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    ‘Cornelia Street’ Review: A Musical With Local Ambitions

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    An affectionate elegy to a Greenwich Village restaurant, Neil Pepe’s production at Atlantic Theater orders everything on the menu.The midcentury novelist Dawn Powell, Greenwich Village’s great chronicler, wrote that there are three stages a person goes through when negotiating its twisty streets — first enthusiasm (“Bohemia — oh thrills!”), then cynicism (“Bah! Village theatricals!”), then resigned acceptance (“After all the Village is the Village when all’s said and done”).“Cornelia Street,” a fidgety, aimless new musical, is set on one of the Village’s quainter lanes. It goes through every stage, all at once. Written by Simon Stephens with music and lyrics by Mark Eitzel and directed by Neil Pepe for the Atlantic Theater’s subterranean space, the show is simultaneously celebration, deflation and a neighborhood elegy in a minor key. It plays out amid and atop the rickety tables and sturdier bar of Marty’s Café, a struggling Village restaurant. The show has deep affection for this (mostly) invented place and for the majority of its habitués. But like a lot of tourists who have walked these winding streets, it loses its way.At the play’s diffuse center is Jacob (Norbert Leo Butz), a onetime punk who has spent 28 years as the cafe’s chef. Jacob lives above the storefront with his teenage daughter, Patti (Lena Pepe, the director’s own daughter), and has recently developed higher culinary ambitions, trying to sneak orders for Iberico ham and venison under the crotchety nose of the cafe’s owner, Marty (Kevyn Morrow). How the empty restaurant has remained solvent long enough for Jacob to turn gourmet is one of the play’s many mysteries. Scott Pask’s set and Stacey Derosier’s lighting suggest a snug, homey, stay-all-day space of tin ceilings and mismatched wood. But no one frequents it, save for Mary Beth Peil’s former opera singer, Ben Rosenfield’s puppyish tech bro and George Abud’s preening cabdriver.The first act finds Marty’s suddenly threatened: The landlord wants to sell. Meanwhile, Patti has trouble at school. Philip (Esteban Andres Cruz), the sole waiter, has an audition. Misty (Gizel Jiménez), a woman from Jacob’s past, fleeing her own demons, turns up, too. Jacob embroils himself in a drug-dealing scheme that also demands embezzlement. If landlord disputes, lost souls and white-collar crime seem like too much story to stir into a chamber musical, well, yes. This is before the complications of the second act: a death, a disappearance, a musical number devoted to the glory days of Studio 54. (For some of us, this will conjure unhappy memories of the Atlantic’s last musical flop, “This Ain’t No Disco.”)Stephens doesn’t seem to believe in all this action, often stopping it cold so that characters can offer some blue-plate philosophizing.Here is Jacob’s: “You ever get one of those days when you really thought you knew where you were and what you were doing with your life and then you realize you had no [expletive] idea?”And here is Misty’s: “Life, huh?”This is the third collaboration between Stephens and the singer-songwriter Eitzel, the founder of the mordant alternative rock band American Music Club, following 2010’s “Marine Parade” and 2015’s “Song From Far Away.” Neither show has played New York, but reviews suggest that these previous partnerships have been successful ones. Which makes sense. Stephens’s enduring concern, in plays from “Punk Rock” to last year’s “Morning Sun,” is with people who don’t feel at home in the world or who must learn that any home they thought they had was made of straw and sticks. And the characters in Eitzel’s songs are very rarely anything like satisfied or secure.Scott Pask’s set and Stacey Derosier’s lighting suggest a snug, homey, stay-all-day space, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut here, under Pepe’s makeshift direction, the songs and the book scenes feel at odds. (Pepe is another frequent collaborator of Stephens, though only his straight plays.) Whatever its contrivances, “Cornelia Street” is ultimately a work of naturalism, whereas the dreamy, gloomy musical interludes suggest something more abstract and symbolic. Instead of swelling during the musical numbers, the show seems to shrink, embarrassed. The arrangements and orchestrations are expansive and surprising, but the staging feels apologetic. Butz, with his rocker voice and dad vibes, and Jiménez, an ingénue with edge, are supple performers, singing as casually as they might speak. They manage these tonal shifts with ease. The rest of the cast, moving to Hope Boykin’s swishing, slashing choreography, seem to struggle. That their characters feel less like people and more like types can’t help.The Atlantic has a productive history of investing in small, off-center musicals — “The Bedwetter,” “Kimberly Akimbo,” “The Secret Life of Bees,” and most significantly “The Band’s Visit” and “Spring Awakening.” This wants to be one more. (In its more creditable moments, it also gestures toward another intimate, single-set musical, “Once.”) Here, the approach feels tentative. Sometimes offstage voices are used, sometimes not. Lighting transforms the space during a song or remains constant. Pepe seems like a man who is not enjoying what he has ordered, but can’t bring himself to send it back.“Cornelia Street” owes an obvious debt to the Cornelia Street Cafe, a Village institution that shuttered in 2019 because of rent hikes. (This homage had apparently upset Robin Hirsch, one of the cafe’s founders. But Hirsch, invited to lead a storytelling event alongside Stephens and Eitzel on one of the show’s dark nights, has since been brought into the fold.) Friendly and unpretentious, the place made you feel like a local, even if you could never afford an apartment nearby. If only “Cornelia Street” could offer some of that same welcome and sense of purpose. If ever a musical needed to stop and ask for directions, it is this one.Cornelia StreetThrough March 5 at Atlantic Theater Company Stage 2, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Review: Edie Falco Shines as an Everywoman in ‘Morning Sun’

