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      ‘Here We Are’ Review: The Last Sondheim, Cool and Impossibly Chic

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      This inventive, beguiling and not quite fully solved puzzle of a show is a worthy and loving farewell to the great musical dramatist.Stephen Sondheim had a genius for genre. Some of his best works were adapted from very niche sources like penny dreadfuls (“Sweeney Todd”), epistolary novels (“Passion”) and Roman comedies (“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”). Leaning hard into their specific styles, he mined their expressive potential in songs that could hardly be improved and never sounded alike.Still, for him and for others, surrealism was often a genre too far. Musical theater is surreal enough already. (Why did that taciturn man suddenly start singing? Who are those dancing women in lingerie?) Building a show on a willfully irrational source risks doubling down on the weirdness, leading to “Huh?” results like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” and Sondheim’s own “Anyone Can Whistle.”So as we waited what seemed like decades for what would turn out to be his last musical, never quite knowing if he’d ditched it or not, the dribbles of information he and his collaborators let drop suggested that the new show — eventually titled “Here We Are” — might be misbegotten.Not only are the two Luis Buñuel films that Sondheim and the playwright David Ives took as their inspiration maximally surrealist, they are also surreal in different, seemingly incompatible ways. “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) is a sunny romp about a group of friends who, seeking a meal, are mysteriously unable to find one. “The Exterminating Angel” (1962) is a much darker affair, about a dinner party no one can leave. Both movies ridicule aristocrats who are underfed yet over-sated: people for whom nothing is ever enough. But one is like the silky tartness of a lemon meringue pie and the other like chicken bones stuck in your throat.The best good news about “Here We Are,” the combo platter Buñuel musical that opened on Sunday at the Shed, nearly two years after Sondheim’s death in November 2021, is that it justifies the idea of merging these two works and succeeds in making a surrealist musical expressive. In Joe Mantello’s breathtakingly chic and shapely production, with a cast of can-you-top-this Broadway treasures, it is never less than a pleasure to watch as it confidently polishes and embraces its illogic. Musically, it’s fully if a little skimpily Sondheim, and entirely worthy of his catalog. That it is also a bit cold, only occasionally moving in the way that song would ideally allow, may speak to the reason he had so much trouble writing it.There are just a few songs in Act II, which, inspired by Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” takes a darker turn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe first act, about an hour long and with perhaps seven numbers — though it’s hard to count because they weave in and out of the dialogue — introduces us to Ives’s American versions of Buñuel’s French gourmands from “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” Leo Brink (Bobby Cannavale) is a crass tycoon and Marianne Brink (Rachel Bay Jones) a society decorator; their Saturday morning is interrupted when four of their circle arrive at the couple’s hyper-sleek apartment, insisting they’ve been invited for brunch.The interlopers include Paul Zimmer (Jeremy Shamos), a plastic surgeon celebrating his 1,000th nose job, and his wife, Claudia Bursik-Zimmer (Amber Gray), an agent, she brays, for “a major entertainment entity.” Along with them are Raffael Santello Di Santicci (Steven Pasquale), the horndog ambassador from a Mediterranean country called Moranda, and Fritz (Micaela Diamond), Marianne’s sour younger sister, a revolutionary with champagne tastes.Ives quickly and amusingly delineates the six with specific and almost universally obnoxious traits. Raffael, who butchers his English, and Claudia, quick to pull rank, have a weekly assignation behind Paul’s back; Paul and Leo run a drug cartel with Raffael’s ambassadorial assistance. Fritz is a pill. As they go on the road in search of a meal, accompanied by a Sondheim vamp that starts out marvelously jaunty and ends like water swirling down a drain, each reveals worse and worse traits, except for Marianne, who is too dim to be venal. When she asks her husband to “buy this perfect day” for her, it seems less acquisitive than sentimental.The changes of scenery as they visit various establishments featuring outré waiters (Tracie Bennett and Denis O’Hare) in ever more ludicrous wigs (by Robert Pickens and Katie Gell) are accomplished with swift grace on David Zinn’s shiny white box of a set, as neon marquees descend from the flies and then descend further to form tables or banquettes. (Zinn’s costumes are also telegraphic, including Leo’s velour sweatsuit and Claudia’s sky-high purple Fendis.) The theme-and-variations