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      A Wood-Carved Protagonist, Enduring the Brutality of War

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      Mid-morning on Tuesday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, a puppet named Michael K had just grabbed a mug when the director Lara Foot called a pause to the action onstage.“Let’s stop here,” she said, and he did so instantly.Still clasping the mug in his right hand, he gazed at her with black, glass-bead eyes like someone who had been taken by surprise. Even frozen mid-gesture, he was subtle, human, uncanny — a striking alchemy of art and imagination.In “Life & Times of Michael K,” based on the 1983 novel of the same name by the South African-born Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, this puppet is the sinewy, carved-wood star, designed and created by Adrian Kohler of Handspring Puppet Company. At two-thirds the size of an average adult human, Michael is operated bunraku-style by a team of three puppeteers. Craig Leo, the show’s puppet master, is in charge of Michael’s head and right arm.The puppeteers Markus Schabbing and Carlo Daniels with Michael K. The story is set amid a fictional civil war, whose Kafkaesque landscape Michael navigates with his ailing mother, Anna.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesManipulation is not the job, though. To Leo, it’s more a matter of following the puppet’s lead.“There’s something strange that happens,” he said in an interview in the lobby of St. Ann’s, game to chat despite feeling under the weather. “You have these moments — and you kind of aim for them, and you hope that you can do it as much as possible — where he just comes alive. It’s when the synchronicity really clicks in between the three puppeteers, and then all of a sudden you’re holding him and he becomes incredibly light. And he’s suddenly almost moving on his own.”Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel is set amid a fictional South African civil war, whose Kafkaesque landscape Michael navigates as he attempts to take his old and ailing mother, Anna, on the long journey from Cape Town back to the countryside she loved as a girl.Foot, the artistic director of the Baxter Theater Centre at the University of Cape Town, adapted the novel in collaboration with Handspring. Kohler and Basil Jones, a fellow Handspring founder, directed the production’s puppetry. At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August, the show impressed critics, with The New York Times calling it “stylish” and a “standout.”The puppeteers Faniswa Yisa and Roshina Ratnam with Michael K’s mother, Anna.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesA young Michael K, with the puppeteers Markus Schabbing and Andrew Buckland.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“Puppets hold philosophy in them, and poetry,” Foot said in a separate interview. “Coetzee’s work, some of his work, lends itself to that because there’s a lot of thought-provoking narrative.”Having long wanted to work with Handspring, she thought a puppet would be perfect to embody Coetzee’s Michael — a gardener whose cleft lip makes people think him inferior — as a kind of everyman confronting existential questions.“When I sent ‘Michael K’ to Basil and Adrian,” she said, “Adrian had already read it and it was one of his favorite novels. We agreed that it would just be Michael, his mother, the children and the animals that would be puppets. And the rest of the world would be the context of the war.”So the company also includes five actors. One of its four puppeteers, Leo, arrived in New York this week from Mexico. That was the terminus of his nearly three-month tour across North America with the giant child refugee puppet Little Amal, who along with the horses of “War Horse” — another show on Leo’s résumé — is among Handspring’s most famous creations.“If you look at his left side of his face and his right side of his face, there are different expressions,” said Craig Leo, the show’s puppet master.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“He has kind of a tortured look on the one side,” Leo said. “From the other side, he’s actually very beautiful. In the light, his expression changes all the time.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesAfter stilt walking to operate Amal from the inside, unable to see what her face was doing, Leo was palpably pleased to be reunited with Michael, a puppet he has worked with on and off for more than two years, and one he could keep his eye on from the outside.“If you look at his left side of his face and his right side of his face, there are different expressions,” he said. “He has kind of a tortured look on the one side; I don’t know how else to describe it. From the other side, he’s actually very beautiful. He’s a really handsome man. In the light, his expression changes all the time. It catches all those carved lines in the wood.”“He holds the pathos,” Craig Leo, the show’s puppet master, said of Michael K. “He holds it even when he’s hanging on his puppet rack.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesOf the dozen-plus puppets in the play, there are four Michaels: a baby, glimpsed only briefly yet made, Foot said, with legs fully capable of kicking; a child; a miniature adult; and the main adult, with a head carved from Malaysian jelutong, legs of carbon fiber and ribs of Indonesian cane.“The joints are very finely made,” Leo said. “It breaks fingers because they’re so delicate. We just glue them back on. But as a whole, the puppet has never broken.”Which is lucky, because there is only one of him, no backup.“I’ve thought about that often, actually,” Leo said. “Should we be locking him up at nights? It’s a work of art, you know.”To him, Michael is also a magnet for empathy, as puppets are generally — and a portal into the story in a way that a human actor would not be.“He holds the pathos,” Leo said. “He holds it even when he’s hanging on his puppet rack.” More

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      ‘Amid Falling Walls’ Review: Songs of Resilience From the Holocaust Era

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      A new musical from National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene stitches together music written and performed in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.With the war between Israel and Hamas keeping much of the world on tenterhooks, and the tide of antisemitism evidently rising, now is either a perfect time, or far too painful a time, for “Amid Falling Walls,” a new Yiddish-language musical set during the Holocaust.Onstage at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan, it is a theatrical act of remembrance and defiance stitched together from Yiddish songs written and performed in the ghettos, cabarets and concentration camps of Eastern Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.Directed by Motl Didner for the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene, “Amid Falling Walls” deftly acclimates the audience before the performance even starts. On banks of monitors hanging on either side of Edmond J. Safra Hall, and on two other screens built into the set, we see black-and-white films and photos of ordinary Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the war.It isn’t idyllic, just placidly quotidian — parents, children, babies, friends, in