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      ‘O.K.!’ Review: When the Abortion Clinic Cancels

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      In Christin Eve Cato’s new backstage dramedy, an actress’s plan to terminate a pregnancy collides with the rollback of reproductive rights.In a shared dressing room of a theater somewhere in Oklahoma, an actress named Melinda is the first to arrive. It’s 90 minutes before the curtain rises, and to the keen-eyed stage manager, Alex, she seems not quite herself.“You look like you’ve been throwing up,” Alex says, getting it right in one guess, not that Melinda is about to admit that she is pregnant. She has an abortion scheduled, and no one needs to know.But in Christin Eve Cato’s new backstage dramedy, “O.K.!,” Melinda’s timing is on a collision course with the rollback of reproductive rights. The date is June 24, 2022, and the U.S. Supreme Court has just overturned Roe v. Wade. Soon the clinic calls to cancel Melinda’s appointment permanently, and the clear vision she had of her future clouds over with panic.“O.K.!” is about how Melinda (Danaya Esperanza) moves through that fear as the clock ticks down to showtime, with the help of her fellow actors Jolie (Yadira Correa) and Elena (Claudia Ramos Jordán) and their collective reverence for tarot-card wisdom. Also instrumental: the calming competency of Alex (a very funny Cristina Pitter), who herds unruly cast members like cats.The barely glimpsed show within a show is a nonunion tour of a musical called “Okla-Hola,” a parody of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s cowboy-Americana classic “Oklahoma!,” told from a Latino point of view. Melinda stars as Lori (a version of Laurey, of course, the farmhouse beauty pursued by two suitors), with the jaded, politically engaged Jolie as Titi Elder (a variation on Laurey’s Aunt Eller) and the high-spirited, Spanglish-speaking Elena as Ada Ana (the inveterate flirt Ado Annie). In a corner of their dressing room stands a scaled-down, rustic farm windmill, which will transform into the tarot deck’s glowing, 3D Wheel of Fortune. (The set is by Rodrigo Escalante.)Directed by Melissa Crespo for Intar Theater and Radio Drama Network, “O.K.!” blends a loving critique of the theater with a historically minded explication of threats to women’s health and autonomy, leavens it all with comedy and sprinkles it with the surreal. Tonally, that is quite a mix to pull off, particularly with the script’s didacticism working against its drama.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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      ‘Business Ideas’ Review: A Parable in a Cute Cafe

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      Milo Cramer’s new comedy about work, survival and the quest for a meaningful life opens Clubbed Thumb’s venerable Summerworks festival.Late each spring at the Wild Project, on East Third Street in Manhattan, crowds bubbling with conversation spill out of the airy lobby onto the sidewalk, awaiting curtain time. For fans of appealingly eccentric downtown theater, this is a seasonal ritual: the return of Clubbed Thumb’s venerable Summerworks festival of new plays.Opening this year’s series, Milo Cramer’s “Business Ideas” is recognizably Summerworks fare — a thoughtful, heightened comedy with a Grade-A cast, a trim running time and a set that instantly draws the eye. A curveball-throwing play about work, survival and the quest for a meaningful life, it takes place in the kind of cafe where a patron could comfortably spend hours, what with the creamy color scheme, the big windows and the potted greenery on the shelves. (The set is by Emmie Finckel.)But for Patty (Brittany Bradford), a miserable and underpaid barista, working there is a shame-inducing, six-days-a-week form of torture: so many customers, so impossible to please. Her only curiosity about them is what they do for a living.Each customer is played by Mary Wiseman, whose over-the-top transformations are a huge part of the fun of this production, directed by Laura Dupper. Wiseman becomes the Slowww Customer, who turns out to be a kindergarten teacher; the Anxious Customer, a therapist; and the Apologizing Customer, an administrative assistant. Also the Hurried Customer, who wears a comically loud dress that clashes wonderfully with what we learn is her vital job. (Costumes are by Avery Reed.)Wiseman plays the cafe’s dreadful owner, too. Sounding like Madeline Kahn, she dryly reads out a series of online customer complaints about Patty, then demands: “Every single Yelp review has to be perfect from now on.”“That’s impossible,” Patty says. “That’s like a fairy-tale task. Like weave straw into gold.”Over in the corner, taking up two tables despite having bought nothing, the recently fired Georgina (Annie McNamara) and her constitutionally embarrassed teenage daughter, Lisa (Laura Scott Cary), are engaged in a challenge with similarly long odds: dreaming up a business idea so irresistible that it will instantly rescue their family finances. Desperation eventually removes any moral framework from schemes they’re willing to consider.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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      ‘Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole’ Review: Dimming a Great Talent

