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    Pride Month 2024: An Abundance of Theater of All Stripes

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    From Broadway to the city’s smaller stages, a flurry of shows with wide-ranging appeal, familiar faces and rising talent.American theater has long been more welcoming to queer lives and stories than Hollywood has been, so the abundance of shows during Pride Month is unsurprising. It’s also overwhelming — there is just so much to see.On Broadway, queer characters play central roles in productions as starkly different as “Illinoise,” a dance-theater work based on a Sufjan Stevens album, and Paula Vogel’s autofictional “Mother Play,” starring Jessica Lange. In the Max Martin jukebox “& Juliet,” a romance involving Juliet’s nonbinary best friend makes up a sweet subplot.And of course, the gayest show of the year returns on June 26, when Cole Escola’s madcap comedy “Oh, Mary!” — about Mary Todd Lincoln’s secret life and aspirations — begins previews on Broadway after a popular run at the Lucille Lortel Theater. As Joshua Barone wrote in his review, “Escola’s humor is tailored like a Bernadette Peters concert gown to New York gays who were brought up on a diet of alt-cabaret and ‘Strangers With Candy.’”Cole Escola, left, as Mary Todd Lincoln and Conrad Ricamora as Abraham Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!,” which is moving to Broadway after a run at the Lucille Lortel Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSusannah Millonzi, left, and Purva Bedi in Bailey Williams’s “Coach Coach.”Maria BaranovaSave some money for the city’s smaller stages, though, because they are offering a flurry of shows for Pride Month and are where you can spot rising talent.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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      ‘Welcome to Clowntown’ Review: Raunchy Stories and Giant Balloon Animals

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      In a production decidedly for grown-ups, Tanya Perez’s one-woman show draws on her life as a professional clown (and occasional stripper).According to Tanya Perez, the writer and performer of “Welcome to Clowntown,” strippers and clowns have the same modus operandi, which includes average dancing while wearing baby attire. She would know: She’s done both jobs.In this unripe one-woman show, Perez, as Pixie the Clown, performs her party act for the audience while regaling them with tales of her career as a clown-for-hire (and more) in New York City and Los Angeles.As Pixie, Perez is dressed in a vivid ensemble designed by Lisa Renee Jordan with polka dots, corkscrew ribbons, a red petticoat, a purple corset and sparkly Chuck Taylors. She seems to have done it all, from stripping to bartending: parties spent placating hostile adults, catering to gross fraternity brothers and serving drinks for one of the Real Housewives. (Don’t ask which one; she signed a nondisclosure agreement.)And then of course there’s clowning, which she started doing in college, amusing obnoxious kids for beer money. That’s why, she announces, with an unprintable word, that she hates your children.Perez has crafted a kind of rudimentary stand-up routine, but it’s light on snappy punch lines and lacks a cohesive narrative structure. Most of her stories stay close to the surface, barely mining their comic potential or personal or political stakes. She gets into misogyny in the exotic dancing world, racist microaggressions in the clowning world (she is Latina, and describes one boss who expected her to be the “hip-hop clown”) and the class divide at play in both. But these themes mostly float at the margins.Produced by the Tank and billed as an “adult immersive experience,” “Welcome to Clowntown” encourages audience participation. Perez makes balloon animals for the audience and plays games like rock, paper, scissors and telephone, but that hardly seems to qualify the work as immersive theater. As a result, the show feels underinflated, despite its fleet 60-minute running time. The erratic direction, by Lorca Peress, exacerbates the problem, fumbling the transitions between Perez’s monologues and the party games.Perez is lively, with a chuckle that’s somewhere between the jovial trill of SpongeBob and the tee-hees of Skeletor. But often her performance feels rehearsed instead of spontaneous, even a bit detached, despite the intimate space with fewer than 50 seats and a small, unadorned stage.Near the end, Perez wrestles a giant balloon animal the way “Clowntown” wrestles in a message about the importance of play and fostering one’s inner child. Still, don’t let the expletives fool you: This may be clowning for adults, but “Clowntown” still has some growing up to do.Welcome to ClowntownThrough May 13 at the Tank, Manhattan; thetanknyc.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      ‘Modern Swimwear’ Review: The Designer and the Murderer

