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      ‘Pal Joey’ Review: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildering

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      Joey is still a heel in this major revision of the 1940 antihero musical, but he’s now a Black artist trying to find his true voice.It’s not often that the standout star of a show is its music supervisor, arranger or orchestrator, but in the gala presentation of “Pal Joey” at New York City Center through Sunday, all three are one man, Daryl Waters. More than the authors of the ambitious, bewildering revival’s new book, Waters, who has served similar roles on musicals as varied as “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” “After Midnight,” “The Cher Show” and “New York, New York,” makes a clear case in beautiful sound for its investigation into the melting pot of American music.That the rest of the revival (really a new creature, made from spare parts) is more suggestive than convincing is no crime; there has never been a satisfactory “Pal Joey.” Though the 1940 original featured some soon-to-be standards by Rodgers and Hart — “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” chief among them — its book by John O’Hara, based on his epistolary novel and New Yorker stories, didn’t match them in tone or dramatic serviceability.Back then, the problem was thought to be the nature of Joey himself, a greasy heel trying to scheme his way from itinerant crooner to supper club smoothie. Along the way he picked up and discarded an innocent named Linda English, traded sex for financial support with a socialite named Vera Simpson and generally ruined everything he touched with his grifty hands. The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson concluded that the show was distasteful because you couldn’t “draw sweet water from a foul well.”But the rise and triumph of the antihero show, with protagonists like J. Pierrepont Finch, Sweeney Todd and Evan Hansen, has since proved such characters ripe for musicalization. The problem faced by the various would-be saviors of “Pal Joey” — there were Broadway revivals in 1952, 1963, 1976 and 2008 — is rather what new throughline to impose and how to make the best use of its songs.In choosing to alter the racial frame of the story, the current version’s adapters, Richard LaGravenese and Daniel Koa Beaty, have made a powerful and promising intervention. Their Joey (Ephraim Sykes) is Black, with the tortured soul of a true artist. The Chicago club in which he sings is now a Black establishment, run by Lucille Wallace (Loretta Devine), a former star of Harlem nightspots. Linda (Aisha Jackson) is a Black singer, too, but one who prefers radio to live performance so as to be “judged by what people hear, not by what they see.”Sykes as Joey and Elizabeth Stanley as the socialite Vera Simpson, who financially supports Joey.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat is all worth exploring, and sometimes succeeds in snapping the tired old setups into vivid life. Because Vera (Elizabeth Stanley) is still white, her dalliance with Joey takes on new overtones and evokes new dangers. Though Joey remains acquisitive of both women and wealth, and Sykes, a Tony nominee for “Ain’t Too Proud,” is excellent at making his cunning charismatic, he is no longer shallow. Instead he’s deep, trying to find a way to render his true voice in a white world. Ancestral spirits who, according to the script, represent “soul, authenticity, power and freedom,” encourage him through percussive sound and movement; the often-astonishing choreography, part tap, part stomp, part African dance, is by Savion Glover.Interesting as all this is, or could be with further time and elaboration, race was the wrong problem to solve in “Pal Joey.” What really never worked, and still does not, is the way the songs hang with the story. Innovators though they were, Rodgers and Hart had only just begun to explore, as Rodgers would continue to do much more deeply with Oscar Hammerstein II, how to make song an expression of narrative itself, not just a character sketch or appliquéd decoration. In particular, Hart’s delightful lyrics (“I’m vexed again./Perplexed again./Thank God I can be oversexed again”) kept pulling focus from the show’s heart of darkness with their sparky wit.The new “Pal Joey” doubles down on that problem. Not counting two reprises, it features all or parts of 21 songs, only seven of which were written for “Pal Joey.” (Another eight of the originals were cut.) Because the added songs come from a variety of other shows, mostly “The Boys From Syracuse” and “Babes in Arms,” these are naturally even more decorative and disengaged than the originals. It does nothing to turn the vanishingly minor Melba Snyder — a society reporter who sings (and strips to) the great but obviously shoehorned “Zip” — into Melvin Snyder (Brooks Ashmanskas), who bravely does the same. You still have no idea why the character is there.Sykes, Aisha Jackson and ensemble members in the gala production, which features Savion Glover’s often-astonishing choreography.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn the other hand, the giant and varied new tunestack — including standards like “Where or When,” “My Funny Valentine” and “Blue Moon” — gives Waters some gorgeous raw material to work with. It’s a mystery to me how he creates so many conflicting kinds of sound, representing different strands of American popular music, from just four players onstage (including the devastating trumpeter Alphonso Horne) and five offstage. Sometimes the original songs are barely recognizable in their new clothing; at other times they have the uncanny familiarity of a post-facelift face that makes you want to say: You look different.Satisfying as that then-and-now duality is in theory, it adds to a rather large list of confusing and incomplete choices overall. What does it mean that Vera almost outdoes the Black characters in the use of scat singing and melismatic riffs? (Stanley is pushing way too hard.) Why does the relationship between Vera and Joey provoke racist threats while Lucille’s with a white gangster (Jeb Brown) provokes nothing but laughs? (Devine is a welcome source of humor and good spirits in the otherwise nearly humorless production.) Why is Linda barely integrated into the action, performing most of her songs (rendered modestly by Jackson) in the no-context of a recording booth?And though the