Stage 42 (Manhattan, NY, Theater)

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    ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Review: Community Building One Dice Roll at a Time

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    Improv adds a theatrical dimension to the role-playing game, which has been undergoing a renaissance as it turns 50 this year.While familiarity with things like non-player characters and their degree of disposability is not strictly necessary to enjoy “Dungeons and Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern,” it certainly helps. At the very least, try tagging along with someone with an awareness of tabletop role-playing games.Indeed, hearing such jokes as “Be gentle — this NPC doesn’t have the ‘essential’ tag,” made me grateful for the quality hours I spent playing Chivalry & Sorcery in my 20s. And the raucous laughter that welcomed the line at a recent performance of this Chicago import, now at Stage 42, confirmed I was among folks who shared an understanding.This is less restrictive than it might sound in terms of potential audience because Dungeons & Dragons, which is turning 50 this year, has been undergoing a startling renaissance. People gather for regular sessions and the game maintains a strong pop-culture presence, from being a key component of the Netflix series “Stranger Things” to providing the framework for films like last year’s “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.”But unlike that straightforward fantasy tale, “The Twenty-Sided Tavern” is basically a play session. This makes it closer to the wildly popular output of Critical Role Productions, which presents live role-playing campaigns on various platforms.Practically speaking, the show follows the basic steps of a D&D adventure. Three actors try to pull off a mission by reacting to prompts, solving riddles and, naturally, engaging in fights. This all happens under the direction of a dungeon master, played by DAGL (though his real name is David Andrew Laws), who created “The Twenty-Sided Tavern” with David Carpenter and Sarah Davis Reynolds (herself playing the watering hole’s keeper).Three of the actors can handle several characters within the same class: Madelyn Murphy can play three versions of a mage, Tyler Nowell Felix three versions of a fighter and Diego F. Salinas three types of rogue. The specific characters and their mission are assigned at the start of the show, the first of many narrative forks each performance can take. The audience can use their phones to participate via the browser-based platform Gamiotics. (My phone sometimes lagged, preventing me from casting votes I like to think would have been crucial, but most likely weren’t.)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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      ‘The Vanishing Elephant’ Review: Bringing ‘a Thing of Wonder’ to Life