the city and the countryside. A gaggle of girls hold hands and dance in a circle; a group of men throw their arms around one another, smiling. Families, so many families, pose for the camera; so do little kids, milling around outside. Then, menacingly, the presence of Nazis intrudes.Underscored by music, the montage of images has a visceral impact; we don’t need language to understand it, or to think and feel in response. (Projections are by Brad Peterson, sound design by Dan Moses Schreier.) “Amid Falling Walls,” though, relies heavily on lyrics and spoken text, almost all of it in Yiddish; non-Yiddish speakers, like me, will spend the performance reading supertitles, which are in English and Russian.The placement of those titles, far above the actors’ heads on a set by Jessica Alexandra Cancino, fundamentally thwarts this fast-paced pageant, whose arc takes it from the Vilna Ghetto, in what is now Lithuania, to a displaced persons camp in Germany. It becomes a fragmented experience: Take our eyes off the titles and we’re lost for meaning, but read only the titles and we miss the show. Either way, the fullness of the production’s emotion and artistry remains out of reach.Curated by Avram Mlotek, who wrote the libretto, and his father, Zalmen Mlotek, who is the show’s music director and arranger as well as the company’s artistic director, “Amid Falling Walls” sounds gorgeous. Its 28 musical numbers — folk music and cabaret, elegies and anthems — are played by a nine-piece orchestra tucked away upstage. And the show has an ace in its fine eight-person ensemble: Steven Skybell, who starred as Tevye in the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene’s excellent Yiddish-language production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”One of Skybell’s songs here, Reuven Lipshitz’s “Motele From the Warsaw Ghetto,” is the rare number in the show with a tempo slow enough to allow both reading the titles and watching the performance, which in its restraint is absolutely searing: the story of a boy, not yet 13, doing his part to resist the Nazis — sneaking in and out of the ghetto — and dying for it.“Humanity’s most true history is written only in blood,” Skybell says in English near the top of the show, and it is an arresting line. But before bloodshed comes the process of dehumanization that features in all ethnic hatred, and “Amid Falling Walls” delineates that vividly.The stripping away of rights, one by one. Global passivity in the face of mass suffering and slaughter.It’s an old story. Timeless, too.Amid Falling Walls (Tsvishn Falndike Vent)Through Dec. 10 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Manhattan; nytf.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Manahatta,’ Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Play About the Lenape, Comes Home

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      The show, which toggles between the 17th century and the early 21st, arrives on the island on which it is largely set.Mary Kathryn Nagle moved to Manhattan in 2010. Back then, she would often run to work along a path that skirted the East River, absorbing the city and its history from the shoreline.“I was interested in learning more about whose lands I was on,” she said.Nagle, a lawyer and a playwright, grew up in Oklahoma, an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She had not known much about the Lenape, Manhattan’s original residents, though Lenape tribes (some of whom refer to themselves as Delaware Indians) lived in Anadarko and Bartlesville, not far from her hometown. That year, through contacts at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, she discovered more, including details of the purchase of Manhattan, which was then part of the Lenape’s homeland, Lenapehoking, by Dutch colonists.This was not long after the 2008 financial crisis. Nagle’s firm, Quinn Emanuel, was engaged in litigation, suing banks implicated in that crisis. The ceding of Manhattan and the subprime mortgage catastrophe began to mingle in her mind, especially once she discovered that Wall Street, a fulcrum of the subprime collapse, was named for the wall built by the Dutch to keep the Lenape out.These dueling histories, recent and long ago, inspired Nagle’s play “Manahatta.” Now in previews at the Public Theater, it will run through Dec. 23. Named for the Lenape word for Manhattan, which translates to “island of many hills,” the drama volleys between the 17th century and the early 21st, and between Manahatta and Manhattan and Anadarko. The seven actors in the cast each play a character in each period. This is the play’s third production, but the first on the island on which it is largely set.“It got really real when we all descended upon Manhattan,” said Rainbow Dickerson, an actress who has been with the play since 2018. “We feel it. We feel it every day.”I met with Nagle, who was nine months pregnant, earlier this month on a warmish Saturday evening just after rehearsal. She had agreed to walk around Lower Manhattan, along streets that pertain to the play. We began on Pearl Street, named, Nagle said, for the mounds of oyster shells the Lenape had left there.Then she moved past Beaver Street, named to reflect the fur trade, and onto Wall Street, where no trace of a wall remained, and then to Broadway, which runs at an oblique angle, reflecting a Lenape trading route. “It is not a street created by the colonizers,” she said.It was dark by then. And any vestiges of the Lenape were long paved over. “At the end of the day, even when you do see grass in Manhattan, it was probably concrete and then changed back to grass,” she said. But she could still feel some remnant, she said, particularly at the island’s tip.Rainbow Dickerson, standing, and Sheila Tousey in “Manahatta” at the Public Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“They had ceremony, they had prayer at the water’s edge,” she said. “So even though we have changed the outline of the island in terms of where it meets the water, that shoreline is still here.” So is the sun, she continued. And the moon. “We’ve imposed so much on top of this island,” she added. “But in a way nature is still here.”Nagle, 40, has the focused, no-nonsense demeanor one might expect of a lawyer specializing in federal Indian law and appellate litigation, and the occasional flights of lyricism fitting for a playwright. She wrote the first draft of “Manahatta” in 2013, as part of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group. She moved back to Oklahoma in 2015, but the play stayed with her. “Manahatta” had its world premiere in 2018 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was produced in 2020 by Yale Repertory Theater.“Nagle,” one reviewer of the Oregon production wrote, “weaves the stories together skillfully, one mirroring the other, often using the same language, to drive home the point that the American story has always been one of putting commerce above people, especially when those people aren’t white. It’s devastating.”As “Manahatta” evolved, it came to center on Jane Snake, a Lenape econometrics whiz hired by a Manhattan investment bank. (The same actress also plays Le-le-wa’-you, a 17th-century Lenape woman.) Through Jane’s conflicting ambitions, desires and loyalties, Nagle explores questions of ownership and allegiance. Jane reminds her in some ways of herself, a young woman who believed she had to leave Oklahoma to make her way in the world. The character’s choices are not always ones that Nagle, who has since relocated to Washington, D.C., might have made, but it was important to her that Jane felt real and active, not merely the victim of a wider, non-Indigenous world.