roughness of the sound (many lyrics were unintelligible as of Wednesday night) and the longueurs of the staging (by Tony Goldwyn and, again, Glover) can be written off to the usual City Center problem of under-rehearsal, a show with such evidently large ambitions — Emilio Sosa’s glamorous early-1940s costumes, a monumental under-the-el set by Derek McLane, lit moodily by Jon Goldman — needs to be more than intriguing. It needs to be coherent.You can certainly count on coherence from the songs themselves, no matter how randomly they sometimes seem to have been placed in one Rodgers and Hart show instead of another. Even completely shorn of plot relevance, they are evergreen for a reason. Though this “Pal Joey” rightfully questions the appropriation of Black voices in American popular song — referring to the King of Jazz, Paul Whiteman, and the King of Swing, Benny Goodman, Joey says, “Awful lot of Kings out there playing our music” — it’s strange to build that argument on the back of these standards. If they’re the problem, why celebrate them, and make them sound so good in the process?Pal JoeyThrough Nov. 5 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      ‘I’m Still Alive’: Sean Young Takes the Stage in ‘Ode to the Wasp Woman’

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      “I walk into a show and everybody’s kind of a little afraid. Then I hear, ‘Oh, but you’re so nice,’” the actress said of her Hollywood baggage.Manhattan has dressing rooms dingier than the one in the basement of the Actors Temple Theater. But not many. Sean Young, curled into a folding chair atop peeling linoleum tiles with a smudged mirror behind her, claimed not to mind.“I don’t have the disease of snobbery,” she said on a late October morning. “I have an incredibly high tolerance for dirty dressing rooms, you know what I mean? I like slumming it.”Young was in rehearsal blacks — leggings, a muscle tee, sneakers — her hair half up. She was two weeks out from the first preview of “Ode to the Wasp Woman,” which is scheduled to open Nov. 9 and run through Jan. 31. Written and directed by Rider McDowell, the play details the lurid, untimely deaths of four Hollywood has-beens and barely-weres. Young, in her New York stage debut, plays Susan Cabot, a B-movie actress whose titles include “The Wasp Woman.” Cabot was beaten to death in 1986 by her 22-year-old son.Young has had her own tragedies. “But here’s the good part of the story,” she cheerfully said. “I didn’t end up damaged.”A movie star in the 1980s (“Dune,” “Blade Runner,” “No Way Out”), Young saw her career derailed by the mid-1990s. She refused to play certain Hollywood games. In past interviews, she has claimed that after rejecting the advances of colleagues, including the actor and director Warren Beatty, she was dropped from projects. (A representative for Beatty denied this.) She played other games too enthusiastically, as when she showed up on the Warner Bros. set dressed as Catwoman, angling for a role, or tried to crash an Oscars party.James Woods, who starred with Young in the 1988 film “The Boost,” filed a $2 million civil suit accusing her of stalking behavior. Though that suit was eventually settled out of court, with Woods required to pay all of Young’s legal fees, Hollywood had already branded her as volatile, difficult, even crazy. Which explains a slide toward TV movies and guest spots. She also appeared on “Celebrity Rehab” for alcohol abuse.McDowell, the “Ode to the Wasp Woman” playwright and director, knew about what he referred to in a recent phone interview as Young’s “past antics,” but he had wanted a well-known actress of Cabot’s age. Young fit that bill. He had found rehearsing with her pleasant.“She’s very lighthearted,” he said. “There’s no Hollywood behavior.”In that grim dressing room, her voice was throatier, her features no longer those of an ingénue. But at 63, Young still has the fidgety electricity and easy glamour that made her indelible in those early screen roles. On a break from rehearsal, she discussed her current role and her early career. (She refers to films, series and plays indiscriminately as “shows.”) These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Young and her castmates during rehearsals at the Actors Temple Theater in Manhattan. She plays a B-movie actress whose son beat her to death.Ye Fan for The New York TimesWhat was the first decade of your career like?I look at the first 10 years of my career as somewhat tragic, actually, because my mother — who has passed away, so I can say whatever I want — inserted herself into my career. What she really wanted was to collect 10 percent and not have to work too hard. By 28, I basically divorced her. I said, “I’m not doing this anymore. I’m sorry.” Those first years were messed up, in terms of career strategy. If I’d had a better manager, I would have had more of a running start. I don’t feel like the rest of my career was as great.What happened? It began so well and then it fell off a cliff.Part of that cliff was when James Woods accused me of stalking him. Then I moved to Sedona. And I said you can all go [expletive] yourselves. So I created part of that cliff.That generated a rumor, for a while, that you were crazy.Oh, that still floats! I walk into a show and everybody’s kind of a little afraid. Then I hear, “Oh, but you’re so nice.” Believe me, that was a pain in my ass. I did not like having to prove myself over and over and over again. This is what I’ve taught my sons: Mommy was right, but it didn’t do me any good. Being right is not actually your best play. Your self-preservation is actually more important than being right. Do you remember when I got fired by Warren Beatty?From “Dick Tracy”? Yes.I worked a week on that show. At the end of one day, he’s dropping me off at the Sheraton. He walks around the car. Mr. Gentleman opens the door. I’m getting out and he grabs my ears, trying to pull me into a kiss. I go, “What the [expletive] are you doing?” I mean, I yell at him. And he goes, “Well, I was just testing you.” I lean into him and I say, “Well, OK, are you clear now? That I’m not here to [expletive] you? I’m just here to do this part. Do you need to test me anymore?” Several days after that, I get fired. They put out in the papers “artistic differences.” Like I was the problem. That really was the definitive cliff. My joke now is I should have just said, “I’d love to [expletive]. I’m just busy right now.”Was there a culture of abuse in 1980s