format is enchanting, allowing Sondheim, the great puzzler, to treat songs almost as anagrams. Eventually, along with three other characters they pick up — a colonel (Francois Battiste), a soldier (Jin Ha) and a bishop (David Hyde Pierce) — the crew lands, by now starving, at Raffael’s embassy, where they dine as Act I ends.Here the musical hinges into “The Exterminating Angel,” only instead of a completely different set of characters (Buñuel’s were Spanish, living under Franco), Ives, in a neat piece of joinery, continues with Leo and Marianne and the others. It is they who find it impossible to leave after dinner, and wind up, in Act II, sleeping, bickering and eventually fighting over food scraps as their metaphysical entrapment persists for days. Ives also complicates Buñuel’s antifascist, anti-bourgeois glee, in which plutocrats are exposed as pigs, by implicating the revolution as well; Fritz turns out to be less of a threat to her own way of life than she intended.Clever as all that is, the windup has problems, as is true for many new shows finding their final shape. To make the characters in “Here We Are” worthy of punishment in the second act has meant making them too obviously awful in the first. Their brutishness throughout also lets us off Buñuel’s hook: His movies are about people whose sophistication and disposable income we should recognize, but “Here We Are,” which sometimes feels like a butterfly box, is about people we don’t dare to.In the first act, inspired by Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” the characters visit various establishments, each distinguished with swift grace by neon marquees that descend to form tables or banquettes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHad Sondheim written more songs for Act II — there are just a few, bunched at the beginning — that problem might have been eased. In any case, Mantello and Ives decided to reframe the dearth as an opportunity. Before his death, Sondheim apparently agreed with them that the lack of songs in fact made structural sense: Once trapped in a repeating nightmare of deprivation, these characters would have no reason to sing. But then why retain the ones he’d already written?Perhaps because the songs he did write are everything you could want them to be. There are fewer trick rhymes than usual, but laugh-out-loud jokes nonetheless. A rhapsodic love song for the soldier and a paean to superficiality for Marianne — “I want things to gleam./To be what they seem/And not what they are” — have the familiar Sondheimian depth and luster to crystallize complex insights.Though we sorely miss that in Act II, and especially at the attempted triple lutz of an ending (which is probably two lutzes too many), Ives, the author of “Venus in Fur” and innumerable clever comedies, has done much to compensate. Some of his dialogue scenes — including a riveting colloquy between the questing Marianne and the questioning bishop — have the shape, rhythm and sorrowful wit of a Sondheim song. (Jones and Pierce are standouts in the excellent cast.) Also lovingly filling in blanks are the musical supervisor, Alexander Gemignani, and Sondheim’s longtime orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, who have arranged themes from the earlier part of the show as instrumental interludes to take up the slack in the later part.You can understand their care. Pending the discovery of some unpublished juvenilia or yet another iteration of the penultimate “Road Show,” this is the last Sondheim musical we will ever have. That alone makes the production historic, a pressure that happily does not show in the product, which is fleet and flashy. Natasha Katz’s lighting, Tom Gibbons’s sound and Sam Pinkleton’s droll choreography do a lot of the heavy lifting for Mantello’s agenda.More important, “Here We Are” is as experimental as Sondheim throughout his career wanted everything to be. To swim through its currents of echoes of earlier work — some “Anyone Can Whistle,” some “Passion,” some “Merrily We Roll Along” — is to understand the characters’ monstrous insatiability. We, too, will always want more, even when we’ve had what by any reasonable standards should already be more than enough.Here We AreThrough Jan. 21 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes. More

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      ‘The Vanishing Elephant’ Review: Bringing ‘a Thing of Wonder’ to Life