“Probably every play of mine is critiquing a white system of power that has been forced on us,” she said. “But also, it’s 2023, we’re all living in it now. So how are we responsible? How are we involved?”The director Laurie Woolery has been with the play since its premiere in Oregon. She was initially attracted to the challenge of the play and how it demanded that the actors move back and forth in time without any major change of scene.“I’m really drawn to work that feels impossible to stage,” she said during a recent interview at the Public Theater.But traveling between two eras was only one difficulty. Avoiding stereotypes was just as important. “There’s so many different ways in which we have been depicted in American culture not based on fact, reality or truth,” Nagle said. “If you want to present the truth, you’re doing that in a space where your representation has been not authentic. So you’ve got to deconstruct that before you can fully introduce the authentic, and that’s a challenge.”While there is no Lenape performer among the cast (casting directors would not have asked about particular tribal enrollment during auditions), the production has hired Joe Baker, a co-founder and the executive director of the Lenape Center in New York, as a cultural consultant.Baker has advised the production on matters of costume, props, language and Lenape aesthetics. “We’ve had many conversations about different traditions, different characters,” he said in a phone interview. Asked if Nagle’s play felt truthful to the Lenape experience, he said that it did.“There is clarity there,” he said. “She totally understands the protocol, the practice.”Lenape artists have also contributed some of the show’s props and design elements, including a wampum necklace, which Woolery shared as she led a recent technical rehearsal. “It’s a gift for us,” she said, holding out the three-strand necklace, “to keep us rooted.”Avoiding stereotypes is perhaps slightly easier now than it was a decade ago, when Nagle began her playwriting career. (Her other plays include “Sliver of a Full Moon,” Sovereignty” and “Crossing Mnisose.”) Recent years have brought many more depictions of Native Americans onscreen, often in projects created by or with Native writers and directors. And Native playwrights are experiencing more prominence, too. Nagle mentioned peers like DeLanna Studi (“Flight”), Madeline Sayet (“Where We Belong”) and, particularly, Larissa FastHorse, whose “Thanksgiving Play” had its Broadway debut last season.“The whole landscape has changed,” Nagle said. “It’s not enough. It’s definitely not enough. But we had our first Native woman on Broadway, which is a big deal.”What would be enough?“When we’re as much in the American theater canon as any other group,” she said.Nagle’s ambitions have always been as political as they are literary. If she has a need to tell stories, she also has the canny understanding that stories can be more persuasive than any number of appellate briefs.“In playwriting you can make an argument and force people to listen to it and hear it, in a way that they will never listen to it or hear it in a legal argument,” she said.The arguments here have to do with how history repeats itself and the dangers of making homes into tradable commodities. And as the play began preview performances just before Thanksgiving — the rare holiday that involves Indigenous history, however mythologized — and opens just after, it is also intended as a corrective to previous forms of representation.“My hope with ‘Manahatta’ is that we can provide non-Native Americans with a genuine narrative about Native people that just might supplant one or more of the false narratives American society has ingrained in them,” Nagle said.The significance of telling this particular story only a mile or two from where it happened has not been lost on any of the “Manahatta” cast or crew. “How do we recognize that we are standing on the ground of Lenapehoking and the genocide and forced removal of that tribe?” Woolery asked just before a rehearsal. “That’s a lot to hold.”Baker, the Lenape cultural consultant, was glad to see the play come home. He sees traces of the Lenape everywhere in Manhattan. “Everything you see is Lenape,” he said. “The breath and vitality of this place continues.” He hopes that audiences will learn something of the place’s history and its Indigenous people.“It’s a significant, significant moment,” he said. “And it’s exciting to share this moment.” More

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      Theater to See in N.Y.C. This Holiday Season

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      Christmas classics, comedic musicals and a star-studded Sondheim revival: a guide to the shows to see this season.The holiday season is upon us, which means it’s an excellent time for theatergoers to pack into cozy venues for a feast of the eyes. Our critics have selected a handful of options for tourists and locals looking to catch up on Broadway and Off Broadway shows this holiday season. And we’ve included some other choices as well.For those who prefer to be entertained from home, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this year will feature performances by Broadway shows like “& Juliet,” “Back to the Future: The Musical,” “How to Dance in Ohio,” “Shucked” and “Spamalot,” along with an appearance by Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells of “Gutenberg! The Musical!”Other theater-related streaming options include “Dicks: The Musical,” with Nathan Lane, and the 2015 documentary that the “How to Dance in Ohio” musical is based on.Here is a selection of notable shows onstage in New York City.Fun for the Whole FamilyBig Apple CircusStraw hats thrown like Frisbees. Death-defying aerial acts. Dizzying foot juggling routines. All accompany the contortionist, trapeze and tightrope circus classics that spectators young and old have come to ooh and aah at. This year, Big Apple presents “Journey to the Rainbow,” a collaboration with the German troupe Circus Theater Roncalli, complete with humans dressed as polar bears and cotton candy galore. Through Jan. 1 at Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center, Manhattan. Read the review.Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City RockettesIt’s a New York City classic. It’s a Christmas classic. The Rockettes are back with sensational high kicks set to state-of-the-art lighting and projections. Little ones will be dazzled by animated trains, ribbons and wintry displays. Their adult companions will delight in a Nativity procession and holiday maximalism. Through Jan. 1 at Radio City Music Hall, Manhattan. Read the review.A Christmas CarolSet in a home built in 1862, in an intimate parlor room, this telling of the timeless Christmas tale stars John Kevin Jones as Charles Dickens. Audience members, surrounded by 19th-century holiday décor and candlelight, will travel back more than a century, to when Dickens wrote the story. The production also features a streaming version. Through Dec. 24 at the Merchant House, Manhattan.Craving Song and DanceSweeney ToddJosh Groban stars on Broadway as everyone’s favorite tall, dark and handsome throat slitter. Opposite the demon barber is a superbly zany Annaleigh Ashford as the murder-accomplice-baker Mrs. Lovett (our critic called her “a brilliant comic for whom comedy is not the end but the means”). The two stars will leave the production after the Jan. 14 performance, so be sure to catch them in full bloody glory before they go. Come for the meat pies and Stephen Sondheim’s gigantic score, stay for the shadowy lighting, which won Natasha Katz her eighth Tony Award. At the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, Manhattan. Read the review.Merrily We Roll AlongJonathan Groff stars alongside Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez in this acclaimed revival of the former Sondheim flop, directed by Maria Friedman. Our critic called the show, which sweetly and gravely warns of the dangers of great ambition, “a palpable hit,” with “a thrillingly fierce central performance” by Groff and “high-wattage, laser-focused performances” by Radcliffe and Mendez. Through March 24 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan. Read the review.Jonathan Groff, obscured, Daniel Radcliffe, aloft, and Katie Rose Clarke in the musical “Merrily We Roll Along” at the Hudson Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHere We AreUnderfed and yet very full: Will the people who have it all ever find something to eat? Inspired by two Luis Buñuel films, David Ives’s chic, surrealist musical was one of the most anticipated Off Broadway shows of the year, and a star-studded farewell to Sondheim’s final work. Through Jan. 21 at the Shed, Manhattan. Read the review.StereophonicFive members of a rock band try to record a studio album. That’s the premise, which hinges upon heartache, copious drug use and fragile rock star egos, of David Adjmi’s first New York production since 2013, set entirely in a recording studio. It’s a play, not a musical, so it’s not squarely in the song-and-dance category, but the music, written by Will Butler (formerly of Arcade Fire), is chock-full of captivating pop songs and gripping ballads. Through Dec. 17 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan. Read the review.For the FaithfulPurlie VictoriousLeslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young star in Ossie Davis’s raucous 1961 comedy, directed by Kenny Leon, about a charismatic preacher who must outwit a plantation owner to buy and restore the local church. The play exposes racism as laughably absurd in a Broadway revival our critic called “scathingly funny.” Through Feb. 4 at the Music Box, Manhattan. Read the review.Leslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young, center, lead the ensemble cast in a revival of Ossie Davis’s 1961 play, “Purlie Victorious,” at the Music Box Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCovenantIn his New York debut, the playwright York Walker’s Southern gothic, directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene, follows a small Georgia town’s reaction to a bluesman’s homecoming. The potent little Off Broadway play, about communing with God and making deals with the Devil, is based on the real-life bluesman Robert Johnson, whose technique inspired rumors that he had traded his soul for musical genius. Through Dec. 17 at Roundabout Underground, Manhattan. Read the review.Nearing ExpirationShuckedIf a cornucopia of puns is your thing, this lowbrow comedic musical about a small-town woman who leaves home to save her corn just might scratch the itch. With a book by Robert Horn, songs by the country music songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally and campy scenes — including a mini-kickline of plastic corncobs — directed by Jack O’Brien, our critic called the show low humor “but hard not to laugh at.” Through Jan. 14 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan. Read the review.Sleep No MoreArguably one of New York City’s crown jewels of immersive theater, the Hitchcock-style take on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is set to close on Jan. 28 after 12 years. In an enchanting act of voyeurism, audiences members wear masks — the Venetian type, not the health-protecting kind (those are optional) — and follow characters from room to room, into densely packed apothecary dens, eerie miniature forests and dark, elaborate dining halls. Through Jan. 28 at the McKittrick Hotel, Manhattan. Read the review. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Buena Vista Social Club,’ Gets Another Life as a Musical

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      The best-selling album turned veteran Cuban musicians into global stars and inspired a documentary almost 30 years ago. Now it’s an Off Broadway musical.It was an improvisation to begin with. In 1996, a recording session was scheduled in Havana combining Cuban and Malian musicians, but the Africans had visa trouble and didn’t arrive. So instead, an assemblage of veteran Cuban musicians, some coming out of long retirement, recorded a collection of classic Cuban songs. This was “Buena Vista Social Club,” which became not just the best-selling Cuban album ever but also a defining artifact of Cuban culture beloved around the world.More albums followed: outtakes, offshoots, live recordings of performances like the one at Carnegie Hall. Wim Wenders made a documentary film. And now, almost 30 years later, there is a stage musical: “Buena Vista Social Club,” in previews at the Off Broadway Atlantic Theater Company.This newest project started a few years back, when a producer with the theatrical rights to the album approached the Cuban American playwright Marco Ramirez (“The Royale”).“The first question,” Ramirez recalled after a recent rehearsal, “was ‘Do you know this record?’ And for a Cuban kid who grew up right around the time the record came out, the answer was, ‘Of course.’ The next question was, ‘Do you think there’s a piece of theater here?’”The search for an answer to that question sent Ramirez to Cuba, where he interviewed some of the surviving participants. “It was about finding the emotional truth at the center of it,” he said. “To me, it’s ultimately about a bunch of people who were given a magical opportunity to do a second take on their past, to make something right or just relive their youth.”Center from left, Mel Semé, Natalie Venetia Belcon and Renesito Avich performing in the musical, about veteran musicians recording a collection of classic Cuban songs.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s the story that this “Buena Vista” tells. It dramatizes the making of the album in getting-the-old-gang-back-together fashion, but also, through flashbacks, recreates the pre-revolution, Golden Age 1950s Cuba of the musicians’ youth, suffused with nostalgia and regret.This is “the emotional truth behind the factual truth,” Ramirez said. “It’s all inspired by real people and events, but I’m definitely taking many, many liberties in order to tell the best possible story.”Where no liberties are taken is with the music. The dialogue is in English, but the songs — drawn from the broader “Buena Vista” catalog — remain in Spanish. “Old songs bring up old feelings,” a character in the show says. “Given these lyrics, given the moods evoked by this music, what is the story that can emerge?” Ramirez said. “At the beginning, I felt that I was communicating with the songwriters, who have been dead for 80 years or more, that my collaborators were ghosts.”Eventually, living collaborators joined him. The show, scheduled to run through Jan. 7 at the Linda Gross Theater, is directed by Saheem Ali (“Fat Ham”) and choreographed by the married team of Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck (Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story”). Casting was a challenge, doubly so since the flashback structure necessitated finding two people (one older, one younger) to play each of the distinctive real-life Buena Vista personalities.