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      Dulé Hill stars as the silky crooner in a play about the last broadcast of his variety show, in 1957.When Nat King Cole performed “The Party’s Over” on his NBC variety show, he did it with a smile, as he seemed to do everything. But the song bitterly resonated on that particular broadcast, Cole’s final outing as a host, having quit after just over a year’s worth of struggles finding national advertisers. “It’s time to wind up / The masquerade,” he sang. “Just make your mind up / The piper must be paid.”Written by Colman Domingo and Patricia McGregor, the formally ambitious, if muddled, “Lights Out: Nat ‘King’ Cole” takes place on that fateful Dec. 17, 1957, when the pianist and singer said goodbye to his audience. (Note that Domingo, who is famous as an actor these days, does not appear in the show.)The framing device is not unlike that of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which is also set in a TV studio, and both shows look at a momentous taping as a mode of resistance against America’s powers-that-be. But “Lights Out” takes a very different tack from the George Clooney and Grant Heslov play’s straightforward embrace of docu-like similitude .“Some of you thought you were going to get a nice and easy holiday show,” Sammy Davis Jr. (Daniel J. Watts) informs the audiences of both the television studio and New York Theater Workshop, where the production is running. “No! Welcome to the fever dream.” The musical unfurls in the minutes before Cole (Dulé Hill) is supposed to go on the air.Time dilates and contracts; guests and family members pop up; conversations are interspersed with musical standards. Davis, who had actually guest-starred on Cole’s show a few months earlier, is ever-present here as a flamboyantly extroverted jester who might represent the id of the more restrained (at least publicly) Cole. The pinnacle of McGregor’s production is a fiery tap number, choreographed by Jared Grimes, between the two men that lands halfway between duet and battle, and is set to “Me and My Shadow.”Juxtaposing an irrepressible scratcher of itches and a debonair charmer as two forces of Black creativity, which the white establishment tried to contain in safe, acceptable boxes, is the show’s best idea. Hill gives it life with a complex, layered performance as Cole, who is revealed to be channeling his anger and frustrations into a smooth, urbane exterior — a review of his show’s premiere in The New York Times described him as having “an amiable personality that comes across engagingly on the television screen.” (Both Hill and Watts were in the “Lights Out” premiere in 2017, with the People’s Light company in Malvern, Penn.)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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      Tom Hanks Will Perform His Play ‘This World of Tomorrow’ Off Broadway

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      “This World of Tomorrow,” based on the actor’s 2017 short story collection, is scheduled to begin performances in October at the Shed.Tom Hanks, the acclaimed film actor, has written a new play about love, longing and time-travel, and is planning to star in an Off Broadway production of it this fall.The play, “This World of Tomorrow,” will be staged in a 550-seat theater at the Shed, a performing arts venue on Manhattan’s Far West Side that has been helping Hanks develop the work over the last year. The play is scheduled to run for just eight weeks, from Oct. 30 to Dec. 21.“This World of Tomorrow” is about a scientist from the future who travels back in time — to the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens — searching for love. It is based on elements of Hanks’s “Uncommon Type,” a collection of short stories published in 2017.Hanks, who will play the scientist, will lead a cast of 10 to 12 performers, some of whom will take on multiple roles. A two-time Oscar winner (for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”), Hanks has one Broadway credit, “Lucky Guy,” a 2013 newsroom drama for which he received Tony Award nomination.Hanks wrote the new play with James Glossman, a playwright and director with whom he has collaborated on other projects, including “Safe Home,” which had a production in 2022 at Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, N.Y. (It was also based on “Uncommon Type” stories.) The director of the new play will be Kenny Leon, who won a Tony Award in 2014 for “A Raisin in the Sun.”Alex Poots, the artistic director of the Shed, said Hanks’s team approached him last year when they were looking for a place to develop the show. Poots leapt at the opportunity, he said, thinking “he’s one of the most beloved and trusted storytellers of our time.” Poots called the play “a classic love story,” but also noted that, because parts of it take place in 1939, “there is reference to the rise in authoritarianism.”“This World of Tomorrow” is one of three upcoming theater pieces to be staged at the Shed. It will present, in collaboration with Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse, a revival of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play “The Brothers Size,” starring André Holland, from Aug. 30 to Sept. 28. And from June 17 to Oct. 19 it will present “Viola’s Room,” an immersive audio production narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It was created by Punchdrunk, the company behind “Sleep No More.” More

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      ‘Bowl EP’ Review: Sessions in Love

