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      ‘Medicine’ Review: One Dose Reality, Two Doses Absurdity

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      Domhnall Gleeson is surrounded by an eccentric cast of characters in Enda Walsh’s surreal play at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Mary, a woman dressed as an old man. Another Mary, a woman in a lobster suit. John Kane, a nervous mental patient in blue pajamas. And a nameless drummer who never speaks. These eccentric characters come together in Enda Walsh’s often baffling yet always arresting new play, “Medicine,” a presentation of Landmark Productions and the Galway International Arts Festival that opened at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Tuesday.John (Domhnall Gleeson) wanders onto the set, a drab room with the look of a community center hall (design by Jamie Vartan). It’s a mess — the aftermath of a staff party, with streamers and balloons — and John is concerned about it. He putters around, fidgeting and picking things up haphazardly.He’s preparing for the arrival of the two Marys (Aoife Duffin and Clare Barrett) and the drummer (Sean Carpio). They’re there at the institution to run through a script of John’s life, presumably as a kind of drama therapy.Once they arrive and their routine gets underway, the Marys don different costumes and lip sync a recording of dialogue from the people in John’s life, beginning with his parents on the day he was born. As John narrates, the Marys interrupt, to share notes and perform random dances while the drummer scores the scenes. But as John’s story unfolds, he becomes increasingly frazzled.Walsh, a celebrated playwright and director whose enigmatic works include “Grief Is the Thing with Feathers,” “Arlington” and “Rooms,” also writes and directs this play, which feels like a psychosexual absurdist fantasy. How long has John been here? What parts of this are real? Walsh is less concerned with providing answers than he is with making us sit with John’s mounting sense of desolation and shame. In this way, the work resembles a poem or an interpretive dance, resonating with symbols and gestures and feelings, and the rest is for the audience to puzzle through.Aoife Duffin as one of the Marys.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesJohn recounts abuse by his parents and peers when he was a child, and maltreatment at the hands of a worker at the institution. He scrutinizes his mother’s negligence and overt sexuality, and conflates his budding erotic desires as a teen with his yearning for maternal love and attention. All the while the narcissistic Lobster Mary (or Mary 2, as the script calls her) controls the performance: She harasses Mary 1 and bullies John.If that weren’t Freudian enough, Walsh plants recurring images and themes throughout, implying connections between John’s version of his past and the present moment with the actors.What the two Marys are doing here is its own theater — a production that Mary 1 starts to suspect is cruel. As they step into and out of the personalities in John’s life, the lights shift with Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” playing. (Adam Silverman handles the mercurial lighting.)Barrett gives a menacing performance as Mary 2, who embodies some of the more brutal characters in John’s tale and aims her own shots of hostility at Mary 1 (Duffin, who appeared as Ophelia opposite Ruth Negga in “Hamlet” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2020). Duffin’s Mary is empathetic, so much so that she inhabits John’s story, and at some point the voice-over of a character she’s playing overlaps with her voice as she speaks the same lines. The language here — which Walsh writes with aureate poeticism, full of vivid imagery and pointed symbolism — is what gives the show its melancholic beauty.Clare Barrett as the other Mary.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThen there’s Gleeson himself, with his impressive performance. He is a chameleonic TV and film star (“Harry Potter,” “Star Wars,” “Run”) who can convey anything from a villainous sneer to a sensitive whimper with his entire physical bearing. Despite his height, Gleeson seems to wilt like a flower in want of sun. He nervously shuffles around the stage or gets worked into a frenzy — huffing and flailing with explosive bravado, seamlessly accompanied by Carpio’s percussion. (Helen Atkinson handily controls the layered sound design.)There could easily be more Gleeson — and by that I mean more of John’s perspective, because we get only snapshots of his life. By the end, John reasserts that he’s “not like other people” and belongs in the institution. It seems John is a victim of a kind of manipulation; the drama therapy isn’t to help him but to gaslight him into believing he mustn’t ever try to seek freedom. Beneath all the oddities of Walsh’s script is a criticism of the ways in which society fails the mentally ill.It’s unclear whether Walsh is also indicting theater — this is, after all, a play in which a play is used toward devious ends. So perhaps “Medicine” is simply a work of fanciful mysteries. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter. The emotional core of the show is always prevalent.By the end, John’s dejection feels as familiar as a phantom pain. He may still be within the same sad four walls where he began, but Walsh’s production transforms the space from one of isolation into one of empathy that even the audience can share. Because ultimately, a couple of doses of human connection is the best medicine anyone can ask for.MedicineThrough Dec. 5 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: Sounds and Styles Playfully Collide in ‘Only an Octave Apart’