“We had to find performers who could sing and play like the originals,” Ali said. “But the Venn diagram of who also needed to act or dance was quite intense. They each do something with excellence, but they’re having to challenge themselves to do something different because of the thing we’re building together. We put on an international search for people who can embody the music in a way that felt truthful.”The common denominator, Ramirez said, is that everyone has a connection to the “Buena Vista” album. His comes through his Cuban grandparents, who played the songs in his Miami home, so that when the record came out he already knew them; it was exciting for several generations of his family to talk about a new album together. “The bittersweet irony is that they were nostalgic for Havana, and now I listen to this record and I’m nostalgic for them,” he said.“Our responsibility is to make the audience feel something through the universal language of dance,” the choreographer Patricia Delgado said. Marielys Molina, left, and Angélica Beliard dance to songs performed in Spanish. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPlaying the older Ibrahim Ferrer — who was shining shoes for money when he was recruited to supply his golden voice to boleros for the Buena Vista recordings — is Mel Semé. He was a teenager in Cuba at the time of the album’s release.“It became popular outside of Cuba first,” he said. “But then we fell in love with this music again, and it became the music many of us aspired to play.”After graduating with a degree in classical percussion from the University of Arts, Semé moved to Europe, slowly building a career as a drummer, guitarist, singer and bandleader. Since his acting experience was limited to commercials, he initially told the Buena Vista musical team that maybe he wasn’t the person they were looking for.“I’ve been feeling like a teenager again, learning a new skill,” he said. Echoing a phrase used by many other cast members, he said that playing Ferrer is a “huge responsibility,” but he has been helped by a deep connection with the singer, who found worldwide acclaim in his 70s and died in 2005.“Even though my story is not exactly his story, I also found a little bit of success late in life,” he said. “I always saw Ibrahim as a role model. No matter how late in life he got his chance, it was done with such grace.”Ibrahim Ferrer, center, and other musicians in Wim Wenders’s 1999 documentary portrait of the Cuban ensemble and its concert performance in New York and Amsterdam.Artisan EntertainmentRenesito Avich plays Eliades Ochoa, the cowboy-hat-wearing musician who brought a more rural sound into the original Buena Vista group. The music, he said, “has been the background of my whole life.” He was born in Santiago de Cuba, Ochoa’s hometown, and even met him once. A successful musician who specializes in the tres, a version of guitar at the heart of Cuban music, Avich is also an acting novice. He said that he feels the musical “is truly honoring what the music means for Cuban people like me.”Or like Leonardo Reyna, who was born and raised in Havana before pursuing a career as a classical pianist in Europe. The “Buena Vista” album “had a tremendous significance for me,” Reyna said, “helping me rediscover forgotten figures like Rubén González” — the virtuoso pianist Reyna plays as a young man.The show feels authentic, Reyna said, “even from a writer and director who are not from the island,” because of its cultural sensibility and an attention to musical details that he finds affecting. “Emotions arise from the distance many of us have had to travel, the separation of families, but also a sense of identity that is being reconstructed somehow,” he said. “It is healing.”Among the cast members who aren’t Cuban, Natalie Venetia Belcon is a Broadway actress who doesn’t speak Spanish. But when she was preparing to audition for the daunting role of Omara Portuondo, Buena Vista’s diva, the songs sprang a flood of memories of her Trinidadian musician parents. Kenya Browne, the Mexican-born singer who portrays the young Omara, knew the music as something that her grandmother used to play. Her mother told her that “Dos Gardenias,” a bolero she sings in the show, is one her great-grandmother sang often.Peck and Delgado — her parents were born in Cuba — have long loved the album. They chose a track from it (“Pueblo Nuevo”) for the first dance at their wedding. As soon as they learned about the musical project, they asked to be involved.“Since the songs are in Spanish,” Delgado said, “a lot of times our responsibility is to make the audience feel something through the universal language of dance, and you don’t even have to understand what’s being said.”“We’ve been improvising, making this up on the fly, building it as we go. I can’t think of a more Cuban thing to have done,” Ramirez (top right) said of his work with his collaborators (Peck, from left, Delgado and Ali).Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesThe variety of dance in Cuba, Peck noted, includes ballet, contemporary, Afro-Cuban, an array of social dances. “We wanted to create a dance language that honors that, so it’s not one thing,” he said. “And we also want to allow for our imaginations to come into play, our personal touch, so it doesn’t feel like documentary dance but alive.”Peck recalled the experience of walking through Havana, hearing music playing and seeing people move to it. “And then as soon as that sound starts to fade, another sound is in the distance rubbing up against it,” he said. “That energy is something we want to weave through.”Ali added: “It’s not a show where one thing stops and another begins. It all hands off to each other. We’re not following a template of what a musical is, but letting the music lead and allowing the songs to dictate how the story should evolve.”Creating in this fashion required much trial and error, Peck said. “All of us have had this huge process of building a lot and throwing stuff away. But that’s the only way to find the final recipe.”Ramirez likened the process to that of Juan de Marcos González, the musician behind the original “Buena Vista” recording: “He was the fixer, the guy who knew everybody involved, who knew where to find Omara and the right bass player. Like many young Cubans in that time” — the “Special Period” of economic collapse following the dissolution of the Soviet Union — “he wasn’t going to let go of an opportunity. To me, he’s the hero.”“I’m not a jazz musician,” Ramirez continued, “but I feel like we’ve been improvising, making this up on the fly, building it as we go. I can’t think of a more Cuban thing to have done.” More

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      Full Exposure? Four Solo Shows Ponder the Art of True Nature.

