get as much sleep as I can.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      3 Ambitious Song Cycles, but Only One Connects Mind and Heart

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      Todd Almond’s “I’m Almost There” is a work of wonder, while Gabriel Kahane’s “Book of Travelers” and “Magnificent Bird” are less effective.Days and months, but also mere minutes, acquire outsize, perhaps even life-altering significance, in three song cycles currently playing intimate venues in Manhattan.Todd Almond’s “I’m Almost There,” at the Minetta Lane Theater through Oct. 5, takes place over just a few minutes, while Gabriel Kahane’s “Book of Travelers” and “Magnificent Bird,” upstairs at Playwrights Horizons through Oct. 13, cover periods that feel like distinct parentheses in his life.Under its goofy exterior, Almond’s “I’m Almost There” is a sneakily, formally daring experiment in pared-down musical theater that connects with both mind and heart. This 75-minute Audible production, directed by David Cromer, unfurls over the time it takes for Todd (Almond) to walk down the stairs from his apartment to the street, where Guy, who has just rung his buzzer, awaits. The two met at a brunch the day before and ended up walking around together, until an abrupt parting. Now this possible love interest has unexpectedly turned up, bearing coffee.An accomplished composer and music director (he collaborated with Laura Benanti on her recent Audible show, “Nobody Cares”), Almond has created something that feels like an interior monologue with the jumbled, digressive quality of a fever dream: Time and space unfold following their own surreal logic and Todd experiences jump cuts from one location to another as the mayhem escalates. “This is exactly what happens when you let someone talk you into brunch,” he says while trying to escape a vampire’s fangs.An undercurrent of anxiety runs through the show — Todd has a fear of falling from something (like his building’s rooftop when sleepwalking) or for someone (like a certain nice man with whom he just clicks) — but it fuels a self-deprecating, antic energy that keeps the story from lapsing into neurotic solipsism.Flanked by Erin Hill on harp and vocals and Luke McCrosson on bass, Almond, whose acting credits include “Girl From the North Country,” brings to life a gallery of eccentric characters, but does quite well on his own, enlivening his serviceable vocals with a vividly comic presence. Letting people in is tough, but Todd eventually answers that bell and opens up.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two More New York Theaters to Share Space

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      The prestigious downtown nonprofit Soho Rep will share space with Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan while figuring out a longer-term plan.In another indication of how postpandemic economics are rattling the nonprofit theater world, the prestigious Soho Rep is giving up its longtime home in TriBeCa and will instead share space with Playwrights Horizons, a Midtown theater company, while trying to figure out a longer-term plan.The move, prompted by real estate constraints as well as fiscal concerns, comes at the same time that another important New York nonprofit, Second Stage Theater, is leaving its Off Broadway home. That company is now planning to reside, at least temporarily, with Signature Theater, which in recent years has had more space than it can afford to program.The two decampments follow a 2022 decision by the Long Wharf Theater, in New Haven, Conn., to let go of its waterfront home and become itinerant.Taken together, the transitions are a reminder of the enormous stresses facing nonprofits, and suggest that revisiting real estate choices will become part of the solution for some.“If you look at the field-wide vulnerability, partnerships are a result of that,” said Eric Ting, one of Soho Rep’s three directors. “We look to each other for support and for strength.”Soho Rep, established in 1975, is small: Its current annual budget is about $2.8 million, it has just five full-time employees and since 1991 it has been presenting most of its work in a 65-seat TriBeCa space, making it an Off Off Broadway theater. But the company, committed to what it calls “radical theater makers,” punches way above its weight. It was the first to stage Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2019, as well as Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s “Public Obscenities,” which was a Pulitzer finalist this year. The theater has regularly introduced New York audiences to work by important, and often provocative, playwrights, including Sarah Kane, Aleshea Harris, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lucas Hnath.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Abe Koogler’s Ominous ‘Staff Meal’ Has Something for Everyone.

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      Restaurant patrons and staff members are oblivious to the impending apocalypse in Abe Koogler’s new show at Playwrights Horizons.A woman in the audience started grumbling around 30 minutes into a recent performance of “Staff Meal” at Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan. “What is this play about?” she hissed. A few uncomfortable seconds after she stood up and repeated her gripe for everyone to hear, it was clear that she was part of the show, which opened on Sunday.The disgruntled audience member, played with relatable side-eye by Stephanie Berry, goes on to summarize the setup so far: Two strangers buried behind their laptops, Ben (Greg Keller) and Mina (Susannah Flood), strike up an awkward flirtation at an anodyne cafe. (“Singles in the city? I’ve kinda seen it before,” Berry’s heckler says.) They head to a restaurant where, just outside the kitchen, two veteran servers (Jess Barbagallo and Carmen M. Herlihy) are schooling a new waiter (Hampton Fluker) on his first day. (“Is this a play about restaurants or the people who work there?” the heckler asks.)She goes on to bemoan the frivolity of “emerging writers” who keep “doodling on the walls” as the world burns. “Take a stand! Inspire action!” she pleads. She’s not alone in that sentiment.Embedding self-conscious commentary about the worthiness of a new play, as the writer Abe Koogler does here, is an increasingly common trope. (Alexandra Tatarsky did it with unhinged gusto in “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” presented at this theater in November.) Blame it on the world being in flames, and the playwrights who can’t help but notice.But preemptively asking what the point is raises the expectation of a satisfactory answer, or at least one that responds to the provocation.There is no one else to object when Berry’s character does what she has just harangued others for doing: relaying a bit of autobiography — she’s a widow and onetime aspiring dancer — that has no obvious plot significance. Back at the restaurant, the chef, Christina (Erin Markey), unveils her own surprising origins: a fantastical tale of class, opportunity and reinvention.Koogler’s previous plays — “Fulfillment Center” premiered Off Broadway in 2017, and “Kill Floor” in 2015 — set up uneasy contrasts between wounded characters and their dystopian workplaces. “Staff Meal” is more loosely constructed and absurdist. Though Ben and Mina eventually forge an incidental unity, and the unnamed restaurant servers bond over industry expertise, the dialogue is less concerned with human connection than with exploring the circumstances that generally necessitate it: proximity in public, collaboration on the job, sitting down in a theater.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Abe Koogler’s New Play Is an Ode to Intense Culinary Experiences