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      This alluring spectacle at Stage 42, which aims to dazzle audiences 8 and older, makes powerful statements about the rights of both animals and human beings.Can magic illuminate a life that was far from magical?Cahoots NI, a children’s theater company from Belfast, Northern Ireland, incorporates illusions into “The Vanishing Elephant,” a show that aims to dazzle audiences 8 and older while also exposing them to the harsh realities of wildlife captivity and human suffering. Although the results are sometimes mixed, this alluring spectacle makes powerful statements about the rights of both animals and people.Presented by the New Victory Theater at Stage 42 (the theater’s regular home is undergoing renovation), the production introduces its title character’s birth in Bengal, on the Indian subcontinent, with a sparkling special effect: a hand-held transparent box fills with light, revealing a mechanized shadow puppet that raises its trunk beguilingly. Written by Charles Way, the play does not mention the period, but adult theatergoers will recognize this as the era of Britain’s crushing rule of India.While the elephant is still very young, hunters tear her from her mother. Even though she wins the love of Opu, a young villager (played as a boy by Adi Chugh and as an aging man by Cliff Samara), he can’t stop a trainer (Madhav Vasantha) from treating her roughly. Opu, who names the elephant Janu, is in many ways her counterpart: a lonely, misunderstood orphan adopted by foreigners (in his case, an English couple). Only he and, later, another child realize that Janu is “a thing of wonder.”That also describes her onstage. Helen Foan, of the company Foan & Fortune, designed the life-size puppets that portray Janu after the opening scene. Gray-suited puppeteers essentially disappear as they manipulate these segmented forms, creating the impression that a real elephant, with sad eyes and a dusty trunk, is moving just feet away.Onstage, gray-suited puppeteers manipulate the elephant’s body, creating the impression that a real animal is moving just feet away from the audience.Melissa GordonThe cast members, who also narrate, execute their roles and Jayachandran Palazhy’s choreographed movement expertly, though it feels jarring to see Opu’s adoptive father, an imperious colonialist, be played by a Black man. The same actor, Ola Teniola, later gives a stirring performance as Jarrett, a harried American circus worker who takes charge of Janu after a wealthy woman (Shanara Gabrielle) transports her to the United States. Forced to train the elephant, now renamed Jenny, for the brutalities of the big top, Jarrett finally declares: “You aren’t meant to be here. Like I was never meant to be here.”Using skillful sleight of hand, cast members set up the circus, appearing to pull tall poles and an entire ladder from a small case. In a departure from Jenny’s sad situation, the surrounding music and crowd noise build a festive atmosphere. (Aoife Kavanagh is the production’s sound designer; she and MD Pallavi are its composers.) Circuses, of course, can be jubilant events, but the production, which is directed by Paul Bosco Mc Eneaney, veers toward contrived romanticism when it depicts a saintly Jenny putting her tormentors’ safety above her own.Inspired by the tale of the real elephant that Harry Houdini made disappear in his New York act in 1918, the show finally places Jenny onstage with that famous magician. Her arduous journey, and those of the play’s Black trainer and South Asian characters, would seem to invite somber reflection about freedom and its loss rather than a Bollywood-style finale. The rousing music and joyful choreography threaten to make Jenny vanish again, just when she’s become indelible.The Vanishing ElephantThrough Oct. 29 at Stage 42, Manhattan; newvictory.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      ‘Helen.’ Review: A Restless Heroine Tired of Abiding by Gender Roles

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      At La MaMa, Caitlin George’s new play uses comedy to counter the legend of Helen of Troy.The play is called “Helen.,” as in Helen of Troy, but her twin sister, Klaitemestra, is the one who steals the show.You remember Klaitemestra, albeit maybe by a different spelling: the grief-enraged mother of Iphigenia, who is sacrificed to the gods by her father, Agamemnon — a betrayal that Klaitemestra avenges by murdering him upon his return from the Trojan War.So dramatic, isn’t it? Not like the humdrum contemporary-classical domesticity that Helen, Klaitemestra and their older sister, Timandra, inhabit at the start of Caitlin George’s “Helen.,” a new twist on the ancient tale in the downstairs theater at La MaMa, in Manhattan’s East Village.Yet for a long time, the bored and restless Helen (Lanxing Fu) is the only one who has a problem with their existence. Timandra (Melissa Coleman-Reed) is placidly happy to have a husband who brings her coffee in the morning and puts socks on her feet when she gets chilly, while Klaitemestra (Grace Bernardo) is so hot for Agamemnon (Jonathan Taikina Taylor) that she can barely contain herself.“That man is melt-in-your-mouth gods-be-damned-licious,” she says. “I love every little speck of him.”The arc of their coupledom — sexual pyrotechnics, cooling affection, grisly end — is the clearest, most affecting element of Violeta Picayo’s incohesive production for the SuperGeographics, presented by La MaMa in association with En Garde Arts.That is unfortunate news for Helen but also for the audience, because this is her story — a comic counter to the legend that she was abducted from her husband, Menelaus (Jackie Rivera), by the handsome Paris (Taylor), whereupon men waged the Trojan War over her. In “Helen.,” the catalyst for her fleeing is her own inchoate yearning.