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      Lameece Issaq’s “A Good Day to Me Not to You” strives for intimacy, but that is not necessarily the aim of works by Alexandra Tatarsky, Milo Cramer and Ikechukwu Ufomadu.Two years of post-shutdown theater has brought to New York stages a slew of solo performers wrestling with subjects like grief, death and the apocalypse — and those are just the comedies. Solo shows are inexpensive to produce and relatively low-lift endeavors for an industry still on shaky ground.There has been no shortage this fall, and now four solo shows running Off Broadway demonstrate a range of approaches to the form, proving, at least for this round, that baring your inner thoughts and fears pays off. “A Good Day to Me Not to You,” at the Connelly Theater in the East Village, and “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan, opt for all-out vulnerability, dissecting the psyche as if the stage were an operating table. “School Pictures” and “Amusements,” also at Playwrights Horizons, take the opposite tack, with performers who hold themselves at a distance to direct attention elsewhere, but with devices that can be distracting and evasive.The middle-aged narrator of “A Good Day to Me Not to You” divulges intimate details from the start: She is nursing a surprise case of genital warts, she tells the audience, that has been dormant for the decade since she last had sex.In this wryly candid confessional, presented by Waterwell, the writer and performer Lameece Issaq plays a New Yorker with a mordant sense of humor who is weathering a downswing: She was forced to to quit orthodontics school because of her bouts of vertigo, and then she was fired from a dental lab for filing away the imperfections in patients’ plaster molds. Now she is nursing HPV and moving into a convent boardinghouse named for St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins and sexual abuse survivors. (The weathered sanctuary set by Peiyi Wong shifts locales under Mextly Couzin’s dynamic lighting.)Directed with graceful sensitivity by Lee Sunday Evans, the artistic director of Waterwell, Issaq’s performance is both tender and frank, flipping with ease between directly addressing the audience as the narrator and voicing succinctly sketched characters (everyone’s teeth tell a story). Driven by her maternal impulse, first toward her nephew and then a potential child of her own, the narrator is betrayed by what she cannot control, but always returns, by some elliptical path, to the care she owes herself.Alexandra Tatarsky, a self-described “anxious clown,” inhabits a graduate seminar’s worth of German literary characters in “Sad Boys in Harpy Land.”Chelcie ParryIn “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” a thrilling and frenetic mental breakdown of a show, Alexandra Tatarsky, who uses they and them pronouns, inhabits a graduate seminar’s worth of German literary characters like kindergarten drag (the scenic, costume and especially inventive prop design is by Andreea Mincic). A self-described “anxious clown,” they so frequently disrupt their own act with reflexive interrogation that the interruptions become the point. With vibrating eyes, Tatarsky sips from proliferating coffee cups, and they appear locked in a discursive effort to come of age, create something new and reckon with their death drive. (No pressure.)Tatarsky continues circling back to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, an affluent boy toiling in his bedroom struggling to write a play about self-loathing and inaction. Occasionally, Tatarsky’s madness is expressed in deranged melodies (sound composition is by Shane Riley). How is anyone supposed to create art that makes their identity legible? And why be legible at all?Directed with bracing invention by Iris McCloughan, “Sad Boys” has the delirious effect of twisting you into communion with a live-wire artist, even if it is hard to tell whether they are laughing, crying or both. Tatarsky’s cumulative argument seems to be that, like the character of the Wandering Jew, whom she plays with a gray beard that trails on the floor, identity exists in process rather than as a fixed set of signifiers.Milo Cramer’s “School Pictures” is a mostly sung-through collage of impressions gathered from tutoring New York City students.Chelcie ParryFirst names scrawled on pieces of colored construction paper form a set list for “School Pictures,” a mostly sung-through collage, written and performed by Milo Cramer, of impressions gathered from tutoring New York City students. Cramer, who uses they and them pronouns, aims to assemble brief snapshots of the privileged youth: their naive clarity, rowdy insecurity and mandate to excel in a system rigged in their favor. (Cramer notes in the script that the subjects here are fictionalized.)These portraits of middle schoolers whose parents could afford the tutoring fees are presented, under the direction of Morgan Green, with the sonic equivalent of a crude crayon: a ukulele and atonal talk-singing. Twee? Yes. And grating once it becomes clear that this will be Cramer’s sustained mode of expression for most of the show’s 60 minutes. Sounding out syllables and striking chaotic notes invokes a youthful spirit, but makes a trying task out of tracing artistic intent in the lyrics. A lecture about systemic inequality in the city’s education system comes as a welcome recess, and finally allows Cramer to level with the audience as adults.In “Amusements,” Ikechukwu Ufomadu offers inoffensive punchlines while conveying an erudite exterior and simple-minded affect.Chelcie ParryThere is a childlike quality to the persona assumed by Ikechukwu Ufomadu in “Amusements,” despite the writer and performer’s shawl-collar tuxedo and gentleman’s demeanor. The humor in this stand-up set is, as the title suggests, airy and mild nearly to a fault. In the chasm between Ufomadu’s erudite exterior and simple-minded affect comes a steady breeze of inoffensive punchlines (“Happy Friday to all who celebrate!” “How