Hollywood?I don’t think there’s ever been a time in Hollywood where there wasn’t abuse. But a feature of the ’80s is that we were really overpaid. There was also a cocaine habit that pervaded, and that could lead to some very dramatic circumstances.Have things improved?I’m not so sure. I don’t think there’s any less egotism or narcissism. It’s funny. You see leading men or sometimes leading women, they turn. They lose their humility. They lose their sense of humor. They lose their gratitude. Those were things I was very lucky to hang on to.I’ve read that you’re a Trump supporter. He’s someone who has been accused of abuse. How do you square that?Until you’ve actually been red-pilled, until you’ve actually gotten some proof or done enough research or really taken a look at what modern life is, then you’re still eating the propaganda. I believe that the reason Trump has gotten the treatment he’s gotten is because he’s a direct threat to permanent Washington, D.C. I don’t care what kind of a person he is. What I care about is that he put a border on the southern part of our country. That’s the priority I feel.Young said her character in the play has “some damage to deal with. But it is also an opportunity to purge whatever’s there of your own.” Ye Fan for The New York TimesSo it matters less to you who he is than what he might be able to achieve?We have no way to really verify it. If you’re going on the assumption that [abuse] actually happened, you also have to ask yourself why this woman’s [expletive] was right there to be grabbed.But so many women have come forward.That’s why it’s done that way. Because that makes it much more believable. Even going on the assumption that maybe it is true, and I feel very bad that that could be the case, it’s still Trump coming in and being a very humongous threat to a part of the Washington, D.C., culture that actually, in my view, needs to be completely wiped out. That’s the priority I feel.What drew you to this play?I know this sounds silly, but actors just like to work. I can do anything. So when something comes my way now it’s like, thank you very much.Had you heard of Susan Cabot before this?I had heard of “The Wasp Woman,” although I never had seen it. For this, I watched it all the way through. It’s pretty cheesy, but I wanted to make sure I knew who she was. She had a great face.Do you think Susan Cabot is a tragic figure?Well, her son murdered her. That’s tragic. That’s at the top of the list. But her dad left her before her first birthday, and her mother was placed in an insane asylum. Show business might have been the thing that offered her any self-confidence. That was the one thing that had meaning for her. Maybe her career was the one moment where she might have felt like, I’m somebody. There’s a line in the script: “I came from nothing. From less than nothing where people laughed at my dreams.” So she’s pretty messed up.She didn’t have the career she wanted.There’s more than just her in this business who can say that. The way in for me, with every part, is I say: What am I going to learn by doing this? And is there anything about the role that I wouldn’t want to deal with? There was a feeling with Susan that there was going to be some damage to deal with. But it is also an opportunity to purge whatever’s there of your own. And when you purge something, it doesn’t haunt you anymore. You cry yourself out, and you really don’t need to cry anymore. You’ve gone to that place of discomfort and it didn’t kill you. I’m still alive. More

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      ‘Poor Yella Rednecks’ Review: A Writer’s Origin Story Remixes Conventions

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      Qui Nguyen’s crowd-tickling comedy about a Vietnamese family in Arkansas mixes hip-hop and martial arts with soapy twists and turns.The playwright Qui Nguyen has made a career of imagining marginalized people as heroic leads. That includes his parents, who emigrated from Vietnam and met in an Arkansas refugee camp, a story Nguyen chronicled in his raunchy rom-com-style play “Vietgone.”“Poor Yella Rednecks,” which opened Wednesday in a rollicking, comic book-inspired production at New York City Center, picks up five years later, in 1980, when their marriage hits the rocks and the playwright is a 5-year-old struggling to learn English.Commissioned by Manhattan Theater Club and South Coast Repertory, where it premiered in 2019, “Poor Yella Rednecks” functions as the playwright’s own superhero origin story: Nguyen has become not only a wizard of language and form, but also an expert M.C., subverting and remixing conventions to confront abiding questions about displacement and assimilation. How can immigrants become legible to the American-born generations of their own families, and to audiences who are so white, the playwright’s mother says, that they resemble a Fleetwood Mac concert?Nguyen’s answer is an expletive-filled fusion of hip-hop and martial arts with the soapy twists and turns of addictive serial television. Under the wry and nimble direction of May Adrales, “Poor Yella Rednecks” is a crowd-tickling comedy that squashes preconceptions in order to place hearts in a vise grip.Framed as recollections Nguyen gathered from his mother, Tong, in 2015, the show begins with the playwright (portrayed onstage as a middle-aged man by Jon Norman Schneider) interviewing Tong (a dynamite Maureen Sebastian), who speaks with a pinched face and a thick accent. But Tong soon demands to have her son’s “pot and a mouth” style of talking in the play he is writing, and for white characters to sound the way she hears them, as a garble of slang and empty signifiers (so he has them squawk exclamations like “Yeehaw!” or “Mitch McConnell!”). From then on, we hear Nguyen’s family talk in frank, and often crass, English when they are understood to be speaking Vietnamese. (Nguyen’s parents were heartbroken when they met, Tong says, “so we comforted each other with our crotches.”)Though his family’s history is rooted in upheaval and loss, Qui Nguyen presents it with a delicate balance of over-the-top humor and unforced sincerity, our critic writes.Richard Termine for The New York TimesRewind 35 years, and Tong tears away her granny garb (thrifty southwestern costumes designed by Valérie Thérèse Bart) to play a younger version of herself. Tong and the playwright’s father, Quang (Ben Levin), who looks like a matinee idol but can’t find work, are nearly broke and