“I want to go on an adventure,” she tells her sisters. “I can’t stay here. I can’t.”Spurred on by Eris (Constance Strickland), the god of discord and the show’s gold-clad narrator, Helen leaves Menelaus and their daughter, meets Paris and takes up with him. (Costumes are by James Schuette.) But the brothers Menelaus and Agamemnon cannot grasp that her absence from home and family is voluntary, the way it might be for a man.“One time right after our daughter was born,” Helen says, “Menelaus disappeared for eight months. Never said anything. Although, to be fair, he did leave a note. ‘Gone out, comma, for glory. Kiss, kiss.’ I had no idea where he was. Then without warning he just rocked up one day and asked what was for dinner.”The struggle here is between a woman’s self-determination and a man’s entitled possessiveness — a world-shaping dynamic rooted in traditional gender roles. This staging mutes that essential resonance, though, with a clownish Menelaus who needs to but never does evoke masculinity. If Menelaus isn’t tethered to some kind of reality, neither is Helen’s stifling marriage. That undermines the urgency of her quest for a fulfilling life.“Helen.,” whose heightened tone sometimes recalls the plays of Sarah Ruhl and Charles Mee, is ultimately overcrowded, and the production largely lacks the ache that George has encoded in the comedy.But it does have that bleakly disillusioned Klaitemestra — and her elegantly choreographed, marriage-ending murder scene.Helen.Through Oct. 29 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘All the Devils’ Review: Patrick Page Investigates Evil

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      In this Off Broadway production, the actor is most fascinated by human fallibility and Shakespeare’s nuanced understanding of it.The events of the world trail us into the theater always. There is no separating a live performance from the moment in which we experience it, not even if the words an actor speaks were written hundreds of years ago.What a powerful time, then, to encounter Shakespeare’s Shylock in Patrick Page’s solo-show investigation of evil, “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain.”Because Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who infamously demands a pound of flesh in “The Merchant of Venice,” is, if a villain, a complicated one: persecuted, spit upon and scorned by Christians for being a Jew. But even in his bitterness, he recognizes that he and they are similar in almost every respect, because they are all human.“And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” he says. “If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”It is impossible, or it was for me, not to think of the horrors in Israel and Gaza with Page embodying Shylock there before us. In that context, Shylock’s words hit hard — yet his argument, like his “ancient grudge” born of humiliations, might have belonged to an ordinary person on either side of that conflict. Such is the prismatic nature of theater, that great instrument of empathy, and such is the capaciousness of Page’s performance.Rest assured, though, that most of “All the Devils” is much less fraught, and a lot of it is fun. Page, whose resonant bass helped make him such an entrancingly sinister Hades in “Hadestown,” practically twinkles here between scenes of malevolence.Directed by Simon Godwin at the DR2 Theater in Manhattan, Page begins the show by channeling a bloodthirsty Lady Macbeth. But when the monologue ends and the lights go up, Page snaps back to himself, looking absolutely delighted.“Do those words frighten you?” he asks, his inviting warmth immediately banishing my fear that “All the Devils” might be a tough-guy exercise like the British actor Steven Berkoff’s “Shakespeare’s Villains,” a solo show that once traversed some of the same terrain.Page is a friendlier guide, charmingly unintimidating and even a little dishy about Shakespeare, tracing the playwright’s game-changing development as a writer of psychologically complex evildoers. Referring to a leg injury he suffered while taking a bow early in the run — Page has been temporarily using a cane — he jocularly blamed the curse of “Macbeth,” a superstition much cherished in the theater.On a set by Arnulfo Maldonado that blends the lush and the austere, “All the Devils” doesn’t always have the precision that it might. As Page slips into role after role, depth sometimes goes missing.But the show, an earlier version of which was presented online in 2021, is smartly structured and frequently fascinating, as in a scene between Othello — honorable, deep-voiced — and Iago, feigning guilelessness, whom Page gives a lighter tone. His Malvolio, more narcissist than villain, is comic, then moving; his Ariel, not villainous at all, is ethereal and excellent.Hamlet’s murderous uncle, Claudius, appears in his most conscience-stricken moment; Angelo, from “Measure for Measure,” in a confrontation that, to my mind at least, is utterly conscience-free.