many of you are alumni of school?”). The resulting eye-roll-to-chuckle ratio will come down to a matter of taste.As directed here by Nemuna Ceesay, Ufomadu has the gracious and charming sensibility of a spiffed-up Mr. Rogers, never more so than when he ventures into the audience to ask if anyone needs a volunteer and then offers his services. Ufomadu is suave, but also halting and unpolished; his set floats along on a stream of appealing humility.It’s an act, of course; how much performers reveal of their true nature onstage may be impossible to know. At its most profound, Ufomadu’s brand of literalism indicates the extent to which we all stand on common ground. Where would we be without clothes or shoes? At home, probably, not brave enough to show our naked selves.A Good Day to Me Not to YouThrough Dec. 16 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; waterwell.org.Sad Boys in Harpy Land; School Pictures; and AmusementsAll through Dec. 3 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. More

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      ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ Review: Alicia Keys’s Musical Is Ambitious

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      A promising Off Broadway jukebox musical features hits by the R&B star (including “Fallin’,” “If I Ain’t Got You” and “No One”) and a story much like her own.Even in the Golden Age of musical theater, shows so commonly died after intermission that critics came up with a name for the disease. “Second act trouble” presented in many ways: unmoored songs, desperate cutting, illogical crises, hasty workarounds. Yet all those second act symptoms arose from the same underlying condition: first act ambitions.So it’s not really surprising that an enormously ambitious new musical like “Hell’s Kitchen,” the semi-autobiographical jukebox built on the life and catalog of Alicia Keys, disappoints after the mid-show break, tumbling directly into the potholes it spent its first half so smartly avoiding. What’s surprising in this promising show, which opened at the Public Theater on Sunday with the obvious intention of moving to Broadway, is how thrilling it is until then.Surprising to me, anyway. I find that jukeboxes — especially biographical ones, like “Motown” and “MJ” — almost inevitably add to the ordinary difficulties of musical construction with difficulties unique to their provenance. The involvement of the original artists (or their estates) leads to historical sugarcoating. A rush to hit all the high points results in a cherry-picked résumé. The catalog retreads, written for a different reason, fail to move the action forward. And since those songs are the show’s selling point, they wind up wagging the story.But Keys, working with the playwright Kristoffer Diaz and the director Michael Greif, steps around most of those pitfalls in the show’s first hour, setting up the story with notable verve and efficiency. In neat succession it introduces the main characters (17-year-old Ali and her single mother, Jersey), the primary setting (the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen in the late 1990s), the parameters of the plot (Ali’s thirst for love and art) and an imminent source of conflict (Mom).At the same time, it floods us with music to establish the worlds it’s taking us into, well beyond the R&B and pop that Keys is best known for. In a marvelous elevator sequence, Ali encounters opera, jazz, merengue and classical piano as she descends from the one-bedroom 42nd-floor apartment she shares with Jersey, a sometime actor juggling two jobs. (The building, Manhattan Plaza, offers affordable housing for artists.) Then, when Ali reaches the street, a giant rush of sound enfolds her; all of New York, it seems, is singing, playing and, in Camille A. Brown’s excitingly contextual choreography, dancing.Shoshana Bean, left, and Brandon Victor Dixon as the young protagonist’s parents.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are only a few minutes into the show and its armature is fully in place. We know that this is going to be a mother-daughter love-and-letting-go story, as Jersey (Shoshana Bean, warm and pyrotechnic) tries to keep Ali fed and safe. Though race isn’t explicitly an issue between them, Jersey is white and Ali is biracial, and Ali (Maleah Joi Moon in a sensational debut) will gradually be drawn away from her mother’s smothering by the wider group of people she encounters.One is the classical pianist, Miss Liza Jane (the magisterial Kecia Lewis), who will demand that Ali take lessons from her — though in truth Keys started studying at 7, not 17. And out on the street, to the strains of the 2003 hit “You Don’t Know My Name,” Ali will flirt with a bucket drummer named Knuck (Chris Lee, sweet as pie) even though he’s in his mid-20s. He’ll resist — at first.And so, over the course of 11 songs, the first act does the work of ambitious first acts everywhere: expanding the show’s horizon to the larger world in which the action takes place (not a fair world for young Black New Yorkers) and deepening our knowledge of the main characters through conflict. Also humor: Diaz — whose hilarious professional wrestling play, “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist — saves the story from too much earnestness. Credit Greif, too, whose steady management of tone and tension coaxes drama from a tale that could easily have been too interior.Together with Keys they also solve, or at least delay, many of the jukebox problems. By keeping a very narrow focus on just a few weeks in Ali’s life, “Hell’s Kitchen” chooses the possibility of dramatic depth over career highlights. Nor is there much sugarcoating: Keys seems quite willing to present her ambitious stand-in as a hormonal teenager immune to common sense — and Moon, 21, is precociously clever and fearless in delivering that complex portrait.Most important, Keys’s songs, even hits like “Fallin’,” “If I Ain’t Got You” and “No One,” fit into the story (and into the mouths of a variety of characters) without too much jimmying. If they don’t, the situation is acknowledged effectively. When Ali finally does spend the night with Knuck — right on time, just before the various story lines merge in a dreadful event at the end of the first act — Ali’s friend Tiny (Vanessa Ferguson) is miffed, for this is supposed to be an unapologetically woman-centered story. “The world is hers ’cause she got a man now?” she complains, interrupting the 2012 banger “Girl on Fire,” here repurposed as a joyful “I’m on top of the world” song. “That’s what we’re doing?”Moon’s dreamy Ali tries to woo Chris Lee, who plays a bucket drummer named Knuck.