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      This show brings together two convention-inverting artists: the cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond and the opera singer Anthony Roth Costanzo.“Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be normal?” Justin Vivian Bond, the doyenne of downtown cabaret, asks the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo a few songs into their show, “Only an Octave Apart,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse.The gag, of course, is that both Bond and Costanzo — whose pristine and ethereal voice has been heard at venues like the Metropolitan Opera and the Palace of Versailles — are utterly singular artists.Bond, 58, is a veteran and pioneer of alternative live performance, polished in appearance but satisfyingly rough in voice and manner, a diva whose response to having seen it all is both a yawn and a wink. Costanzo, 39, who will return to the title role in Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Met this season, has demonstrated a voracious appetite for mashing up disciplines. Perhaps that is in response to the limited countertenor repertoire, “music written before 1750 or after 1950,” as he has said.Their teaming up came about by chance and circumstance, they banter in “Only an Octave Apart.” Costanzo recalls seeing one of Bond’s shows at Joe’s Pub and professing instant fandom; Bond remembers thinking Costanzo was hot. They became fast friends, and their relationship led to the St. Ann’s performance, which takes its name from a TV special the soprano Beverly Sills and the actress Carol Burnett recorded at the Met in 1976, in a campy meeting of so-called high and low culture.Conceived with and directed by Zack Winokur, “Only an Octave Apart” feels like something between “Honey, I Shrunk the Opera” and oversized cabaret. Or an operatic highlight reel wedged into a freewheeling stage revue. Or an improvised set of concept singles. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. The uneasiness of its hybrid form is part of the point, and reflective of its stars’ convention-inverting talents.Costanzo, left, and Bond in the show, which teases out the obvious humor and dissonant beauty in their sounds.Nina WesterveltA ventriloquist-style number inspired by “Singin’ in the Rain,” for example, plays off their bucking of gendered expectations: Costanzo sings from behind the curtain while Bond lip-syncs, aligning his countertenor with Bond’s high-feminine presentation. Then they switch. (“Act butcher!” Bond barks.)The show finds both obvious humor and a dissonant beauty in combining sounds. Under Thomas Bartlett’s brilliantly agile music direction, nimble arrangements by Nico Muhly and Daniel Schlosberg flit seamlessly from plucked strings to erotic disco beats. The stars’ voices at times collide to strange, glorious effect (as in a languid take on Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Waters of March”); or they playfully intersect in ways that throw their differences into sharp relief.Bond thrills most in haunting ballads that animate the eerie exigencies of isolation (“Me and My Shadow”) and the melancholy in holding onto hope (“I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”). Cutting a glamorous figure beneath worshipful lighting by John Torres, Bond issues an enchanting warble, its gravelly depths echoing with comfortable wisdom.Costanzo also dazzles in solos that showcase his rich yet delicate voice, which glints and swoops like intricately painted blown glass. Before performing Lizst’s arresting art song “Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh,” Costanzo explains that it’s about despair, from poetry that Goethe is said to have carved into stone as he died alone.If the show speaks to the moment, it does not seem by design. The organizing principle of non sequiturs (“We’ve sung about flowers and water, now how about leaves?”) is charming to a point, though ultimately comes at the expense of assurance and momentum.Bond, a seasoned stage personality, is at ease riffing off the cuff and ribbing an insider crowd — but feels rather far away peering over the nine-piece orchestra, with a hand shielding the glare. Costanzo’s element is vocal storytelling; he’s less at ease, however, as a co-host, even though he’s clearly game.Their self-mythologizing repartee (an avant-garde legend and an opera star walk into a bar …) keeps the audience at a guarded remove, while the songs yearn for connection. It’s a paradox starkly rendered in fabric by the first of Jonathan Anderson’s costumes, velvety-soft, floor-length gowns that jut out at harsh angles, like front-turned bustles whose bell curves have been replaced by blunt machetes.Bond and Costanzo are extraordinary artists, though it’s not until the night is nearly over that they allow us to see them as vulnerable ones, too. “Only an Octave Apart” was meant to be a live show, then an album; the pandemic forced them to work in reverse. They poured themselves into creating this odd and beguiling record, they say, over the worst of the past year.Now onstage, they seem electrified, their nerves raw and frayed, dazed to be in communion again — in other words, more like the rest of us than they’d dare to let on.Only an Octave ApartThrough Oct. 3 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; 718-254-8779, stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 90 minutes. More

