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      ‘The Lonely Few’ Review: Rocking Out and Falling in Love

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      Lauren Patten and Taylor Iman Jones star in an achingly romantic, softly sexy new musical by Rachel Bonds and Zoe Sarnak.Of all the juke joints in all the towns in all the South, Amy had to walk into Paul’s.OK, yes, he invited her. A musician with a touch of fame, whom he’s known since she was a child, she’s stopping in for a visit on a break from her solo tour.For Lila, the front woman of the local band that’s playing the bar that night, the world shifts permanently when Amy glides in, trailing all the glamour and cool of a life so much bolder than anything Lila has ever lived.“Great set,” Amy tells her afterward. And when Lila bashfully shrugs off the compliment, Amy repeats it. “No, really — great set,” she says, her words unambiguously flirtatious. The chemistry between these two is instant, and profound. As soon as they sing together, so is the harmony.“The Lonely Few,” the achingly romantic, softly sexy, genuinely rocking new musical by Rachel Bonds (“Jonah”) and Zoe Sarnak at MCC Theater, is Lila and Amy’s love story. The telling of it gives us more of Lila’s world than of Amy’s, though — the same way that the 1999 rom-com “Notting Hill” is grounded more in the world of the ordinary bookseller than of the movie star who wanders in and claims his heart.Meticulously directed by Trip Cullman and Ellenore Scott, “The Lonely Few” is beautifully cast, and it has an absolute ace in its Lila: Lauren Patten, bringing the full-voiced ferocity that she unleashed in “Jagged Little Pill” — and won a Tony Award for — and the endearing awkwardness that she lent to “The Wolves,” alongside a vulnerability that could just about break you.In Lila’s tiny Kentucky hometown, music-making is the passion she gets up to when she isn’t working her grocery store job with her bassist and best friend, Dylan (Damon Daunno), or keeping an anxious eye on her brother, Adam (Peter Mark Kendall), whose drinking is out of control.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: In ‘Three Houses,’ a Dark Karaoke Night of the Soul

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      It’s open mic at the post-pandemic cocktail bar where Dave Malloy’s hypnotic triptych of monodramas takes place.It’s only fitting that a bar, replete with liquor and raised like an altar, presides over Dave Malloy’s “Three Houses,” which opened on Monday at the Signature Theater. Malloy’s music is, after all, intoxicating. Alcohol is the accelerant for the show’s linked monodramas. And hung over is how it leaves its pandemic-sozzled characters at the end of a dark karaoke night of the soul.You may feel that way too: lost in a morning-after fog like Malloy’s three protagonists, each having radically relocated during lockdown. Susan (Margo Seibert) found herself in her dead grandmother’s ranch home in Latvia, pointlessly alphabetizing the library. Sadie (Mia Pak) moved into her auntie’s New Mexico adobe, where a life-simulation game akin to Animal Crossing was her only companion. Having holed up in a “red brick basement in Brooklyn,” Beckett (J.D. Mollison) soon turned into an Amazon shopaholic.As each now takes the open mic at the metaphysical bar to sing about going “a little bit crazy living alone in the pandemic,” it becomes clear, though, that more was at play. Encouraged by a bartender not incidentally called Wolf (Scott Stangland) — “don’t be afraid to go deep,” he says — they reveal to us, and perhaps to themselves, that Covid wasn’t the only threat to their well-being. Love, too, was a lockdown.A recent seismic breakup is part of all their stories. Susan’s ex, Julian, moved to another state for work. Sadie’s Jasmine kept “messing up” household routines with her spontaneity. Beckett did not feel safe letting his wife, Jackie, see fully “the darkness within” him. That these accusations are so transparently thin does not weaken their effectiveness as defenses — or, because we recognize the behavior, as storytelling.But Malloy’s attempt to cross-reference the stand-alone 30-minute stories with psychological and literal echoes palls. It’s easy enough to write off the twee alliteration of the three J-named exes as a kind of light rhyme or fairy-tale resonance. Same with the eight jugs of red currant wine in Susan’s tale that become eight cases of mezcal in Sadie’s and eight bottles of plum brandy in Beckett’s. Why eight? Why not? The point is that people drink heavily in isolation.The meaning of the more ornate linkages is less clear. Each segment includes an obligatory puppet — a Latvian house dragon, a video game badger, a creepy spider, all designed by James Ortiz — that feels more like a stab at theatrical variety than an expression of a relevant human need. (Even so, Annie Tippe’s staging grows monotonous.) The bar’s orange-vested waiters (Ching Valdes-Aran and Henry Stram) reappear as various loving grandparents, indistinguishable despite their accents. But all the characters seem to have been reverse engineered from templates, suggesting structural desperation.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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      ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Review: Community Building One Dice Roll at a Time

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

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      Review: In ‘Invasive Species,’ the Acting Bug Bites, Dramatically