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlas, “that’s what we’re doing?” is how I felt the moment the second act started. As if the creators had run out of time for finesse — though Keys and Diaz have been working on “Hell’s Kitchen” for more than a decade — its wit curdles into lectures as the story, especially Jersey’s, goes blurry. Her strained relationship with Ali’s father, here a jazz pianist though in reality a flight attendant, bears the characteristic signs of dramaturgical whiplash. (On the other hand, he’s played by Brandon Victor Dixon, a human aphrodisiac, vocally and otherwise.) An argument between Jersey and Miss Liza Jane feels similarly trumped up, until it is resolved in an obvious twist of pathos. And despite Bean’s skill, Jersey’s love for her daughter, the core of the show, gets lost in the attempt to complicate it.The second act songs follow suit; it is no coincidence that the three new ones Keys wrote for the production, all good, are at the top of the show. And though well-structured musicals typically have far fewer songs in the second half than the first to make way for the complexities of plot resolution, here there are a whopping 14, ending indulgently if unavoidably with the 2009 New York anthem “Empire State of Mind.” As a result, “Hell’s Kitchen” nearly becomes what it tried to avoid at the start: a hit dump.But because those hits are hits for a reason, there is still pleasure in hearing them. The singing, arrangements and orchestrations (by various hands including Adam Blackstone, Tom Kitt, Dominic Follacaro and Keys herself) are thrilling, if strangely unbalanced in Gareth Owen’s sound design. The fire-escape sets (by Robert Brill), expressive projections (by Peter Nigrini), saturated lighting (by Natasha Katz) and often hilarious costumes (by Dede Ayite) are all Broadway-ready.I hope “Hell’s Kitchen” will be too. Of course, many musicals make the transfer without ever solving their first act problems, let alone their second. That would be a shame here. Though not perfectly told, Ali’s discovery that art is love, with or without the guy, is too rich not to reach a bigger audience, and a million more girls on fire.Hell’s KitchenThrough Jan. 14 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Arcadia’ Review: Artistic Ambition Gets Thrown Into Chaos

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      Bedlam’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s time-traveling mind-bender of a play is a meditation on uncertainty.If even commonplace matters of everyday life — weather, traffic, disease — can defy scientific expectations, what hope could there be in predicting human behavior? With “Arcadia,” his 1993 play, Tom Stoppard set out to explore the science of this uncertainty and how it can disrupt our understanding of history. A new staging presented by Bedlam makes a valiant effort to adapt Stoppard’s cerebral probes into chaos theory, Newtonian law, thermodynamics and metaphysics for a 2023 audience, but the result is a muddled one. And that may just demonstrate Stoppard’s frustrating but brilliant point.Act 1 introduces us to the play’s complicated narrative mechanics, as we jump back and forth between the Regency Period of the early 1800s and the early 1990s. The staging of the 1990s years feels even closer to our own when two primary characters — the independent-minded author Hannah (Zuzanna Szadkowski) and one of her love interests, the logic-driven mathematician Valentine (Mike Labbadia) — pull out smartphones and sleek laptops.Stoppard sets the play in Derbyshire, a county in the East Midlands of England, but Eric Tucker, the director, has his actors drop the British accents. So when Hannah and Valentine enter an academic arms race with a smarmy Byron scholar named Bernard (Ian Zafir) who values poetry above all other subjects, they spew hard consonants and short vowels. The North American Englishness of it all makes it slightly easier to hold on to Stoppard’s words.Even in a space as physically intimate as the West End Theater (located on the second floor of a century-old church, which provides an aptly haunting atmosphere), the production feels cold, caught up in its own profundity at the expense of our comprehension. The Bedlam company’s acting is void of real thrill so the bits of Stoppard’s playful wordplay and humor we do catch fall flat in both centuries.There are two exceptions: the luminous Caroline Grogan as Thomasina, a preternaturally wise student, and the stormy Shaun Taylor-Corbett as Septimus, her tenacious tutor. Together, they find themselves on the brink of a major discovery that Valentine will investigate in the 1990s. The pair find a seductive chemistry that blossoms as Septimus opens Thomasina’s mind to entropic (and erotic) possibilities.In Act 2, the eras blur. Timelines that were previously distinct are now stacked on top of one another. After intermission, we’re ushered back into the theater only to discover that Tucker has brazenly swapped the actors’ playing area for our seating area. By doing so, Tucker fulfills Bedlam’s mission statement to “reinvigorate traditional forms” and “collapse aesthetic distance.” But he’s also honoring one of Stoppard’s main provocations — that the unknowability of the past meets the unknowability of the here and now.ArcadiaThrough Dec. 23 at the West End Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More