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      A Cabaret Star and an Opera Star Walk Onto a Stage …

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      The punchline is “Only an Octave Apart,” featuring the unlikely collaborators Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo at St. Ann’s Warehouse.“This show has been 10 years in the making,” the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo said recently.He was talking about “Only an Octave Apart,” an undefinable event — A staged concert? A revue, maybe? — which he created with Justin Vivian Bond and which runs at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn from Tuesday through Oct. 3.On paper, the two seem to be unlikely collaborators. Bond, 58, is a throaty-toned pioneer of the alternative cabaret scene, both as a solo artist and as half of the duo Kiki and Herb. Costanzo, 39, is a classical star whose luminous voice takes him to opera houses and concert halls around the world. (In the spring, he’ll return to his body-waxed role as the titular character of Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Metropolitan Opera.)But Costanzo’s voracious taste for collaboration has encompassed artists as disparate as the painter George Condo, the ballet dancer David Hallberg and the fashion designer Raf Simons. And Bond recently appeared in an opera, Olga Neuwirth’s “Orlando,” in Vienna in 2019.Costanzo is a countertenor who is returning to the title role in Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Metropolitan Opera in the spring.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBond is an alt-cabaret artist who rose to fame as half of the duo Kiki and Herb.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesSo it’s not entirely implausible that they’ve ended up together at St. Ann’s, where their set list ricochets giddily from Gluck to Jobim to the Bangles, and the artistic team includes the director Zack Winokur (“The Black Clown”), the fashion designer Jonathan Anderson and the composer Nico Muhly on arrangements.Bond and Costanzo’s partnership is more organic than most “when worlds collide” projects, which often feel as if an enterprising impresario had pulled random names out of a hat and precipitately pushed the unlucky artists onstage.“We were seeing each other because we were friends, not because we were intending to collaborate,” Bond said, sitting with Costanzo after a recent rehearsal.Back in 2011, Costanzo was in the audience at Joe’s Pub for one of Bond’s cabaret outings. When Bond mentioned from the stage that the guest artist for an upcoming performance had just dropped out and there wasn’t a replacement, Costanzo leaned over to a friend and whispered, “Me!”The friend, the photographer and director Matthew Placek, also knew Bond and made the introductions. Costanzo nabbed the guest spot and prepared a Handel aria, but he was also keen to join voices on “Summertime.”“You said no,” Costanzo recalled to Bond in the interview. “Then right before the show started, I was practicing it and you were like, ‘All right, all right, we will do it as a duet.’”The inspiration for “Only an Octave Apart,” and the title number, came from a television special Carol Burnett and Beverly Sills recorded at the Met in 1976. Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe combo was a success. “We sounded so good together,” Bond said. “Of course, that song’s problematic and we can’t sing it anymore, but it gave us an opportunity to see our chemistry onstage, which was really fun.”So much so that they are back for more, though the initial impetus was rather pedestrian: Costanzo wasn’t sure what to do next for his record company. “I just didn’t want to make ‘Scarlatti Cantatas’ or something,” he said. “I mean, they’re beautiful, but it’s been done.”Teaming up with Bond provided a creative solution. (And this won’t be their last partnership of the season. They will come together at the New York Philharmonic in January as part of the “Authentic Selves” festival that Costanzo is organizing.)The inspiration for “Only an Octave Apart,” and the title number, came from a pop-culture footnote: a television special that Carol Burnett and Beverly Sills recorded at the Met in 1976. A similar encounter of disparate influences and high and low culture (or at least what audiences associate with high and low), flavored with vaudevillian touches, will now be played out at St. Ann’s.At first, even the longtime Bond collaborator Thomas Bartlett — who is the show’s music director and producer of the album version of “Octave,” which comes out in January — was skeptical.“When the idea was pitched to me, it sounded a bit like a fun joke,” he said in a video call. “It didn’t occur to me that Anthony’s voice would make Viv’s voice feel rich and kind and wise in this way, and that Viv would make Anthony sound even more ethereal.”Bond, Costanzo and Bartlett came up with a wide range of material. Some of the songs are duets, like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush’s “Don’t Give Up.” Some are solos in conversation with each other, such as when an aria from Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” segues into the early-20th-century ditty “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden.” Some are classics from the cabaret repertoire, like “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” And some are the kind of free associations in which Kiki and Herb used to specialize, like a surprisingly effective medley of “Dido’s Lament” — also by Purcell — and Dido’s “White Flag.”