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      Maia Novi stars in her play about a Hollywood-struck actress from Argentina who stops at Yale’s drama school and an inpatient psych ward on her way.Maia Novi’s “Invasive Species” is being marketed as an outrageous dark comedy, but it’s a quieter play than that: about being an Argentine immigrant with Hollywood ambitions, a graduate acting student at Yale and a psychiatric inpatient plagued by intrusive thoughts.“My name is Maia,” the play’s central character (Novi) tells the audience near the top of the show. “And this is a true story.”Well, true-ish, given that we’ve just seen her get bitten by the Acting Bug (Julian Sanchez), a human-size creature with a giant proboscis whose process of infecting Maia involves spitting voluptuously onto her face from above. A bit of hallucinatory license, then, has sometimes been taken.Directed by Michael Breslin at the Vineyard’s Dimson Theater, the play fragments into different worlds. The most realistic is the hospital in New Haven where Maia wakes up, in March 2022, to find she is a patient — admitted to a children’s ward, where suicide is a temptation for some of the adolescent patients.The play’s other worlds are more heightened and satirical, though they, too, have the whiff of veracity: the drama school, where a teacher says that Maia — trying to lose her accent by diligently imitating Gwyneth Paltrow — has a “lazy tongue”; the Connecticut dating scene, where a dimwitted American bro swallows every stereotype-laced lie that Maia concocts, prankishly, about her family in Argentina; a film set where a British director who casts her as Eva Perón has a blithely wrongheaded sense of authenticity.Partially inspired by the 1977 production of Spalding Gray’s theater piece “Rumstick Road,” an investigation into his mother’s suicide, “Invasive Species” carries the thrum of fear that can accompany a family history of mental illness. Maia worries — so does her father — about what she might have inherited from her own mother.Presented by a group of producers who include the playwright-provocateur Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play”), Breslin’s roommate when they studied drama at Yale, “Invasive Species” is crisply directed on a nearly bare stage. The supporting cast members (who include Raffi Donatich, Sam Gonzalez and Alexandra Maurice) are quicksilver-changeable in their multiple roles, and it’s always clear which reality or unreality the characters have stepped into, even when worlds overlap. (Yichen Zhou’s lighting is instrumental in that.)This is a well acted, neatly assembled, carefully modulated play with a cumulative force that is less than it might have been. The satire — of drama school, of xenophobia — isn’t the freshest, and the obliqueness of the hospital strand softens its impact, and ultimately the play’s.“Invasive Species” is a portrait of a young woman attempting, for the sake of ambition and survival, to force herself into various molds that do not fit who she truly is.“Pretend,” one of the teenage patients advises her, practically. “You should be good at that — you’re an actress, right?”Invasive SpeciesThrough June 30 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; invasivespeciesplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Review: A Text-to-Speech Meet-Cute in ‘All of Me’

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      Laura Winters’s romantic comedy pays careful attention to the dynamics of living with disabilities.Lucy has impeccable comic timing and a sense of humor as dry as a gin martini. Her expression deadpan but for a slightly furrowed brow, she delivers punchlines with Amazon Prime efficiency in a calm, even tone that may sound familiar to people who use Alexa or ride the New York City subway.Played with wry assurance by Madison Ferris, Lucy communicates using a text-to-speech tool built into her motorized scooter. As heroines go, she is a young Katharine Hepburn type: headstrong and outspoken but eagerly in search of tenderness. Her verve and vulnerability are the lifeblood of “All of Me,” an affecting if formulaic new romantic comedy by Laura Winters that opened on Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center.Lucy meets Alfonso (Danny J. Gomez), who uses a motorized wheelchair and similar technology to communicate, outside a hospital while awaiting their rides. Proposing a game, Lucy asks him to pick a random key on his screen; when he chooses “B,” there’s a prolonged pause while she types. Then her device’s flat staccato sounds out the raunchy rhymes of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”Typical of Lucy, it’s a funny bit with a mordant edge, bemoaning her situation by making light of it. As we soon learn, Lucy used to love to sing but has lost the ability to pronounce consonants (the play’s title refers to the jazz standard by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons). Lucy received a diagnosis of muscular dystrophy when she was 16; now in her early 20s, she has been managing the disease long enough to laugh about it with a trace of cynicism.Where Lucy sees only limitations, Alfonso, who has been paralyzed since infancy, maintains a broader sense of life’s possibilities — largely because he has the money to. So, what follows is a classic case of opposites attract. Lucy shares a cramped, less-than-accessible home with her mother, Connie (Kyra Sedgwick), who works two jobs; her older sister, Jackie (Lily Mae Harrington); and Jackie’s fiancé, Moose (Brian Furey Morabito).Alfonso, on the other hand, is a white-collar professional with enough means to hire help and buy a tricked-out house (the furniture-swapping set is by Brett Banakis and Edward T. Morris); his mother, Elena (Florencia Lozano), is only in town to help with the move (the story takes place in Schenectady, N.Y. in 2018).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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      Betty Buckley Is Not Wedded to the Same Old Songs