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      Nazareth Hassan’s play follows the tender romance (and acid-fueled hallucinations) two skateboarders share.The play “Bowl EP,” written and directed by Nazareth Hassan, is really more of a double LP.The titles of its discrete scenes (25 in total!) are projected as track names onto the sunken, in-the-round skatepark set of this exuberant premiere at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, co-produced with the National Black Theater in association with the New Group. The first half conjures a fun flirtation between two queer aspiring rappers, while the second is a jagged refraction of its ideas. At 80 minutes, the whole play pulses with a concentrated immediacy.The main M.C.s, if you will, are the jovial Quentavius da Quitter (Oghenero Gbaje) and the seductively internal Kelly K Klarkson (Essence Lotus): two 20-somethings who skate absent-mindedly while spitting potential rhymes. While deciding on a name for their duo, they strike up a playful romance over an indeterminate period of time.The two are tender with each other, fooling around between skate tricks and occasionally revealing glimpses of inner turmoil. Hassan charts these low-key adventures through impish scene titles (projected in inventive typefaces by Zavier Augustus Lee Taylor) like “picking a name for their rap group attempt four” and “skating and drinking.” The drained swimming pool that is Adam Rigg and Anton Volovsek’s set, and the skateboarders’ “bowl,” often places the actors below the gaze of the audience, which is seated on all four sides, lending an analytical lens to the stage interactions.Substances, from the casual vape pen to MDMA, help the pair find inspiration and grow closer. But like most of what’s played off as typical youthful behavior, this recreational habit returns under a new light in the piece’s second half, which is triggered by an acid-fueled sex act between the couple.That jarring shift comes with the arrival of Lemon Pepper Wings, a pangender demon who haunts Quentavius’s mind, and is suggested to have once pestered Kelly. (Hassan, who is nonbinary, winks at the clunkiness of communicating gender by referring to the creature as every combination of “he/she/they.”)Lemon is played by Felicia Curry in a bravura psychedelic freakout of a commedia dell’arte performance that begins in full anime cosplay, plush head mask and all. (DeShon Elem’s costume design here wildly expands from D.I.Y. skater outfits.) Shattering the fourth wall — all four of them, in this case — as the “patron demon of the intimate,” Lemon cuts through the issues pushing the lovers together and pulling them apart.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: How Music Came Down to Earth, in ‘Goddess’

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      Amber Iman lives up to the title of a musical about the divine gift of song.If you’re going to call your show “Goddess,” you’d better have one handy. Luckily, the musical with that name that opened on Tuesday at the Public Theater stars Amber Iman, who fully fits the bill. Whether scatting or belting or just standing tall in gold eye shadow and regal gowns, she conveys the combination of power and ease that inevitably elicits words like “otherworldly.”When Saheem Ali, the director of “Goddess,” gives Iman and the rest of the talented cast a chance to display that otherworldliness, mostly while performing the songs by Michael Thurber and dances by Darrell Grand Moultrie, the show makes a strong case for live performance as a central expression of our divided nature. “What is human? What is divine?” goes one of Thurber’s better lyrics. “Do either exist until they intertwine?”But when merely talking, “Goddess” descends. The book by Ali, with additional material by James Ijames, is labored, with a conventional plot about a young Kenyan man torn between furthering his family’s political dynasty and baring his artistic soul. (He plays saxophone.) It doesn’t take long to get bogged down in banalities of both the domestic and the folkloric variety.Because yes, the goddess of the title is literal. Iman plays Marimba, a mythic East African queen who, we learn in a flashback, taught humans to sing and gave them their first instruments. But like Omari, the saxophonist, Marimba has parent problems. Her mother wants her to go into the family business, which to judge from Julian Crouch’s amazing puppets and masks is evidently Evil Incarnate. But Marimba, refusing to accept the mantle of war goddess, instead escapes to Mombasa to live under a new name, Nadira, in an underground nightclub called Moto Moto.Arica Jackson, left, plays a spunky nightclub owner and Nick Rashad Burroughs, seated in the chair, is its exuberant emcee.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt is there that Nadira becomes a queen in the secular sense: a star. Singing Thurber’s mélange of music, which encompasses smooth jazz, R&B, theatrical pop and an aura of Afrobeat, she draws an audience that is similarly diverse. Moto Moto, run by the spunky Rashida (Arica Jackson) and emceed by the exuberant Ahmed (Nick Rashad Burroughs) becomes a hotbed of heterogeneity (there’s even a shaman) in a culture that is otherwise intolerant of mixing.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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      ‘Bus Stop’ Review: Travelers Find Shelter From a Storm