are each being drawn back into previous relationships. Tong, a waitress at a diner, partly blames her mother, Huong (a dry-as-gin Samantha Quan), for the difficulty that her son, known as Little Man and represented by a wide-eyed puppet, faces fitting in at school. Huong, who only speaks Vietnamese, worries that learning to talk like his peers will turn Little Man (endearingly designed by David Valentine and maneuvered by Schneider) into a stranger.As in “Vietgone,” “Poor Yella Rednecks” shows Nguyen’s onstage parents expressing their most vehement feelings, and occasional exposition, in verse, rapping over uncomplicated beats composed here by Shane Rettig, who also designed the game show-like sound. (“Cuz I’m more than just pretty, my brain is damn witty,” Tong raps. “Gimme one hot second Imma run this city.”) For the title song, Nguyen borrows a familiar declaration about the work ethic of immigrants from the musical “Hamilton,” though his own less sophisticated lyrics, which are better at illuminating conflict than romance, may not exactly hold up in comparison.Though rooted in upheaval and tragic loss, Nguyen’s family history is presented with a delicate balance of over-the-top humor and unforced sincerity. Jon Hoche, who plays Quang’s best friend Nhan, is a boisterous bro with a soft underbelly, while Paco Tolson is almost pitifully hapless as Bobby, Tong’s bumbling white ex. Tolson also plays the godfather of Marvel, Stan Lee, whose presence as a sporadic narrator adds to the show’s graphic-novel aesthetic; the set by Tim Mackabee spells out “yella” in big, rotating letters, lit in emphatic color by Lap Chi Chu.For all of its surprises, including action sequences I won’t spoil here, the play falters only when it tips into obviously earnest territory. Nguyen doesn’t need a surrogate to detail his intent; the story soars on its own.Poor Yella RednecksThrough Nov. 26 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Merry Me’ Review: A Loopy Sex Comedy Focused on Female Pleasure

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      Hansol Jung’s new play riffs on Greek dramas, the Restoration comedy “The Country Wife” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.”On an imaginary island off the coast of some enemy state that exists only in fantasy, a navy is becalmed. A blackout is to blame, but it’s the good kind of blackout — the kind that stops a war in its tracks.Still, it means the phones aren’t working. So when Pvt. Willy Memnon’s mother calls him up from elsewhere on the base camp, she does it the analog way: on a paper cup attached to a string.“William Iphigenio Memnon,” she says, using his full name because she means business, “pick up the cup, I need to ask you something.”Unusual middle name, no? Then again, his father is Gen. Aga Memnon, and his mother is Mrs. Memnon, a.k.a. Clytemnestra. And in Hansol Jung’s delightfully loopy sex comedy, “Merry Me,” it matters not a whit that navies don’t tend to have generals and privates, or that the Clytemnestra we know from ancient Greek drama, mother to the sacrificed Iphigenia, stays at home when her Agamemnon goes off to the Trojan War.In “Merry Me,” directed by Leigh Silverman at New York Theater Workshop, Clytemnestra (Cindy Cheung) tags along, and becomes one of quite a few women to fall for the seductive charms of Lt. Shane Horne (Esco Jouléy), Jung’s libidinous heroine. Another is Willy’s frustrated wife, Sapph (Nicole Villamil) — as in Sappho, and yes she writes poetry.From left, Cindy Cheung, Shaunette Renée Wilson and David Ryan Smith in Jung’s refreshingly playful mash-up, directed by Leigh Silverman. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesVirtuosic though Shane is at giving sexual pleasure, she is having trouble with her own orgasms, which for reasons best known to her she refers to as her “merries.”“Can we not call it that?” her psychiatrist, Jess O’Nope (Marinda Anderson), requests, not unreasonably.Shane, just out of solitary confinement “for having sexed up the general’s wife,” has a plan to hatch, and she needs Jess’s help — Aeschylus and Euripides being merely two of the sources that Jung (“Wolf Play”) is riffing on in this frolic through the stacks.She borrows, too, from William Wycherley’s notoriously randy Restoration comedy “The Country Wife.” Its hero, Horner, spreads a rumor of his own impotence so he can proceed with his many liaisons unsuspected. The version of that in “Merry Me” involves Jess telling everyone that Shane has turned straight.This lie is handy for fending off General Memnon (David Ryan Smith), who wants Shane “court marshaled for her heretically heterophobic courting habits.” It also ensures her freedom to woo women, with Sapph soon topping the list. Except that the pseudo-enlightened Willy (Ryan Spahn) is nowhere near as gullible as his father.It’s a ridiculous, convoluted plot, with only a tenuous logic in its connection to Shane’s orgasmic quest, but there is a gleeful, almost punchy abandon to this play’s dedication to queer female pleasure, embrace of bawdy fun and relish of theatrical in-jokes.With shout-outs to Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Thornton Wilder, “Merry Me” pilfers successfully from Shakespeare (when Sapph dons a mannish disguise that Shane sees right through) and from Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” (which lends a glamorous, comic, sexually skilled Angel, played by Shaunette Renée Wilson). If such a mash-up smacks slightly of drama school, “Merry Me” also has a refreshingly playful spirit that established artists sometimes lose out in the world.Rachel Hauck’s set gives an angel’s-eye view of the base camp, with rows of miniature tents arrayed on a vertical backdrop, and in fact the Angel and her winged colleagues are much concerned with goings-on there. Godlike, they caused the blackout that has paused the war. To lift it, they demand a sacrifice — and in this feminist retelling, that’s not going to be anybody’s daughter.Pvt. Willy Memnon, they’re looking at you.Merry MeThrough Nov. 19 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Searching for Brian Friel, and His Mythical Ballybeg