“We’re holding our own space, but we’re doing it together,” Bond said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesDespite the mingling of their musical universes, the performers stay true to their respective styles. “We’re not crossing over,” Bond said firmly. “We’re holding our own space, but we’re doing it together.” They do not scat-sing Purcell, for example, and Costanzo does not imitate the disco singer Sylvester’s famous falsetto when the pair covers his track “Stars.”“I was like, how do I take an application of this voice and technique that feels honest and that sings the song?” Costanzo said. “I listen to opera singers try to sing pop and it’s so lame, because inevitably they wind up trying to sing some classical arrangement to a pop song.”During a recent rehearsal, Bond often left space for future improvisation. “I’m going to come out, they’re going to see me, I’m going to milk it for a moment,” Bond said at one point, describing an entrance. Costanzo, on the other hand, is used to the precision of classical music, where every note and step is carefully planned.“Sometimes my frustration with opera is that all spontaneity dies in pursuit of perfection,” he said. “I want to uphold and cherish the tradition, but in order to make it feel alive, it needs some kind of being in the moment and spontaneity.”“But it’s challenging because I am always looking for structure and Viv is always like, ‘Don’t box me in because it’s not going to be as good,’” Costanzo said.Still, Bond pointed out that there is a safety net. “I obviously don’t want Anthony to feel uncomfortable, or that he’s going to be in any way undermined or not feel that he’s going to be seen at his best, so we’ve been establishing points where things definitely have to happen,” Bond said.Working out the sound of a crow’s caw, the pair seemed ready for their spotlight — at the most stylish comedy hour ever. “I’ve never laughed so hard in the rehearsal process,” Winokur, the director, said.But if there are many jokes in the show, the performers are in on them.“Being a countertenor, whenever I open my mouth, even at the Met, people go, ‘Why is he singing like that?’” Costanzo said. “I go work with kids and they laugh the minute you start singing. Which I love, I welcome it, but I’m like a novelty in that way, which I enjoy exploiting.”“As a classical musician,” he added, “you can be gay or queer or whatever, and then you go do your show. You are not expressing yourself as much in that theatricality or your identity. You are embodying a character. This project feels like, for whatever reason, this real theatrical expression of who I am.”Bond suggested, “It’s expressing your artistry through a place of truth, as opposed to trying to make something that is artificial seem true.”Costanzo laughed and said: “See? Viv is so good!” More

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      New York to Allow Limited Live Performances to Resume in April

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNew York to Allow Limited Live Performances to Resume in AprilThe state will allow plays, concerts and other performances to start again April 2 for audiences of up to 100 people indoors, or 200 outdoors.New York State is relaxing coronavirus restrictions and allowing venues to reopen next month to limited audiences. The musicians Jon Batiste and Endea Owens performed at a pop-up concert last month at the Javits Center.Credit…Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMarch 3, 2021Updated 5:32 p.m. ETPlays, concerts and other performances can resume in New York starting next month — but with sharply reduced capacity limits — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Wednesday.Mr. Cuomo, speaking at a news conference in Albany, said that arts, entertainment and events venues can reopen April 2 at 33 percent capacity, with a limit of 100 people indoors or 200 people outdoors, and a requirement that all attendees wear masks and be socially distanced. Those limits would be increased — to 150 people indoors or 500 people outdoors — if all attendees test negative before entering.A handful of venues immediately said they would begin holding live performances, which, with a handful of exceptions, have not taken place in New York since Broadway shut down last March 12.The producers Scott Rudin and Jane Rosenthal said they expected some of the earliest performances would take place with pop-up programs inside Broadway theaters, as well as with programming at nonprofit venues that have flexible spaces, including the Apollo Theater, the Park Avenue Armory, St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Shed, Harlem Stage, La MaMa and the National Black Theater.“That communion of audience and performer, which we’ve craved for a year, we can finally realize,” said Alex Poots, the artistic director and chief executive of the Shed, which plans to begin indoor performances for limited-capacity audiences in early April.The new rules will not affect commercial productions of Broadway plays and musicals, which are still most likely to open after Labor Day, according to Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League.