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      Intimacy is at the heart of this rare revival of William Inge’s 1955 play, about stranded passengers learning from one another and about themselves.When a blizzard strands stagecoach passengers in a lodge in Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight,” violence and mayhem erupt. Death looms.Eight people are also marooned by a snowstorm in William Inge’s 1955 play “Bus Stop,” but what looms for them is life: Some take stock, others try to figure out what awaits.Best known for its movie adaptation starring Marilyn Monroe, “Bus Stop” isn’t seen much in New York these days, so Classic Stage Company, the National Asian American Theater Company and Transport Group should be thanked for this revival.The director Jack Cummings III staged Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba” and “Picnic” in repertory for the Transport Group in 2017, and is familiar with the delicate bard of the Midwest, whose deceptively plain work captures the lives of working people. The most consequential decision here is to forgo amplification, creating a sense of intimacy at the Kansas diner where four bus passengers and their driver (David Shih) wait out the weather. The diner’s owner Grace (Cindy Cheung) and a waitress, the high school student Elma (Delphi Borich), are used to parades of customers, but maybe not for such extended stays. Conversations stop and start as the visitors chat among themselves and with the locals, who include the sheriff, Will (David Lee Huynh). Elma, for example, is fascinated by Dr. Gerald Lyman (Rajesh Bose), a former professor whose flowery verbiage evokes a broader, more literate world than hers — and a more perverse one, too, as he has a taste for underage women.But the most striking of the newcomers is Cherie (Midori Francis), a nightclub singer who has been whisked away by Bo (Michael Hsu Rosen), a smitten young cowboy who plans to take her to his Montana ranch, whether she likes it or not.The story line is rattling to a contemporary audience. But the beauty, humanity and complexity of Inge’s writing is that he makes us understand what drives Bo and, even more important, who Cherie is, and why she stays with Bo.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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      ‘Creditors’ Review: Who Pays the Price for a Bankrupt Marriage?

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      Liev Schreiber stars in an update of the bleak Strindberg classic about a husband and wife and the man who seeks to destroy them.If a man hates women but also everyone else, is he still a misogynist?I ask for an acquaintance: August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright whose three tempestuous marriages were not enough to exhaust his fury at wives, muses, temptresses and others. Also, it would seem, at himself.His excess of rage found its way into plays — “Miss Julie” (1888) and “The Dance of Death” (1900) are today the most famous — that feature male characters only slightly less awful than the women in their lives. That ought to be unbearable, and not just as an affront to feminism; his pox-on-both-your-genders cussedness can sometimes feel self-canceling as drama. Still, Strindberg sticks to the canon of European classics like a tick: ugly, bloodthirsty, alive.The contradiction is at its most vexing in “Creditors,” a follow-up to “Miss Julie” that flips the earlier play’s love-triangle geometry so that one woman and two men stand at its vertexes instead of one man and two women. Believe me, two men are worse: The lone woman, in this case a writer named Tekla, is literally outmanned. When Adolph, her second husband — having fallen under the influence of Gustav, his new friend — prosecutes Tekla for the theft of his happiness, Strindberg barely allows a defense.That “Creditors” is nevertheless wretchedly compelling has previously been sufficient to keep it onstage. Perhaps in a post-#MeToo age no longer. At any rate, the production that opened Sunday at the Minetta Lane Theater — starring Liev Schreiber as Gustav, Maggie Siff as Tekla and Justice Smith as Adolph, now called Adi — sets out to shift the play’s balance of power and mostly succeeds. In Jen Silverman’s thoroughgoing adaptation, Tekla is given full voice, and the men are finally held to account.The new version, set in a vague present, opens like the original in the parlor of an out-of-season seaside hotel. There, Adi, a young painter, and Gustav, a teacher of “dead languages,” are discovered in the depths of a whiskey-enhanced discussion of women and art. At first idly, then with what appears to be solicitude, and finally with the glee of a cat cornering a mouse before killing it, Gustav pokes into Adi’s professional failures, connecting them to Tekla’s galling success. Having dumped her first husband after humiliating him in a popular roman à clef, what’s to stop her from doing the same to her second?The author of dramedies that foreground women — among them “The Roommate,” “The Moors” and “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties” — Silverman is not about to let that wife-as-witch framing stand. Still, Strindberg’s three-part structure, with its bear-trap teeth, is too ingenious to mess with. In the second part, Adi, empowered or perhaps just empoisoned by Gustav, confronts Tekla with his newfound and possibly bogus insights into what he had thought was a happy marriage. Because Smith is so sincere and appealing, his vulnerability reading as openness instead of petulance, we are at first willing to allow his line of thought.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