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      Irish Repertory Theater’s season-long survey of the playwright’s work prompted our reporter to seek out the Irish town that inspired the imaginary site of so many of his plays.Up a steep and grassy windblown hill, in the top row of what’s known as the new graveyard, the playwright Brian Friel lies buried under a dark, glossy slab etched with an image of a St. Brigid’s cross, a traditional Irish symbol woven from rushes.This little cemetery in a remote northwest corner of Ireland has a sweeping view of valley, hills and tiny town: Glenties, County Donegal, which in a way is a curious choice for Friel’s final resting place. It isn’t where he was born, in 1929; that was Omagh, across the nearby border with Northern Ireland. It isn’t where he died, in 2015; that was Greencastle, quite a bit farther north in County Donegal, on the sea.But it is, arguably, a place he spent a lot of time in his head. Glenties (population 927 in 2022) is his mother’s hometown, where he would go during childhood summers. Not a son of the town but a grandson, he became, as the New York Times critic Mel Gussow asserted in a 1991 profile, “a writer on a level with Sean O’Casey and John Millington Synge,” two of the most esteemed Irish playwrights in the canon.What claim to fame Glenties has, and what brush with Hollywood, is because of Friel. In his writing, he transformed it into a place called Ballybeg: the site of many of his plays, including the most famous, “Dancing at Lughnasa” (1990), which is inspired by his mother and aunts, and dedicated “In memory of those five brave Glenties women.”At St. Connell’s Museum, a homely repository of area history around the corner from Main Street, material about Friel includes news clippings of his funeral and old show posters.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe grave of the Irish playwright Brian Friel overlooks the western Irish town of Glenties.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesOff Broadway this season, Irish Repertory Theater’s Friel Project will revive three of his Ballybeg plays, starting with “Translations” (1980), about a 19th-century British colonialist project to Anglicize Ireland, directed by the Tony Award winner Doug Hughes and running through Dec. 3. It will be followed in January by “Aristocrats” (1979), set amid a once-grand Catholic family in Chekhovian decline, directed by Charlotte Moore, Irish Rep’s artistic director; and in March by “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” (1964), in which a young man prepares to leave Ballybeg for the United States, directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, Irish Rep’s producing director.After Friel died, the critic Michael Billington called him “the finest Irish dramatist of his generation,” citing a body of work that examined “exile and emigration, the political Troubles of Northern Ireland [and] the subjective nature of memory.” All of it, he pronounced, was “bound together by his passion for language, his belief in the ritualistic nature of theater and his breadth of understanding.”In a phone interview, O’Reilly said that “if there was such a thing as a poet laureate of the Irish Rep, it would be Brian Friel”: an intellectually curious, deeply empathetic playwright who probed the makeup of Irish identity. As profoundly as Friel fathomed small-town Irish life, he also recognized the urge to escape it — or in O’Reilly’s words: “Let me get the hell out.”“In so many of his plays, it’s about the departure from it and the need to break beyond it,” said O’Reilly, who was 19 when he left his hometown, even tinier than Glenties, in County Cavan.A current view of Main Street, which is pocked with vacant storefronts.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesA photograph on display at St. Connell’s Museum shows Main Street in 1912.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesOf course, the true Ballybeg — whose name in Irish, Baile Beag, means “small town” — exists only in Friel’s plays. Still, you can hear echoes of Glenties in those plays, and echoes of those plays in Glenties.And if you go there looking for him, as I did in late September, you will find him — even if the post office where his mother is said to have worked is long gone, succeeded by a branch tucked efficiently inside the Costcutter supermarket, on an unbusy Main Street pocked with vacant storefronts.I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast at one end of the road, near the electric vehicle charging point that communicates loud and clear that Glenties is a 21st-century town. At the other is a hotel whose website commemorates the occasion, 25 years ago, when Meryl Streep, star of the film adaptation of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” slept there “on the night of the local premiere.” In between, a creative arts center and a gift shop both have Lughnasa — “the feast day of the pagan god, Lugh,” as the narrator of Friel’s play explains, and a harvest festival — in their names.With a dozen Broadway productions in his lifetime, most of them Ballybeg plays (including “Faith Healer,” from 1979, in which a pivotal, sinister event occurs on the outskirts of town), Friel was not given to sentimentalizing rusticity.A peat bog in the hills and mountains surrounding the town.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesBut outsiders have a tendency in that direction, as a Ballybeg woman says in Friel’s comedy “The Communication Cord” (1982): “You know the way strangers get queer notions about a place like this; and foreigners is the worst.”Yet when a visitor remarks, in “Give Me Your Answer, Do!” (1997), “The view up that valley is breathtaking,” he could easily be talking about Glenties, whose name in Irish, Na Gleannta, means “the glens.”The town has stunning vistas of the Blue Stack Mountains that hem it in — and make driving there from Dublin, as I did, an adventure, fraught with the risk of toppling off some narrow, winding road into a patch of gorgeous scenery.Phillip Rodgers, owner of Roddy’s Bar, shares a drink with his patrons.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesA 2008 photo of the “The Laurels,” the old family home where Friel’s grandparents, mother and aunts once lived. Mary Ita BoyleA local resident sells bread at a weekly street market.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesFOR MORE THAN 50 YEARS, starting in the 1890s, a railway stopped in Glenties. I learned that at St. Connell’s Museum, a homely repository of area history just around the corner from Main Street. Its collection of Friel material tends toward news clippings (more Meryl) and old show posters (like the one that informs you that both Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea were in the original cast of “Translations,” in Derry).There is also the text of a cheeky piece that Friel wrote for The Irish Times in 1959, ribbing Glenties for its second consecutive win of the national Tidy Towns contest. “My mother’s people were MacLoones,” he notes, wryly claiming “direct descent” from that “mecca of tidiness.”An early-20th-century photograph at St. Connell’s Museum shows a train traveling in western Ireland.