“For a traditional Broadway show, the financial model just doesn’t work,” she said. “How do we know that? Because shows that get that kind of attendance close.”Mr. Cuomo announced his plan to ease restrictions as New York, along with New Jersey, has been adding new coronavirus cases at the highest rates in the country over the last week: both reported 38 new cases per 100,000 people. (The nation as a whole is averaging 20 per 100,000 people.) And New York City is currently adding cases at a per capita rate roughly three times higher than that of Los Angeles County.The labor union Actors’ Equity responded by calling on Mr. Cuomo to “prioritize getting members of the arts sector vaccinated.”Many nonprofit leaders welcomed the new rules as a sign of hope and a first step toward recovery. “We have suffered immense loss and there’s a way to go,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, “but this policy change signals that we are turning a corner on the worst crisis the American theater has ever experienced.”Lincoln Center and the Glimmerglass Festival have already announced plans to perform outdoors this year, and the new rules clarify how many people can attend.“We welcome the new guidelines and want to serve as many people on our campus as is safe,” said Isabel Sinistore, a spokeswoman for Lincoln Center, which is planning to open 10 outdoor performance and rehearsal spaces on April 7.For many New York music venues, operating at 33 percent capacity still may not be enough to make reopening economically feasible, give the costs of running the venues and paying performers.“It doesn’t make financial sense for the Blue Note to open with only 66 seats for shows,” said Steven Bensusan, the president of the Blue Note Entertainment Group, whose flagship jazz club is in Greenwich Village.Smaller music venues, which are among the eligible recipients of $15 billion in federal aid, have been anxiously awaiting permission to reopen. But even with growing vaccination numbers and New York’s latest rule change, it may still take months for the touring industry to resume, and even then venues say they will need help.The Blue Note, along with some other jazz spots that serve food, had reopened last fall for dinner performances, allowing them to put on some shows without running afoul of state regulations that had banned anything but “incidental” music. (Some venues, and musicians, had filed lawsuits challenging those rules.) Then the city shut down indoor dining again, and some clubs did not reopen when it was allowed to resume last month.Michael Swier, the owner of the Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge, two of New York’s best-known rock clubs, said that the state’s order that venues require social distancing and mask-wearing means that the true capacity at many spaces may be much lower.“Given that social distancing is still part of the metric, it brings us back down to an approximate 20 percent capacity, which is untenable,” Mr. Swier said.Several promoters and venue operators said they were holding out to reopen at 100 percent capacity, which many hope can happen this summer.But some small nonprofits immediately expressed interest. At the Tank, a Midtown Manhattan arts venue with a 98-seat theater, Meghan Finn, its artistic director, said that within hours of the governor’s announcement she started hearing from comedians eager to resume indoor performance.“Having the ability to use our space is not something we will pass up,” Ms. Finn said.The Joyce Theater in Manhattan had been expecting to bring audiences back to see live dance in September, but Linda Shelton, its executive director, said that she and her team had “hard work” to do in the coming days, as they assess whether staging a performance in the near term makes financial sense and can be done safely.“We’ve got a few things that we could present pretty quickly,” she said.Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, home to the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in Annandale-on-Hudson, the site of a respected music festival each summer, called the moves a “welcome first step.”“One hundred is a good beginning number,” Mr. Botstein said. “That’s April’s number. Let’s hope June’s number is larger.”A variety of nonprofit theaters said they found the news encouraging.Paige Evans, the artistic director of Signature Theater, said that she had already commissioned the playwright Lynn Nottage and the director Miranda Haymon to create a multimedia performance installation in the theater’s capacious lobby this summer, and that the new rules should allow for audiences to attend.Rebecca Robertson, the founding president and executive producer of the Park Avenue Armory, said she, too, is eager to welcome people back. “To have live audiences responding to the work is going to be thrilling,” she said.Other organizations said the relaxed rules would allow them to imagine new programming. El Museo del Barrio said it would seek to develop outdoor work for parks, on streets, or in borrowed spaces.“Finally,” said Leonard Jacobs, interim executive director of the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning in southeast Queens, “we have good guidance from the state to help us take the first steps back to normal life.”Ben Sisario and Matt Stevens contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Approach’ Review: Three Women and the Men Who Define Them

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Approach’ Review: Three Women and the Men Who Define ThemMark O’Rowe’s intricate, beautifully acted play begs for debate. To start: Why don’t its protagonists have full lives of their own?Derbhle Crotty, left, and Cathy Belton in “The Approach.’Credit…via St. Ann’s WarehousePublished More