“Who will believe thee, Isabel?” Angelo says to the young woman whom he is trying to power play into having sex with him.Page is interested in the intersection between evil and sociopathy, which he began considering when he first played Iago. But human fallibility — and Shakespeare’s nuanced understanding of it — grips him even more.Quoting the line from “The Tempest” that gives the show its title, Page says: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”At that “here,” he places a hand softly on his heart. Where there is evil, it lies within.All The Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented The VillainThrough Jan. 7 at DR2 Theater, Manhattan; allthedevilsplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      A Play Revisits the Making of ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Mandarin

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      A new Off Broadway production explores how Arthur Miller led a 1983 collaboration in Beijing that brought his work to a new audience.In 1983, Arthur Miller faced a herculean task: staging his 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Death of a Salesman,” in Chinese, with an all-Chinese cast and crew, in Beijing.But questions kept popping up: Would this drama about the American dream translate for a Chinese audience? Would concepts like “traveling salesman” or “life insurance” make sense to a people who had little exposure to either?Rehearsals became exercises in cross-cultural exchange. At one point, Miller instructed his cast to abandon the wigs — he didn’t need them to impersonate Americans.“The way to make this play most American is to make it most Chinese,” he told them, according to his 1984 book about the undertaking, “Salesman in Beijing.” He added, “One of my main motives in coming here is to try to show that there is only one humanity.”The play eventually drew rapturous audiences to dozens of performances in Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore, and was a watershed for U.S.-China cultural relations.Forty years later, the process of staging that production is the subject of the Off Broadway play “Salesman之死,” running through Oct. 28 at the Connelly Theater in the East Village. (The 之死 of the title, pronounced Zhisi, means “death of.”) Directed by Michael Leibenluft and written by Jeremy Tiang, the bilingual play centers on a young Chinese professor, Shen Huihui, who interprets for Miller during rehearsals, trying to translate for the cast ideas like “the American dream.”“What would happen if we did try to find a way to work together, rather than just sticking to our own patch of language and culture?” said the playwright Jeremy Tiang, left, with the director Michael Leibenluft.Ye Fan for The New York TimesBy spotlighting the linguistic and cultural misunderstandings between the American playwright and his Chinese collaborators, the new play explores the challenging dynamics that arose when the two cultures converged.“This play is an example of international cross-cultural collaboration I fear we don’t see enough of,” Tiang said during a video call. “What would happen if we did try to find a way to work together, rather than just sticking to our own patch of language and culture?”Tiang drew on interviews with the original production’s cast and crew, as well as the book in which Miller recounts traveling to China at the invitation of Ying Ruocheng, one of China’s leading actors and directors, and the playwright Cao Yu.China had only recently emerged from its Cultural Revolution — the Maoist movement that targeted intellectuals and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people — and its government had adopted a new foreign policy of openness to the West. Artistic projects once unthinkable under Mao Zedong suddenly become achievable.The playwright said he wrote the script based on interviews with the cast and crew of the original 1983 production as well as Miller’s memoir “Salesman in Beijing.” Ye Fan for The New York TimesThe real-life Shen Huihui was among the first group of students to attend graduate school after the Cultural Revolution. At Peking University, Shen wrote her dissertation about Miller’s books and plays and published one of the first journal articles about Miller in Chinese. When Miller arrived in China to direct “Salesman,” Ying, who translated the script and played the protagonist, Willy Loman, asked Shen to be the rehearsal interpreter.“I was shocked,” Shen said in a recent phone interview. “Why me? There were plenty of people who were professional interpreters, and I was not a professional interpreter.”Meeting Miller was both thrilling and intimidating, said Shen, who now lives and teaches writing in Canada. She recalled a tall, broad-shouldered man who seldom smiled.Rehearsals started in March and by opening night on May 7, Miller and his collaborators had worked through numerous adjustments (and endured many a misunderstanding) on the way to staging this tale about the perils of the American dream.The show is in English and Mandarin, with supertitles for both languages.