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe family home was not far from where the railway station used to be, where Friel’s grandfather was the station master.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe cottage where the family lived, the home of the impecunious sisters who inspired “Dancing at Lughnasa,” is in Glenties — close to where the railway station used to be, where Friel’s grandfather had been the station master. The Brian Friel Trust, which reportedly has plans for a cultural center elsewhere in town, owns the house.From the road, the path to the old family home passes under a low canopy of branches. Then, in a clearing, there it is, looking grimy and forlorn, with moss-carpeted stairs and a gold-lettered plaque beside the door. “‘The Laurels,’” it says, which is the house’s name. “Unveiled by Brian Friel, Meryl Streep and Sophie Thompson. 24th September 1998.”Sheep are free to graze the rolling hills.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesAnd this is where the soft glow of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” a memory play set in imaginary Ballybeg in 1936, collides hard with a reality that is too earthbound, too bleak, too untouched by poetry. But also — maybe because of the plaque, and the gloom — more like an exhibit than a remnant of history.“Translations” (in which, somewhat mind-bendingly, a character from Ballybeg mentions Glenties in conversation) takes place a century earlier, in 1833, as the British are mapping all of Ireland and rewriting every Irish place name into English. It’s more than a decade before the Great Famine, but jobs are scarce — a theme that runs through Friel’s plays — and a fear of blighted crops is making some locals nervous.“Sweet God,” another scoffs in response, “did the potatoes ever fail in Baile Beag? Well, did they ever — ever? Never!”If you go simply by the sign on Main Street in Glenties, with its arrow pointing vaguely north, you will never find the town’s famine graveyard. If you consult Google Maps, it will tell you that the place is “temporarily closed.” Not so.The famine graveyard has a single marker, inscribed in Irish: a 20th-century monument to the dead buried there beginning in 1846. That’s the year after the failure of potato crops started the Great Famine.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesMichael, who now lives in Australia, was visiting family in Glenties. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesWhen I pulled up behind the group of houses where my GPS said it was, a man in a purple sweater instantly emerged to find out why I was there. Then he moved a metal barricade away from the graveyard entrance — “It’s just a makeshift thing,” he said — and let me in. The bright green grass was so soft under my feet that I said so, and the man said it probably should have been farmland all those years ago. Down the hill, sheep were grazing.The graveyard has only a single marker, inscribed in Irish: a 20th-century monument to the dead buried there beginning in 1846. That’s the year after the failure of potato crops started the Great Famine, making poverty a scourge in rural Ireland. Sickness spread among the desperate poor at the Glenties workhouse. Inmates who perished were interred out back.So much covered-over misery, such an alluringly pastoral setting: This felt like Friel to me.I got back in the car and headed to the Atlantic Ocean, about eight miles away, where the island of Inishkeel and its medieval monastic ruins lie not far across the water from Narin/Portnoo Beach. At low tide, you can walk to it on an exposed sandbar, but you will need to keep careful watch of the time if you don’t want to get trapped there, and heed a sign, fixed to a gate on the island, that warns, surreally: “Beware of the bull.” (I saw no bull.)The island of Inisheel in the distance. A sandbar that is exposed during low tide connects Narin/Portnoo Beach and Inishkeel.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThere is a wildness and a timelessness to Inishkeel. A rugged desolation, too, even though all you have to do is face the far shore to see the houses on the mainland, and wind turbines spinning in the hills beyond: a side-by-side coexistence of the eerie ancient and the unsettled now that is very Friel.Glenties doesn’t have a coastline, but Ballybeg does, with at least one island off it: in “The Gentle Island” (1971), called Inishkeen; in “Wonderful Tennessee” (1993), called Oilean Draiochta, which is translated in the play as Island of Mystery. Neither island is tidal like Inishkeel — you need a boat to get to them — but each shares a bit of the real island’s past.In those plays, Friel taps into the primal, the mythic, the spiritual. And maybe it was just the gray and chill the day I was there, and the tiny needles of rain that stung my face. But on that marvelous, rock-strewn island, all of those forces seemed entirely conjurable — somewhere off beautiful Ballybeg, County Donegal. More

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      ‘Artificial Flavors’ Review: Blame ChatGPT for This Musical