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      In “Staff Meal,” in previews at Playwrights Horizons, a restaurant becomes a refuge as the world ends.Abe Koogler didn’t grow up going to many restaurants. He was raised on Vashon Island, Wash. — sparse and bucolic with an artsy populace, a few miles southwest of Seattle — in a house without a TV, where meals were mostly eaten at home, his free time spent fashioning handmade puppets onto chopsticks.So when he moved to New York, a city with restaurants on virtually every corner, he found the hustle and bustle of Manhattan’s highbrow establishments fascinating.“Living in New York, you walk by all these highly curated, beautiful, warm spaces where people are in the middle of this intense culinary experience,” Koogler said on a rainy afternoon in Midtown Manhattan. “And I like looking at these windows and imagining what it’s like for the people inside.”“A lot of it is being fascinated and not knowing why,” he added.Koogler, 39, is known for his darkly comedic plays about labor-intensive jobs in, for example, package inventory centers and slaughterhouses. Works about work. His latest, “Staff Meal,” about a beloved restaurant with a mysterious owner, has a similar setting (much of the story takes place in the prepping of food and serving of drinks) but with a notable diversion from his previous productions: Here is a job where the employees enjoy their work. In fact, they revere it.The restaurant’s culture of veneration for food, wine and care-taking nods to Danny Meyer’s hospitality manifesto, “Setting the Table,” and though the play, which opens on April 28 at Playwrights Horizons, begins as a familiar meet-cute, it “progressively gets weirder and weirder,” said the show’s director, Morgan Green.After first reading the script, she wondered, “How the hell do you stage it?”“I was really excited about this down-the-rabbit-hole feeling,” she said, and about mapping out “that trajectory.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How the Gory Sex Scenes in ‘Teeth’ Came Together

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      Creating the sex scenes for the horror musical required close attention to detail, extra communication and some strategically placed silicone.Song, dance and deadly genitalia: It’s all on full, gory display in “Teeth,” Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs’s campy musical adaptation of the 2007 cult horror film. The story follows Dawn O’Keefe, a God-fearing good girl — surrounded by shame-lobbing, not-so-good men — whose body has a sharp sense of justice.In a show in which violence begets vengeance — Dawn has a curious case of vagina dentata — it’s a lot to endure, for both biter and bitee. (As Jesse Green cheekily put it in his New York Times review of the Playwrights Horizons production: “If you don’t want to see bloody amputated penises, why come to the theater?”)Campy or not, choreographing the many scenes of intimacy and assault required extraordinary sensitivity. Violations vary: In one scene, Dawn seeks relief for her condition, only to be repeatedly ogled and groped by a creepy gynecologist. As she protests, her body takes revenge. The director, Sarah Benson, wanted someone dedicated to creating a space for the actors to feel safe, and free to set boundaries.“There’s so much sex and intimacy and sexual violence and everything in between that I just knew immediately that intimacy direction was going to be a massive part of the work of the show,” Benson said. “It was so important to me to have someone who was really creating a container in which we could be vulnerable and raw and make this very intense story.”“I am still able to go home feeling like I didn’t give every single part of myself and my body to the work,” said Alyse Alan Louis, who plays Dawn. Here she’s in an early scene with Jason Gotay, who plays her boyfriend.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThat someone was Crista Marie Jackson.Intimacy directors, or intimacy choreographers as they are also known, help actors simulate sex by laying out the specifications of consent and organizing the logistics of bodily contact.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: An Affair to Dismember, in the Gory Musical ‘Teeth’

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      A cult horror film about a teenage girl with a surprise set of chompers gets another surprise: the song-and-dance treatment.So unexpected, contrarian and maximalist are the musicals of Michael R. Jackson that I spend a lot of time between them wondering what he’ll do next. First came “A Strange Loop,” about a “fat, Black, queer” man stuck in a cycle of shame by his faith. Then came “White Girl in Danger,” about soap opera characters so privileged and confident they feel total freedom to do what they like.Now, in collaboration with Anna K. Jacobs, comes the remix, “Teeth,” which opened on Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. It too is a show about faith and shame, but as experienced by an alpha white girl in the most biting ways.Literally.“Teeth,” with music by Jacobs, lyrics by Jackson and a book by both, manifests all three elements of the Jackson formula. Based on the 2007 cult horror film by Mitchell Lichtenstein, it is a parable set in motion by a young woman’s discovery of vaginal incisors that spring shut when sexual violence is done to her. Living in a paternalistic faith community, where men believe (as one lyric has it) “the weaker sex has weakened us,” such violence is never far away — and so neither is dismemberment.Well, if you don’t want to see bloody amputated penises, why come to the theater?Perhaps for Jackson’s provocative mix of high-mindedness and low satire. Both are fully evident in Sarah Benson’s production, even if they never blend into a satisfying whole.The low satire, mostly in the setup, is the more successful tactic. It offers a winking subversiveness and plenty of laughs, especially in the catchy pop-rock tunes with their sharp, smutty rhymes. About the only ones I can repeat here are “gravity/cavity” and “zucchini/weenie.”But the elaborate ideological superstructure is also rewarding at first. It puts the tale in the context of current culture wars between those who seek to restore male dominance and the supposedly castrating women they call tools of the “feminocracy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More