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      The actress is back in concert mode at 76, and doing new material. She’s also looking forward to a bold new take on “Sunset Boulevard.”On her 35-acre ranch in Texas, the actor-singer Betty Buckley has been dreaming of playing a Western heroine at last — ideally in something by Taylor Sheridan, the “Yellowstone” creator, who shoots nearby.“I have literally contemplated going to his ranch and just knocking on the door,” Buckley, 76, said the other afternoon, and laughed.This week, though, she is slated to perform in Manhattan, Thursday through Saturday at Joe’s Pub, with songs and arrangements new to her show. After a year and a half of physical challenges including long Covid and compression fractures in her spine, she has worked her way back into concert mode.A veteran of the 1976 movie “Carrie” and the musical adaptation — a cult favorite that was a Broadway flop in 1988 — she is also back on-screen as an unsettling neighbor in the horror movie “Imaginary,” released in March, and with an animated short that she wrote and narrates, “The Mayfly,” scheduled for the Tribeca Festival in June.The actress played Norma Desmond in both the West End and the Broadway productions of “Sunset Boulevard” in the mid-1990s.John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesSissy Spacek and Buckley in “Carrie,” which was Buckley’s big-screen debut in 1976. She later starred in a stage adaptation of the movie.United ArtistsA 1983 Tony Award winner for playing Grizabella in “Cats,” and famed for her trans-Atlantic 1990s turn as Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” Buckley spoke from her ranch by video call. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.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: A New Lens on Auschwitz in ‘Here There Are Blueberries’

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      Archivists are the heroes of a documentary play about a photograph album depicting daily life among the perpetrators of the Holocaust.You do not expect a camera to be the first thing you see in a play about the Holocaust. Yet even before “Here There Are Blueberries” begins, a spotlight illuminates a Leica on a pedestal. A period advertisement projected behind it promotes it as “the camera of modern times.”That’s apt for a dramatized documentary that looks at its subject from an unusual angle: the discovery of photographs taken at Auschwitz and the archivists who brought them to light.“Blueberries,” which opened on Monday at New York Theater Workshop in a co-production with Tectonic Theater Project, focuses on the so-called Höcker album, which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum acquired from an anonymous donor in 2007. Uniquely, none of the album’s 116 photographs depict victims of the Nazis — only the Nazis themselves, going about the banal daily business of living and enjoying their lives at the camp.That the play takes a similar approach, keeping the victims mostly out of frame, is a blessing and a problem. A blessing because in so doing it avoids both active horror and the cynicism of Holokitsch, in which the murder of six million Jews is appropriated to zhuzh some emotion that might otherwise be absent.But in backgrounding the tragedy, even with the noblest intentions, “Blueberries” (conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman; written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich) gets caught in a different dramatic problem: a problem of moral scale. What it’s about, however worthy, is so much smaller than what it insistently isn’t.It’s not just that the album at the center of the story, being the keepsake of an assistant to the commandant of Auschwitz in 1944, makes no reference to major atrocities in its portrayal of minor pleasures like the title blueberries. We do not see — as we do in the film “The Zone of Interest,” which features some of the same characters and locations — smoke from crematories or glowing evil light at night. In keeping with the museum’s efforts to “avoid undue attention to the perpetrators,” the play’s Nazis are characterized almost as little as their victims.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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      ‘Sally & Tom’ Frees Sally Hemings From Being a Mere Footnote

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      Suzan-Lori Parks’s play is the latest work by a Black writer seeking to prioritize Hemings’s life and perspective to make her fully dimensional.Sally Hemings might be a household name these days, but we still know so little about the relationship between Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Yet, Hemings endures as a figure of endless fascination: American writers aspire to tell her story, and there remains a yearning for a deeper understanding of the enslaved woman who left no firsthand accounts of her inner thoughts.In “Sally & Tom,” Suzan Lori-Parks is the latest writer trying to fill in the gaps in order to present Hemings as a multidimensional character — and, in the process, rescue her personhood onstage. “We don’t know what happened,” Sheria Irving, who portrays Hemings in the play, told me, adding that Parks is “building on this factual account.” (The play has been a hit for the Public Theater and runs there through June 2.)She continued: “We do not have to reimagine, we can really imagine what it is for a 14-year-old to be looked at by a 41-year-old, and not just looked at but to engage in sexual exploitation with this man.”Parks’s fidelity to the history means she doesn’t alter Hemings’s fate. Instead, she experiments with the storytelling by plotting “Sally & Tom” as a backstager, or a play within a play, in which the main character, Luce (also played by Irving), is an African American dramatist who is writing a play about the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson. Luce is playing Hemings in her own play, which is called “The Pursuit of Happiness.”In fact, each cast member plays two parts: Luce’s partner, Mike (Gabriel Ebert), is playing Tom in the production, and Alano Miller plays both Hemings’s older brother, James, and Kwame, a Hollywood actor who has returned to his old theater company. When the historical story and the present-day one collide, they often reveal the sometimes comical and often complicated reality that can arise when mounting a show dealing with race relations in the American theater today.Contemporary woes: Irving and Ebert as a modern couple struggling to produce a play (and overcome race relations in the American theater) in “Sally & Tom.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWe 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