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      Each performance culminates in a production, composed on the spot, with misguided help from artificial intelligence.Artificial intelligence can paint meddlesome monkeys, speak in the basso profundo of James Earl Jones and play a tune to suit a hall of mirrors. But it can’t write a musical that doesn’t feel canned (at least, not yet). That’s the argument put forward by “Artificial Flavors,” a live demonstration of A.I.’s creative capabilities — and tedious limitations — at 59E59 Theaters.The writer and director Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the restlessly curious company the Civilians, here assumes the role of a somewhat befuddled narrator, explaining that this project was born from his late-night tinkering with programs like ChatGPT. Cosson, who says he is not a performer, at times doesn’t seem to know where to stand or what to say next. Whether or not it’s an act (and I suspect that it is), Cosson’s apparent insecurity provides a stark contrast to the technology he is investigating.Cosson solicits Mad Libs-style audience input to show that generative A.I. merely needs prompting and a few seconds to spit out an unconvincing Picasso or write vaguely in the voice of Stephen King, examples projected on a screen. Six actors then step in to perform A.I.-generated skits, including a scene between socialist comrades quibbling over a Birkin bag on the night I attended. Cosson promises that each performance of “Artificial Flavors” will culminate in a brand-new musical, with text written by ChatGPT and melodies composed on the spot by the Civilians and the onstage music director Dan Lipton.The problem is that every example of A.I.-generated content proceeding it portends how bad that musical will be. That seems to be Cosson’s point, though it becomes tiresome as his experiment balloons to 90 minutes. What scant humor A.I. produces here is inadvertent and its metaphors are clichéd. (“We’re more than gears, circuits and wires,” one early sample lyric goes, “We are the spark igniting untamed fires.”)There is ingenuity in the varying parameters for a musical that Cosson feeds into ChatGPT, including conflict, setting and structure (for example, a pie-eating contest at a beachside resort). But by Cosson’s design, A.I. is squarely to blame for the resulting artistic failure. The cast does impressive impromptu work, singing on the fly and reading live text from hand-held tablets. Michael Castillejos and Trey Lyford add lo-fi percussion to Lipton’s electronic keyboard, while Heath Saunders appears to lead the ensemble’s unpolished vocals. But the songs and dialogue, though generated anew each night, are no doubt consistently inane.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      ‘I Can Get It for You Wholesale’ Review: Rag Trade Revival, Recut for Today

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      A story considered too dark for Broadway in its time is too much of a patchwork in ours.What a shame that the 1962 musical “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” a critique of vulture capitalism disguised as a rag trade comedy, is now best known as the Broadway show that gave Barbra Streisand her start at 19. No matter how good she was — and the recording of her big number, “Miss Marmelstein,” overflows with stupendous, youthful invention — hers was only a small, comic role in a much darker story by the novelist Jerome Weidman; her song a bauble in a fascinating and multifaceted score by Harold Rome.A clash of styles probably contributed to the show’s meh run. In Weidman’s novel, the main character, a garment industry climber named Harry Bogen, is an impenitent snake, a moral bottom feeder who knows no bottom. (On his way up, he breaks a strike, lies to his mother, dupes his pals, two-times his girlfriend and embezzles from his partners.) Despite the antiheroes of “Pal Joey” and “Carousel” in the 1940s — and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” a recent hit when “Wholesale” opened — Bogen was apparently deemed too awful for Broadway, so Weidman softened him. Casting Elliott Gould further dialed up the twinkle.The revisal of “Wholesale” that opened on Monday at Classic Stage Company was meant, in part, to address the tonal problem, and who better to do it than Weidman’s son John, himself a fine musical librettist. (Two great Sondheim shows are among his credits: “Pacific Overtures” and “Assassins.”) He has restored some of the novel’s first-person narration, so that Harry (Santino Fontana) gets to work his charm directly on the audience. (Fontana being a charmer, he almost succeeds.) Weidman has cut a song, moved two, added three from Rome’s archive and trimmed several others. He’s excised any hint of redemption at the end.That the show, directed by Trip Cullman, still doesn’t hold together is unfortunate. Its bones are too big for the 196-seat Classic Stage space, which makes the story feel as if it were stuffed into a dress several sizes too small. Likewise, the music is too complex for six players weirdly doubling. The violinist naturally enough plays viola, but also percussion, occasionally at the same time.This doesn’t matter when the show’s best singers are given its best songs: Judy Kuhn, as Harry’s Yiddishe momme, offers an exquisite “Too Soon”; Rebecca Naomi Jones, as his long-suffering girlfriend, a touching “Who Knows?”; and Joy Woods, as the gold digger he trades up to, a cynical duet called “What’s in It for Me?” (with Greg Hildreth as a salesman). And Julia Lester’s clarion honk in “Miss Marmelstein” recalls Streisand without being a copy. Still, the lack of orchestral texture makes the songs, dotting the highly episodic book, feel like one-offs, not a score.Rebecca Naomi Jones, center left, and Fontana as a couple in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Review: In ‘Stereophonic,’ the Rock Revolution Will Be Recorded

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      David Adjmi’s riveting new play, with songs by Will Butler, is about a ’70s band that nearly destroys itself making an epochal album.It’s an imperfect rule of thumb that musicals lift up and dramas drill down. So what do you call David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic,” which does both?You could rightly say it’s a play with music, emphasis on the “play”: In a little more than three hours it features just six songs, some of them fragmentary.But that would be to shortchange the ingenious way Adjmi weaves sound and story into something as granular as it is operatic. Granular because the songs (by Will Butler) are not decorations but are elemental to the plot, in which the five members of a rock band spend a year of the mid-1970s writing and laying down tracks for an epochal new album while bickering over each riff and tempo. Operatic because what they wind up recording, however refracted through a commercial pop lens, inevitably expresses their heartache, betrayal and fury.There is plenty of each in “Stereophonic,” which opened on Sunday at Playwrights Horizons in a relentlessly compelling production by Daniel Aukin that has the grit of a documentary. In a way, it is one: If you know anything about the year Fleetwood Mac spent making the 1977 album “Rumours,” you will grasp the template at once, even though Adjmi has said he was inspired by many bands of the era after listening to Led Zeppelin on a