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThose cross-cultural encounters are the core of “Salesman之死,” which is being produced by Yangtze Repertory Theater in association with Gung Ho Projects; much of the play’s plot centers on the bilingual and often chaotic exchanges within the 1983 rehearsal room.Leibenluft first read “Salesman in Beijing” as an undergraduate studying theater and Chinese at Yale University. He later moved to Shanghai and began directing adaptations of American plays in China.Sandia Ang, center, as the actor Zhu Lin, who played Linda Loman in the 1983 production.Ye Fan for The New York TimesIn 2017, he hosted a workshop to explore possibilities for turning “Salesman in Beijing” into a play. Tiang was among the writers and directors who attended, and he soon started writing a script.The show eventually opted for an all-female cast, which “highlights the women who are part of this history and who are often overlooked,” Leibenluft said on a video call. On a recent Thursday, cast members huddled around a table in a rehearsal room in Midtown Manhattan. (Five of the six actors are immigrants from China and Taiwan and are fluent in English and Chinese.) Sonnie Brown, a Korean American actor who plays Arthur Miller, barked out instructions, while Jo Mei, who plays Shen Huihui, translated them into Chinese. (The show, in English and Mandarin, has supertitles in both languages.)The play is “so hopeful,” Mei said, describing it as a reminder of people’s common humanity: Everyone, whether Willy Loman or a shopkeeper in China, suffers the same disappointments, shares the same dreams.“It says so much about how as different as you think you are, the themes and humanity are so similar and universal,” she said. “The more different or specific, the more universal is what I think Miller and Ying were trying to get at.” More

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      Under the Radar to Return, With New Partners

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      The festival of experimental work is planning a citywide event at multiple venues in January, after the Public Theater declined to fund the 2024 iteration.When the Public Theater announced in June that it had placed the Under the Radar festival on indefinite hiatus, its founder, Mark Russell, did not know if he would be able to find another home for it. The Public cited financial reasons for the decision; other institutions were facing similar struggles. But today Russell, in association with ArKtype, a production company specializing in new work, announced that Under the Radar, New York’s foremost festival of experimental performance, would return in January.In contrast to the central hub that the Public provided, this new iteration, which will run Jan. 5-21, will take place at 10 partner venues throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Some, like Japan Society, will present a single show, and others, such as Lincoln Center and La MaMa, will host two or three. The festival will also co-sponsor a symposium dedicated to the challenges facing arts presenters.To continue the festival, Russell contacted old friends and longtime funders. He approached several theaters and universities in the hopes that they could take it on. But none were able to do so, especially on such short notice. Still, plenty of theaters offered partnerships. Eventually, he and ArKtype settled on this decentralized model, with Russell ceding artistic control to these new collaborators.“I love my programing, but I’ve had 18 years of that,” he said. “Now I have a dozen curators.” He has given himself a new title, festival director, in place of artistic director. “It’s bigger than me,” he said of the festival, which is supported by grants, private donations and contributions from partners. “So we made something bigger.”Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, is one new partner. St. Ann’s had hosted the first Under the Radar Festival, in 2005, and Feldman hurried to support this new version. She also had a work in mind: Luke Murphy’s “Volcano,” a challenging piece of dance theater, told in four 45-minute segments, that takes place inside a glass box.“We felt like the festival would be the right place for it,” she said in a recent phone interview.Julia Mounsey and her collaborator Peter Mills Weiss have presented work at three previous festivals. They were in rehearsals for a new piece last spring when they learned that Under the Radar might not take place. Mounsey had to go for a walk “because I was so upset,” she recalled during a recent phone interview. She said she felt profound relief about the festival’s rebirth. Mabou Mines and Performance Space New York will host Mounsey and Weiss’s new show, “Open Mic Night.”She will miss the centrality of the Public. “It was great for connecting with people and meeting people,” she said. “But there’s also something exciting about it being spread out.”Russell hasn’t given up on the idea of a festival hub. “If I could find a nice large bar in the center of all this, that would be great. But right now, it has to be what it has to be,” he said. “People are going to have to run all around the city, but they’ll be able to get the Under the Radar experience.” More