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      A new play by Simon Stephens has hearty performances but a nearly undetectable pulse.Making the best of the little you’ve got may or may not be the theme of “Morning Sun,” the pianissimo new play by Simon Stephens that opened Off Broadway on Wednesday. But it’s certainly the problem.Not for Stephens is the big statement. His characters, linked in a maternal chain, are everywomen — or anywomen — positioned equidistantly along a conveyor belt between birth and death. Claudette is the tough one in her 70s, Charley the practical one in her 50s, Tessa the disillusioned one in her 30s. That they are identified by number in the script suggests their merely prototypical status.But unlike the lettered characters (A, B and C) in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” of which “Morning Sun” sometimes seems a less glittering variation, 1, 2 and 3 have self-consciously ordinary lives. Instead of Albee’s Park Avenue-ish boudoir, Stephens locates three generations of the McBride family in a rent-controlled walk-up in Greenwich Village. And instead of having chic lawyers and live-in caretakers, the McBrides and their companions have pointedly working-class jobs: a hospital receptionist, a museum guard, a janitor at the Y.M.C.A.Generations: from left, Falco, Brown and Marin Ireland.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat these three not-so-tall women are played by three excellent stage actors — Blair Brown as Claudette, Edie Falco as Charley, Marin Ireland as Tessa — ensures that their crises come into clear focus. Abuse, affairs, alcoholism and abortion each get a believable turn in Lila Neugebauer’s staging for Manhattan Theater Club. Yet for all the enjoyably detailed work, the play remains stubbornly tiny, as if Stephens, aiming small, overshot.Certainly the effort to valorize unglamorous lives is worthy. The problem comes from trying to dramatize uneventful ones. It can be done; consider “Waiting for Godot,” a play about nothing happening. But “Morning Sun” highlights neither the existential angst of a meaningless world nor the interpersonal conflicts that make so many fictional homes feel dangerous.Instead, it illustrates familiar moments on a family timeline: Claudette moves from Nyack to New York City, marries while pregnant but the baby dies; two years later Charley (actually Charlotte) is born, and 30 years later, Tessa. For two of the women, the search for happiness in love is eventually successful — there’s a reason they’re named McBride. And though Claudette tells Charley she’s a failure as a mother and Charley tells Tessa she’s an irresponsible daughter, everyone is reconciled before they die.“It’s just people, just trying to get through stuff,” Falco said in a New York Times article. “There’s something very beautiful about that.”Perhaps, but even Stephens seems to find the approach insufficiently muscly for a contemporary play. As a vitamin supplement, he turns to irony and meta-theatrics, having each woman narrate parts of the story as if reading one another’s résumés aloud and annotating them with sass. At times, Brown and Ireland moonlight as ancillary characters — a boyfriend, a lover, a husband, a pal — to thicken the texture.But these attempts to sketch the women’s lives and the ethos of the eras they live through are unconvincing, laced as they are with hasty anthropology and a whiff of Wikipedia.So when Claudette gets a job in the haberdashery department at Macys in 1947 or Charley attends a Beatles concert in 1965, the specifics seem paradoxically generic. The skipped-over patches necessitated by the play’s chronological format likewise become little more than name-checks: Leonard Bernstein, AIDS, Valerie Solanas, Sept. 11, Jane Jacobs, poor demolished Penn Station.Those last two are a tipoff to what Stephens, whose earlier plays “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” and “Heisenberg” were crackling fun, may be up to here. Rather than adding to the catalog of works in which monsters prevail and little lives go unnoticed, Stephens seems to prefer, in “Morning Sun,” to eulogize the loss of a quieter idea of civic life, and also of theater. The New York City he offers — admittedly from afar; he’s British — feels relentlessly sepia, like 1930s social drama but without the social disruption. It’s a place that can be modest about its grandeur, where work is honored and sadness is part of the light.That Hopperesque quality — “Morning Sun” takes its name from Edward Hopper’s 1952 portrait of a woman staring out a sun-filled window — is the play’s most attractive trait. Neugebauer’s staging doesn’t pick up on it, though; the set, by the design collective called dots, references a painterly spareness but leaves out the beauty part. (It’s just a big, ugly room, less like a fifth-floor walk-up than a basement, with barely any sunlight at all.) And since the women are mostly speaking from different eras, or