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      This alluring spectacle at Stage 42, which aims to dazzle audiences 8 and older, makes powerful statements about the rights of both animals and human beings.Can magic illuminate a life that was far from magical?Cahoots NI, a children’s theater company from Belfast, Northern Ireland, incorporates illusions into “The Vanishing Elephant,” a show that aims to dazzle audiences 8 and older while also exposing them to the harsh realities of wildlife captivity and human suffering. Although the results are sometimes mixed, this alluring spectacle makes powerful statements about the rights of both animals and people.Presented by the New Victory Theater at Stage 42 (the theater’s regular home is undergoing renovation), the production introduces its title character’s birth in Bengal, on the Indian subcontinent, with a sparkling special effect: a hand-held transparent box fills with light, revealing a mechanized shadow puppet that raises its trunk beguilingly. Written by Charles Way, the play does not mention the period, but adult theatergoers will recognize this as the era of Britain’s crushing rule of India.While the elephant is still very young, hunters tear her from her mother. Even though she wins the love of Opu, a young villager (played as a boy by Adi Chugh and as an aging man by Cliff Samara), he can’t stop a trainer (Madhav Vasantha) from treating her roughly. Opu, who names the elephant Janu, is in many ways her counterpart: a lonely, misunderstood orphan adopted by foreigners (in his case, an English couple). Only he and, later, another child realize that Janu is “a thing of wonder.”That also describes her onstage. Helen Foan, of the company Foan & Fortune, designed the life-size puppets that portray Janu after the opening scene. Gray-suited puppeteers essentially disappear as they manipulate these segmented forms, creating the impression that a real elephant, with sad eyes and a dusty trunk, is moving just feet away.Onstage, gray-suited puppeteers manipulate the elephant’s body, creating the impression that a real animal is moving just feet away from the audience.Melissa GordonThe cast members, who also narrate, execute their roles and Jayachandran Palazhy’s choreographed movement expertly, though it feels jarring to see Opu’s adoptive father, an imperious colonialist, be played by a Black man. The same actor, Ola Teniola, later gives a stirring performance as Jarrett, a harried American circus worker who takes charge of Janu after a wealthy woman (Shanara Gabrielle) transports her to the United States. Forced to train the elephant, now renamed Jenny, for the brutalities of the big top, Jarrett finally declares: “You aren’t meant to be here. Like I was never meant to be here.”Using skillful sleight of hand, cast members set up the circus, appearing to pull tall poles and an entire ladder from a small case. In a departure from Jenny’s sad situation, the surrounding music and crowd noise build a festive atmosphere. (Aoife Kavanagh is the production’s sound designer; she and MD Pallavi are its composers.) Circuses, of course, can be jubilant events, but the production, which is directed by Paul Bosco Mc Eneaney, veers toward contrived romanticism when it depicts a saintly Jenny putting her tormentors’ safety above her own.Inspired by the tale of the real elephant that Harry Houdini made disappear in his New York act in 1918, the show finally places Jenny onstage with that famous magician. Her arduous journey, and those of the play’s Black trainer and South Asian characters, would seem to invite somber reflection about freedom and its loss rather than a Bollywood-style finale. The rousing music and joyful choreography threaten to make Jenny vanish again, just when she’s become indelible.The Vanishing ElephantThrough Oct. 29 at Stage 42, Manhattan; newvictory.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Review: A Faithful ‘Kinky Boots,’ With All Its Pizazz and Pitfalls