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      Review: In ‘(pray),’ Nourish Thyself With Song and Dance

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      An exploration of how faith intersects with Black womanhood, through a mix of music, movement, ritual and poetry.“Is this a church?,” a character wonders in nicHi douglas’s “(pray).”The Greenwich House Theater, where this production by Ars Nova and National Black Theater recently opened, certainly looks like a church, complete with (fake) stained-glass windows rrffand seating arranged like rows of pews.But it would be reductive to say “(pray)” is any one thing, because this transcendent, paradoxical work — what douglas calls “a sacred offering” — exists both within a Christian tradition and outside any religious institution. It’s a holy communion of musical interludes, movement, poems, rituals and critical theory investigating how faith intersects with Black womanhood.Upon entering the theater, audience members are asked to don disposable shoe covers as nine Black women alternate between shuffling down the aisles in matching powder-blue church ensembles and fanning themselves while sitting among the audience.They are all called Sister Anna Bertha, because they are variations on the stereotype of the sassy, overdressed Black church lady (playful costume design by DeShon Elem).Over 75 minutes, these women run through a 17-part liturgy accompanied by a pianist (Darnell White) and singer (S T A R R Busby, whose resonant voice leads the joyous gospel numbers). At one corner of this church stands a partially obscured forest. A silent spirit in white occasionally dances out from this surreal fantasy space (scenic design by dots), flitting around in fluid swells of movement. This is the Ancestor (Satori Folkes-Stone, magnetic), who also performs offstage rituals as part of the service. Another young woman, called Free (a less graceful Amara Granderson), is the one wondering whether this is a church, and if she even belongs here.Like “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” by Aleshea Harris, “(pray),” which douglas has nimbly written, choreographed and directed, is theater that demands the audience step into a shared experience of Blackness. In these experimental works, theater begins and ends in community.Thus, douglas’s script aims to make faith more accessible via coy translations: “ghost” becomes “most,” for example, and “hallelujah” is “yahleloo.” The similar sounding words with the music (composed by Busby and JJJJJerome Ellis) trick the ear into fluency, so that a prayer that says “O, abundance! May I meet you. May I know you,” feels as true and traditional as, say, the Apostles’ Creed.The Sisters deliver improvised gossip and judgmental comments, sometimes, hilariously, at the audience’s expense. The cohesiveness of their vocals and group movements (a stunning mélange of styles, including hip-hop and Afro-Cuban) recalls the deft cast of performers in Ars Nova’s 2022 hit by Heather Christian, “Oratorio for Living Things.” Each Sister sings with her own textured affect, so the psalms they perform feel creased, pleated or smoothed over like fabric. Tina Fabrique’s elastic bellows electrify “A Song (For to Ease My Troubled Mind).” Another Sister Anna (Ariel Kayla Blackwood) spits Noname lyrics atop a muscular beat. (Mikaal Sulaiman’s ethereal sound design lifts the voices higher.)A whole syllabus of thinkers and artists have inspired (and are referenced in) douglas’s script, including the poets Tyehimba Jess and Raych Jackson. But douglas’s writing sometimes pales in comparison, lacking the same polish and panache. And there are some missed notes: “(pray)” feels more anchored within the distant and recent past, lacking firmer context in the present, and despite the production’s inclusive language around gender, queerness is only occasionally alluded to. The history of race-based attacks on Black churches, like the 1963 Birmingham bombing and the 2015 Charleston shooting, is artfully hinted at with the haunting sound of a helicopter overhead, but feels like a footnote.So the question remains: Is this a church? Well, “(pray)” offers a congregation of believers in God but, more essentially, in the sanctity of Black women. So, let’s call this a house of song and praise — yahleloo.(pray)Through Oct. 28 at Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan. arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      ‘The Refuge Plays’ Review: A Surreal Family Saga on the Homestead