from some unspecified time beyond time, the home they all occupy comes off less as a real place than as a purgatory.Under these conditions, a lot is asked of the actors; all three deliver. Brown, in her snappish mode, is wonderfully entertaining, and Ireland brings a sparkly, neurotic wit to the weakest material. (Tessa seems to have been reverse engineered from a list of plot necessities.) But Falco, perhaps because she is the only one who plays no other characters, offers the richest portrait; even if you don’t quite believe in Charley, you believe that she does, and that’s often enough.Even when it’s not, the play is no disaster, just strangely becalmed and unresponsive. Only rarely can you detect its pulse, let alone the feeling Stephens describes as “the sadness in your chest.” Claudette, speaking for Charley after the end of a relationship, says of that feeling, “What’s odd is there is no reason that you can understand why people should feel sadness or shame in their actual heart, an organ the primary function of which is to maintain the distribution of blood around the body. But you do.”It’s a beautiful line, but also an unintentional diagnosis. In “Morning Sun” you mostly feel the heartbreak in your head.Tickets Through Dec. 19 at Manhattan Theater Club; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Go or No? An Indoor Theater Invitation (at Last!) Needs an R.S.V.P.

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      Two critics, hungry for live performance, weigh whether they’re ready to take a health risk for “Blindness,” which opens in New York next month.On Monday afternoon, theater critics in and around New York City received something they hadn’t seen in more than a year: an invitation to an in-person, indoor performance at an Off Broadway house. “Blindness,” Simon Stephens’s adaptation of the novel by José Saramago, directed by Walter Meierjohann and prerecorded by Juliet Stevenson, would open at the Daryl Roth Theater on April 6.The production, which played in London in August, involves no live actors, but it does invite live, masked, temperature-checked audience members to attend in pods of two. And if you are a theater fan still waiting on a vaccine, it also invites conflicting emotions — excitement, indecision, eagerness, fear — because any social interaction involves risk. Is theater (and particularly a show without actors) worth it? Two New York Times critics took to Twitter, and then to email and a Google doc, to try to sort it out. Here is their edited conversation.LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES Alexis, when you saw the invitation, what went through your mind?ALEXIS SOLOSKI Panic, basically. I’d heard about the show and I am breathlessly (wrong word, I know) excited for the return of in-person theater, but I won’t be vaccinated for months and I don’t feel ready to make this moral/professional/hygienic calculus. You?COLLINS-HUGHES When I think about returning to indoor theater, there are things that scare me and things that make me feel safe. I am terrified by anything involving poor air quality, or people eating and drinking, or people singing or playing wind instruments or otherwise breathing hard, like from dancing. “Blindness” has none of those. And when I think about the Daryl Roth Theater, I think about how airy it is. That’s huge for me.SOLOSKI I mostly think about “De La Guarda,” the longtime show it hosted, which was one big, sweaty upskirt shot. But to your point, “Blindness” involves no human actors. Why would I want to take on the associated risks of subway and lobby and the mask habits of other patrons for something that doesn’t even offer the energetic flow between performer and audience?COLLINS-HUGHES Fair point. I’m not vaccinated yet either and have no idea when I will be. To me, taking what feels like a minimal risk is partly about gathering, partly about theater design being a strong lure for me — and designers have been left out of a ton of online work. But I sensed when you raised the subject on Twitter and we started chatting (and it took our editor all of three minutes to intervene, suggesting we have that conversation here instead) that you weren’t feeling comfortable yet.SOLOSKI I wasn’t alone. A lot of our colleagues voiced mixed feelings, too, though some had already R.S.V.P.’d. And a London acquaintance piped up to say that he had seen it at the Donmar Warehouse and found the safety protocols impressive. But when I read that invitation, I felt nauseated. Which came as a huge surprise. Because I thought I’d be desperate to go. I dream about theater most nights. And even though this will probably sound insufferable, it’s something I actively mourn. I also miss the me who went to the theater, who put on hard pants and lipstick (remember lipstick?) and left my home as a functional adult who did professional stuff in the company of other apparently functional adults. I miss that almost as much as I miss the transport that theater offers. But no, I don’t feel comfortable. And then I feel like a wimp for feeling that discomfort.COLLINS-HUGHES One valuable lesson we learned right away, a year ago, is that it can be very brave to follow your gut and not do the thing that’s reflexive — like going to the theater, like keeping a show running — if it doesn’t feel safe. Theater does not work when the audience, or the artists, have to sit there and worry about something other than the show.SOLOSKI Yeah, but does it work when you’re at home and children are yelling and the temptation to check your phone or fold laundry is just overwhelming?COLLINS-HUGHES Wait, I