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      Depicting the final hours of a young fashion designer’s life, Caitlin Saylor Stephens’s play lacks the sturdiness to make its connection to real events believable.The murder of the swimsuit designer Sylvie Cachay in 2010 cut short the life of a promising fashion star at the young age of 33. “Modern Swimwear,” a new play by Caitlin Saylor Stephens, imagines the events of her final night. A one-act, (almost) two-hander now in performance at the Tank, it features a strong central performance from Fig Chilcott, but is incurious about its subject to the point of feeling arbitrary, with the choice to turn this particular woman’s tragic end into dramatic fodder unjustified.At a glance, it’s an almost ideal setup: one night, one hotel room, one failing relationship — with Nick Brooks (Frank Zwally), a trust fund baby, then 24, with whom Cachay had a stormy monthslong affair. The two checked into the Meatpacking District’s Soho House late one December night after the candles he’d lit accidentally set her apartment on fire. Hours later, her body was found strangled and drowned in the bathtub.Anyone unfamiliar with this story would most likely be shocked and confused when Nick, who is otherwise written and performed as a lazy, garden-variety 20-something narcissist, attacks the bright and bubbly Sylvie in the play’s final minutes. Though Stephens offers some compelling insights into the crossfire of a doomed coupling, her characters are neither sturdy enough for an ordinary relationship drama to stand on its own, nor specific enough to be tied to real events. Their arguments about wandering eyes and miscommunication are relatable to a fault, yet their end is anything but, and arrives too abruptly.The couple seem at odds on everything from professional ambitions (he has none) to sex; not only is Nick uninterested in the intimacy of “making love” (it’s more of a four-letter word for him), but he is tormented by sensory hallucinations whenever the two come in contact (an invention of Stephens’s). Spookily rendered through Marcelo Añez’s staticky sound design and the way Sarah Johnston’s lights flicker across Christopher and Justin Swader’s true-to-life set, these manifest mainly as intrusive snippets of a song his songwriter father once wrote. But the plot avoids a real-life detail that might have brought Nick’s fraught relationship with women into higher relief: The elder Brooks, Joseph, was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault in 2009.The play does not explore these histories, nor does it spend much time investigating Cachay’s passion for swimwear, aside from one very effective, if simple, sequence. Locked in the bathroom, Sylvie hypes herself up ahead of a meeting with investors scheduled for the next day, speaking poetically and convincingly about the value of style and vision, fashion’s triumph over nakedness. When she then tries to spice things up with Nick by modeling her newest line, he shrugs and mumbles that there should be more nude beaches.It’s a subtly gutting moment, made especially persuasive by the warmth radiating from Chilcott. Right from the opening scene, the actor’s liveliness embodies someone who hasn’t entirely dimmed her light for an unresponsive boyfriend — though Stephens frustratingly leaves unsaid any reason that Sylvie should stick around. As a scene partner, Zwally isn’t so much one-note as he is perhaps misguided by Meghan Finn, whose direction matches the play’s uneasy mix of the momentous and the routine.Chad Pierre Vann appears briefly as a room-service waiter, threatening to steal the show with an entirely out-of-place flash of comic relief. It’s hard to wish away such a deftly farcical performance, but even tougher to argue for its inclusion. As the couple’s only onstage witness, his reappearance to discover Sylvie’s body is inevitable and unfortunately clumsy. Like Stephens’s play, it’s not exploitative — there is palpable care for the fallen woman — but feels unwarranted and unearned.Modern SwimwearThrough Feb. 12 at the Tank, Manhattan; thetanknyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Taxilandia’ Review: The Mouth is Running, but Not the Meter

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      Modesto Jimenez, known as Flako, has turned cab theater into a genre, and his latest show takes place on a ride through Bushwick, Brooklyn.Cruising down Knickerbocker Avenue in the back of a vintage Lincoln Town Car on a sunny Friday afternoon, I was thrilled when the driver, Modesto Jimenez, played the Fabolous track “Brooklyn,” loudly. The song, the Lincoln’s smooth ride, life passing by on the busy streets — the combination hit like theatrical umami.If cab theater were a genre, Jimenez would have medallion-shaped awards. Seven years ago, he performed his play “Take Me Home” in a New York City cab for up to three people at a time. For his Oye Group company’s new “Taxilandia,” he drives around his central Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, regaling his tiny audience with stories and reminiscences, asides and historical tidbits, like the fact that in the 1970s and ’80s Bushwick was devastated by arson fires just as bad as the ones that laid waste to the Bronx.Jimenez, known as Flako, says the ride is not a tour, and discourages audience members from taking photos.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJimenez, who goes by Flako, spent nine years driving a cab, and he handles the traffic with a calm confidence — which is reassuring because he also talks nearly nonstop, weaving between English and Spanish, scripted text and off-the-cuff exchanges with the passengers (a plexiglass barrier separates the front and back seats).As for Bushwick, he knows it inside and out. He was raised by his grandmother there after moving from the Dominican Republic as a child; his autobiographical show “¡Oye! For My Dear Brooklyn,” from 2018, supplied much of that back story.Jimenez prefaces “Taxilandia” by pointing out that it is not a tour (he discourages the fares/audience members from taking photos) but an experience. The car trip itself is just one part of a greater project that also includes the text-guided walk “Textilandia,” a 16-track playlist, storefront galleries, and virtual artists’ salons (now archived online).“Taxilandia” is a follow-up to Jimenez’s “Take Me Home,” a play he performed in cabs seven years ago.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs we slowly rolled down main thoroughfares and side streets, Jimenez sketched an impressionistic portrayal of an ever-changing neighborhood, stressing that Bushwick’s history is an ebb and flow of successive arrivals, of displacement and conflict but also of energy and reinvention. We passed the community institution El Puente, where he thrived as a kid, and the former Ridgewood Masonic Lodge, which is now — you have one guess — an apartment building.The large breweries created by the German beer barons of the 19th century are long gone; the new Bushwick prefers microbreweries anyway. We double parked so he could dissect layers of graffiti, “and right across the street,” Jimenez gestured, “the gentrification bar.” While the car is briefly in neutral, he himself is anything but.His take on change is nuanced, though, and as a Bennington-educated artist Jimenez bridges various constituencies — he has appeared in shows by the experimentalist Richard Maxwell and at the thriving Off Off Broadway theater the Bushwick Starr, which is presenting “Taxilandia” with New York Theater Workshop, in association with the Tank.A stop along the way near the former Ridgewood Masonic Lodge. The show is part of a larger project that includes a text-guided walk, a playlist and art.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Lincoln was on the move again. On the right was a pizzeria that Jimenez claimed is the best in Brooklyn. When we passed another with a nearly identical name a minute later, I asked which slice he preferred and he started waffling. Eventually we made our way to the trendier part of the neighborhood, where young folks dine on rather more expensive pizza, and he dropped me off near a subway stop. For Bushwick, the ride continues.TaxilandiaThrough May 30; taxilandia.com More