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      A family in exile contends with its future, and its ghosts, in Nathan Alan Davis’s new Off Broadway play starring Nicole Ari Parker.The unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” retreats, after an alienating odyssey through the South and Harlem, to live in a secret cellar. Underground is both an escape from oppression and a sanctuary where he can see himself on his own terms.Ellison’s 1952 novel is like gospel to the eldest matriarch in “The Refuge Plays” by the playwright Nathan Alan Davis. “Gotta make your own world in this world,” says Early (Nicole Ari Parker), a great-grandmother homesteading with her family. She can still chop firewood and hunt squirrels with a hammer, but when we first meet Early in this keen but unwieldy family saga, opening Wednesday at the Laura Pels Theater, her daily life has evolved beyond the need for such primal skills.Four generations of Early’s family are living together in the present-day Illinois wilderness, sharing a cabin built years ago by Early and her husband, Crazy Eddie (Daniel J. Watts). The too-small sofa and ratty armchair draped with quilts and crochet (the persuasively salvaged set is by Arnulfo Maldonado) indicate a modest home where her relatives choose to live out of kinship rather than necessity.Early’s great-grandson, Ha-Ha (J.J. Wynder), is the purest product of this social experiment: a 17-year-old who is deferential, bookish and comically naïve about girls. (Many of Davis’s character names are freighted with exaggerated symbolism.) Ha-Ha’s mother, Joy (Ngozi Anyanwu), tried striking out on her own when she was younger, but eventually returned. And Joy’s mother, Gail (Jessica Frances Dukes), the wife of Early’s deceased son, Walking Man, is the functional head of the household, though not for long: The spirit of Walking Man (Jon Michael Hill), a routine and welcome visitor, has just foretold her imminent death.Davis’s grand ambitions for “The Refuge Plays” are indicated by its running time — three hours and 20 minutes, with two intermissions — and by a title that suggests its three parts may not exactly cohere. The action rewinds to the past, revealing what drove Early into the woods, why others followed and what binds them together. (“If you don’t need me, leave me,” Early tells Walking Man.) Each act operates in a different mode: Sitcom conventions play out in the first (with Early as the armchair curmudgeon); surreal and Shakespearean elements dominate the second (with ghosts who incite an Oedipal revenge plot); and the third imagines a meet-cute in exile.Daniel J. Watts and Parker play a young couple who meet-cute in exile in an earlier section of the show.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis Roundabout Theater Company production, directed by Patricia McGregor and presented in association with New York Theater Workshop (where McGregor is the artistic director), benefits tremendously from bold interpretations of Davis’s characters. McGregor accentuates the humor Davis weaves throughout, and even mines more from between the lines, giving the production a sustained momentum. But the pace lags when Davis’s airy lyricism occasionally tips toward the sentimental, as in the heavy-handed second act. Early, for example, insists she has cried a nearby river with her tears.Parker (“And Just Like That …”) has an innate gentility that would seem an odd match for Early’s wild fate, but there is frisson in the juxtaposition and Parker lends Early a poised ferocity. Her flinty exterior is a formidable match for Eddie, the World War II vet who becomes her husband. Slightly sideways and nursing his own wounds, he’s a philosophical jester (Watts can land punchlines with the whites of his eyes) and proof that civilization inflicts violence in many forms.“The Refuge Plays” is populated with gifted storytellers, whose language is sticky with associations (like “if all your worries was ice cream” that melted at death’s door), and who can clearly see the ills of the outside world from the safe distance of their own. They conceive their identities in relation to one another, reflecting an organic sense of human responsibility, yet rib and curse one another like the members of any family would.Davis, whose speculative 2016 drama, “Nat Turner in Jerusalem,” was also produced by New York Theater Workshop, takes a sweeping view of Black life while isolating his characters from the social contexts and systems that would otherwise shape them. Some, like Early and Eddie, have their memories to contend with, while Walking Man, who was born in the woods, encounters human injustice from an absurd angle (beneath a heifer he tries to slaughter with a switchblade).In an attempt to imagine alternative ways of being, the playwright has smashed existing artistic forms and created new ones along the way. The result is provocative but messy: While the three acts interlock, they don’t propel each other forward, and Davis’s surfeit of ideas ultimately comes at the expense of a dramatic throughline. But cumbersome as it is, “The Refuge Plays” suggests the potential for stories to exceed the world’s limitations. Ellison would have to agree.The Refuge PlaysThrough Nov. 12 at Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 3 hours 20 minutes. More