flight to Boston.Nevertheless, the bones are Fleetwood Mac’s. Like Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, the play’s Diana and Peter are an American couple, she on vocals, he on vocals and guitar. Like John and Christine McVie, the fictional Reg and Holly are British, he on bass guitar, she on keyboard and vocals. And like Mick Fleetwood himself, Simon is the drummer, playing Daddy to the others while missing his wife and actual children back home.That they all behave childishly once aesthetic arguments arise is a given of the milieu. The constant drinking, toking and dipping into a big bag of cocaine don’t help, even if it’s part of the job of the two overwhelmed engineers (Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler, hilarious) to keep the sessions going at any cost.Daniel Aukin’s relentlessly compelling production has the grit of a documentary, and David Zinn’s studio set is a multitrack wonder, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut something is already wrong when the band arrives at the studio in Sausalito, Calif.: The intimacy and blend so riveting in their music has not worked out as well in their lives. Reg (Will Brill, heartbreakingly unhinged) and Holly (Juliana Canfield) are evidently on the skids. Indeed, Reg is so cataclysmically strung out by the third day of recording he can barely walk; he looks like a drowned rabid squirrel. Holly and the rest of the band, who all live together in a house nearby, are past the breaking point of patience and exhaustion.Drugs and sleep deprivation are the accelerants here, exacerbating Reg and Holly’s flip-flops of affection while undoing the couples who at first seem properly glued. Diana (Sarah Pidgeon) and Peter (Tom Pecinka) have been a couple for nine years, held together by mutual admiration and complementary flaws. (He’s a control freak and she’s insecure.) Even so, they too begin to crack. Peter’s volcanic temper erupts as Diana, gradually emerging as the group’s breakout star, gingerly tries to assert more independence.By the time Simon (Chris Stack, suavely coiled) announces that his wife has left him, we begin to adjust to the depths toward which Adjmi has quietly been leading us, beneath the expert polyphony of his overlapping dialogue, the keenly imagined naturalism of the setting — David Zinn’s studio set is a multitrack wonder — and the nervy patience necessary to let characters come to their own boil.Pidgeon and Pecinka are riveting as a couple whose relationship begins to crack during the protracted recording session.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat deep story is about the disaster of maleness, and thus of mating, behind the pop-rock revolution of the period. (The Bicentennial vibe is firmly established by Enver Chakartash’s late-hippie costumes, including some wild peacockery for Simon.) And though Adjmi’s depiction of the men as stunted adolescents at first seems lightly satirical — the casual thumbing of Playboy in the control room, the engineers high-fiving each other over shared fantasies of oiled-up women reclining on Corvettes — the atmosphere eventually turns menacing.When challenged, Peter, who fancies himself (and may be) the band’s best musician, rigidly defends a fraying idea of what you might call monaural masculinity. Women are accomplices, not equals: incomprehensible witches, strange in their sisterliness (the men are Cains and Abels) and artists only accidentally.To the extent that “Stereophonic” dramatizes a victory of any kind it is in the way Diana (Pidgeon is riveting in all aspects of the role) inches herself away from Peter (Pecinka, too, is riveting) and at last defies him. Not without a price, of course. Another of Adjmi’s main interests here is in the tricky duality of music and, by extension, of art. However cathartic, writing and performing do not fix anything, the soul being too complicated for that. “I thought I was getting things out with the music because it’s so expressive and exhausting, but you don’t,” Diana laments. “It’s just a trick, all the conflict gets like submerged and hidden in some other weird pocket of your psyche.”Or as Holly, beguilingly cool in Canfield’s portrayal, sums up: “It’s a torture to need people.”Adjmi, first known for plays like “3C” and “Marie Antoinette” that push satire past the gates of surrealism and then push even further, works a new path here, after some years away from the stage. He is still very funny but now without the quotation marks, devoting himself in every playwriting way — thematically, dialogically, structurally — to real things emerging in real time. “Stereophonic” may even be slightly attenuated by its refusal to take shortcuts; I wouldn’t have minded a 20-minute trim, if only to keep the material from falling, as it does occasionally, into the gap between drama and mini-series. (It would make an excellent mini-series, though.)The discipline is otherwise unexceptionable. Aukin’s staging, which carefully tracks the different worlds of the control room downstage and the sound room, protected by glass, behind it, supports the variations on revelation and concealment that make the play so compelling. Sometimes the control room is silent and we hear only the sound room, sometimes it’s the other way around; sometimes there’s dialogue between them on mics and sometimes a mic is surreptitiously left live to spy on people in an isolation booth. And though superior work from the sound designer, Ryan Rumery, and the lighting designer, Jiyoun Chang, help direct our ears and eyes, we have to assemble the story ourselves.I don’t really understand how the cast (under the music direction of Justin Craig) did the same, but backward and from the inside out, all while playing their own instruments and singing richly enough to sell Butler’s songs. Whether barnburners with chunky hooks or dreamy reflections with rangy lyrics, those songs sound every bit like the pop hits they are meant to be — perhaps not a surprise from a former member of Arcade Fire, but a joy nonetheless.So however you want to categorize “Stereophonic” — perhaps a playical? — the great thing is that it doesn’t founder, as most theatrical treatments of the artistic process do, on either side of the genre divide. The music justifies the long buildup, and the play, Adjmi’s best so far, is as rich and lustrous as they come. You could even call it platinum.StereophonicThrough Nov. 26 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes. More