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      The Cyndi Lauper and Harvey Fierstein musical, in which the drag queen Lola saves a provincial shoe factory, makes an Off Broadway return at the spacious Stage 42.You can’t keep a drag queen down, at least not for long. It was only April 2019 that the Cyndi Lauper and Harvey Fierstein musical “Kinky Boots” closed on Broadway after a six-year run, and already it’s back in town. The Britain-set show, in which the statuesque performer Lola saves a provincial shoe factory by inspiring a line of toweringly outré footwear, is now running Off Broadway.But unlike the comebacks of shows such as “Jersey Boys” and “Rock of Ages,” which both reopened at the underground theatrical mall New World Stages, “Kinky Boots” is at the spacious Stage 42, which stands on 42nd Street and is large enough to accommodate a 25-person company and a minimally downsized version of the director Jerry Mitchell’s va-va-voom production.But enough about real estate: How is Lola?This, after all, is the role for which Billy Porter won a Tony in 2013, and it is a textbook Fierstein creation — bold and brassy, with big hair, bright nail polish and quick-fire quips barely concealing the scars of pain and rejection. There are expectations.Happily, Callum Francis, who has played the part in Britain, Australia and, briefly, on Broadway, meets them. He is a delight not just as Lola but as her alter ego, Simon — it is hard to tell who the real person is, what real means in this context and whether it even matters. Unlike Porter, whose physical intensity often came across as combative swagger, Francis moves with a dancer’s grace, and Lola’s confidence has a slinky playfulness that is especially fun to watch in her early scenes with Charlie (Christian Douglas, whose performance is a little stiff).Charlie is the earnest bloke trying to save his late father’s failing shoe company because the jobs of people he has known since he was a child depend on it. Lola provides him with life coaching and the idea that will eventually reinvent the business — to create and build “tubular sex,” that is, boots that are simultaneously strong and sexy. Both characters have complicated relationships with their fathers, and Lola shows not just Charlie but everyone onstage that there are many ways to be a man. That thread was also in the 2005 movie that inspired the musical, but here, the message feels super-Fiersteinian.Simon’s wounded vulnerability is never too far underneath the glitter and takes center stage in the 11 o’clock power ballad “Hold Me in Your Heart.” The reveal of that song’s context hit harder in the original production because we had seen a little more of Lola’s back story — the roles of Young Simon and Young Charlie have been cut here. More subtle are tiny tweaks such as Lola’s welcome greeting, which has been expanded to “Ladies, gentlemen, theys, them and those who have yet to make up their minds!”But, overall, the show looks and feels like a slightly sized-down photocopy of the original. Danielle Hope, for example, is very funny as Lauren, an employee at the factory, and her big solo, “The History of Wrong Guys,” is perfectly calibrated, but the rendition faithfully duplicates Annaleigh Ashford’s, who originated the role on Broadway. It looks as if Hope might be capable of coming up with her own shtick, and it would have been interesting to see the supporting cast receive a little more agency. But don’t worry, the conveyor belts still turn into treadmills for the exhilarating “Everybody Say Yeah” — a sterling example of Mitchell’s showmanship.Considering this faithfulness to the original template, it is not surprising that the story’s less successful moments remain, too. Among them are the slightly preachy tone as well as Charlie’s sudden dark turn. According to Fierstein’s recent memoir, “I Was Better Last Night,” the show took nearly five years to complete, so you have to wonder how nobody could find an hour to refine this temporary personality transplant. The book also suggests an intriguing line of thought when Fierstein writes that the number “What a Woman Wants” expresses Lola’s “daring sexuality — as a cross-dressing heterosexual male.” You will have to stare extra-hard and perhaps do a bit of projecting to see that onstage, where Lola essentially manifests as a magical being. “The sex is in the heel,” as one song proclaims, but it would have been nice to transfer some from the boot to the character.One seemingly big change that turns out not to matter is the shrinking of the band to half of its Broadway size. But here it is perfectly fine to go big on synthesizers because Lauper’s songs, packed with hooks, and Stephen Oremus’s sharp arrangements and orchestrations always made terrific use of electronics. This is the only score in recent Broadway history that sounds as if it were written by people who had set foot in a nightclub within the past 40 years, and the hi-NRG finale, “Raise You Up/Just Be,” sounds like it’s booming out of a float at a Pride parade. That’s a compliment, of course.Kinky BootsAt Stage 42, Manhattan; kinkybootsthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. More

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      ‘Kinky Boots’ Sets Summer Return Off Broadway

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      A revival of the Tony-winning Cyndi Lauper-Harvey Fierstein collaboration will begin performances at Stage 42 in July.The sex is back in the heel.The producers Daryl Roth and Hal Luftig announced on Thursday that an Off Broadway revival of “Kinky Boots,” the Cyndi Lauper-Harvey Fierstein collaboration that won the Tony Award for best new musical in 2013, would begin performances at the theater in July.The revival at the 499-seat Shubert theater is set to be directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell (“La Cage Aux Folles,” “Legally Blonde”), who directed and choreographed the original Broadway production, which won him his second Tony for choreography.The feel-good musical tells the story of a young Englishman, Charlie Price, who attempts to save his family’s shoe factory by making boots for drag performers. The Broadway production — which starred Stark Sands as Price and Billy Porter as the drag queen Lola, a performance for which Porter won a Tony — closed in April 2019 after 34 preview and 2,505 regular performances.In his critic’s pick review, the New York Times critic Ben Brantley called the musical, which features music and lyrics by Lauper and a book by Fierstein, “a shameless emotional button pusher.” He described its pulsing, earworm-y score as performing “like a pop star on Ecstasy.” (The cast recording won a Grammy for best musical theater album.)“Kinky Boots” has been a significant hit in the nine years since it opened on Broadway, where it grossed $297 million and won six Tony Awards. The show has toured North America and Britain, and productions have been staged in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Poland and Spain.The Off Broadway production is scheduled to begin performances July 26 and open Aug. 25 at Stage 42 in Hell’s Kitchen. No casting has been announced. More