thought you got into the online stuff?SOLOSKI I did. I do. Particularly when there’s a participatory or a gaming element. I am extremely competitive! But not when it doesn’t feel live. Then again, will something like “Blindness,” in which you listen on headphones to a prerecorded voice, feel live anyway?Signs promoting “Blindness” in New York include review excerpts of last summer’s well-received London production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCOLLINS-HUGHES I just hunger for the in-person element, even if there are no in-person actors. The way I think about the safety of indoor theater is that it has to have what makes outdoor theater relatively safe: people in masks (“Blindness” requires them, and mine will be doubled), at a distance from one another, in a space with excellent ventilation. But I am surprised to see, when I check on the websites for “Blindness” or the Shed, for example, that there’s no mention of contact tracing, like they have at the Park Avenue Armory or at “Frozen” in Australia. [Note: After this article was published, publicists for “Blindness” said that a fuller description of safety protocols, including contact tracing and a medical questionnaire, was on the Daryl Roth Theater’s website.]SOLOSKI Laura, why didn’t we become critics in Australia? I guess I would feel more comfortable if audience members had to show proof of vaccination or a recent negative test, like the one I had to show when I visited a television soundstage recently.COLLINS-HUGHES The Armory is requiring on-site rapid testing as well as a health questionnaire in advance, and the Shed has a testing requirement and a questionnaire. Those make me feel a little better than a temperature check.SOLOSKI Temperature checks are basically useless.COLLINS-HUGHES Over the summer, I went to a tiny indoor show, where the guy at the door asked where I’d traveled lately, and specifically inquired about a few virus hot spots in New York City. That felt reassuring.SOLOSKI What do you make of the edict that no single seats are available for “Blindness” and that people have to arrange to come in twos or purchase the extra seat?COLLINS-HUGHES I’m wildly opposed to that. I’ve spent the past year by myself, am ravenous for anything resembling ordinary life and am not thrilled to feel unwelcome as a single person at the theater. There has to be a way to make the economics of socially distanced audiences work less cruelly. But have you decided for certain not to go to “Blindness”? What would make you feel OK about going back to indoor theater?SOLOSKI I’ve mostly decided, at least insofar as my natural and wild ambivalence allows. Rapid tests would help, but the vaccine seems so close now and for an indoor performance, especially this indoor performance, I’d rather wait. I can turn off the lights and put on headphones right here at home. You’re going?COLLINS-HUGHES I am. And I will report back.SOLOSKI Good luck. Don’t get Covid! Even Juliet Stevenson isn’t worth it. More

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      ‘Blindness’ Sets Opening, Off Broadway and Indoors

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Blindness’ Sets Opening, Off Broadway and IndoorsAn audio adaptation of the celebrated novel has no live actors and was a pandemic hit in London. In New York it will play to 50 people per show.Audience members listen to the narration through headphones in the Donmar Warehouse production of “Blindness,” which, after delays, will open in New York in April.Credit…Helen MaybanksMarch 9, 2021An immersive audio adaptation of José Saramago’s dystopian novel “Blindness” will be among the first productions to open in New York City since the coronavirus pandemic shuttered theaters a year ago.The producer Daryl Roth said she would present the show, which was created by the Donmar Warehouse in London and was a critical and popular success there, at her namesake Off Broadway theater, the Daryl Roth, for an open-ended run beginning April 2.The 75-minute show does not involve live actors, which considerably reduces the complexity of producing it during the pandemic; the audience listens, via sanitized headphones, to a story narrated by the British actor Juliet Stevenson.The play was written by Simon Stephens, a Tony Award winner for his stage adaptation of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” and directed by Walter Meierjohann. (Stephens is currently up for a Tony as the writer of the first of the monologues that comprise “Sea Wall/A Life.”)Roth said she would allow just 50 people to attend each performance, in a Union Square venue that has held up to 400. Patrons will be required to wear masks and to have their temperatures taken upon arrival.The production is among the first announced since Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said last week that he would allow indoor arts and entertainment to resume April 2 at 33 percent capacity, with a limit of 100 people. If the “Blindness” productions sell out, the theater will be at just 12.5 percent capacity; Roth said tickets will be sold in blocks of two, and each pair of seats will be six feet from the others.Roth had hoped to bring “Blindness” to her theater last fall, but the worsening pandemic prevented that; productions scheduled for Washington and Toronto were shelved for the same reason. Now the Donmar is trying once again to present the show around the world; a production in Mexico City, narrated by Marina de Tavira (“Roma”), is scheduled to begin performances on Friday at Teatro de los Insurgentes.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More