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      ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Review: Bringing a Classic Record to Life

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      A new Off Broadway musical adds the thrill of intimacy and the weight of history to the Cuban songs popularized on a 1997 album.The boleros, sons, danzóns and other popular Cuban song forms captured on the hit 1997 album “Buena Vista Social Club” — and in a 1999 Wim Wenders documentary about the musicians who made it — are a marvel: diabolically catchy, lively yet poetic, mesmerizingly complex beneath their seeming simplicity.Those are qualities that few jukebox musicals have going for them. Usually, if the borrowed tunes are catchy, they’re prosaic. Or if poetic then dreary. Or if complex then irrelevant.But the full-of-riches jukebox musical “Buena Vista Social Club,” which opened on Tuesday at the Atlantic Theater, avoids all those problems. Particularly in its rendition of the “Buena Vista” songbook — including eight numbers from the original album and seven from later iterations — the production, directed by Saheem Ali, enhances (instead of merely exploiting) the music with the thrill of its liveness. The social dancing that accompanies some songs is often just as exciting. And if the narrative draped over those high points is a bit droopy, and the staging a bit choppy, they also give contour and context to what would otherwise be just a concert, albeit a joyous one.Like the documentary, the musical’s book, by Marco Ramirez, uses the “Buena Vista” recording sessions, at a Havana studio in 1996, as its framework. There we efficiently meet the veteran musicians who have gathered under the direction of a young Cuban producer, Juan De Marcos (Luis Vega), to make an album of “songs from the old days.” These musicians include the singer-guitarist Compay Segundo (Julio Monge), the pianist Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling), the tres player Eliades Ochoas (Renesito Avich) and the singer Ibrahim Ferrer (Mel Semé). Together they will prove, as De Marcos puts it, that “Mozart’s got nothing on us.”So far, so semi-true. But Ramirez soon begins his departure from the facts by establishing the singer Omara Portuondo (Natalie Venetia Belcon) as the star of the sessions and thus of the show. (In reality, though she was already a Cuban national treasure, she sang just one track on the original album.)Accurate to life or not — and perhaps it’s better to think of the musical as an adjacent story in the Buena Vista universe — she’s a fine theatrical creation: a musician of great emotion (Compay calls her “the Queen of Feeling”) and a woman of commensurate hauteur. When Juan tries to introduce an unexpected woodwind riff to her “scorching rendition” of the song “Candela,” she cuts him right down — and you don’t want to get cut down by the regal Belcon. “No one ever recorded a ‘scorching rendition’ of anything with a flute,” she says.Omara is the musical’s portal to the past, which Ramirez, best known for another quasi-historical work — “The Royale,” inspired by the prizefighter Jack Johnson — traverses at liberty. We thus meet Omara not only in 1996 but also 40 years earlier, as a young woman on the edge of stardom in a double act with her sister, Haydee (Danaya Esperanza).But while the Portuondo Sisters perform kitschy numbers for American tourists at the Tropicana nightclub, musical and political changes are brewing beyond its palmy grounds. Both can be found at the namesake Buena Vista Social Club, “a space where smoke and sweat fill the air,” according to a stage direction, and “where beer bottles keep clave rhythm.”The musical’s fizzy club dances, choreographed by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck, are a delight, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRamirez overburdens this past tense with heavy subplots: gunrunning, colorism, revolution, betrayal. The more contemporary scenes are correspondingly haunted by regrets and ghosts. (The main characters are all represented by younger versions of themselves; Omara and Haydee get dance doubles as well.) It’s too much story for a two-hour show, especially in the second act, when the weight of Cuba’s painful history threatens to smother the songs. They don’t need help to bare the sadness in their souls.Still, even if you don’t understand their Spanish lyrics, the songs prevail. Never forced into literal service as signboards for the plot but instead performed atmospherically by characters who would actually sing them, they lend coherence and depth to the story with their exquisite harmonies, delirious polyrhythms and raw brass. The exceptional music production — the work of a team led by Dean Sharenow and Marco Paguia — enhances that effect with arrangements appropriate to the new contexts and the intimate space of the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater. The blessedly live-sounding sound design is by Jonathan Deans.And though I was less impressed by a series of balletic duets for the young sisters, which feel labored, the fizzy club dances are a delight. As choreographed by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck, they match and heighten the music with intricate close partnering as limbs find ever more intricate ways of closing the space between bodies.Ali’s staging, on a unit set by Arnulfo Maldonado that aptly suggests some of the cramped spaces in which the story transpires, does not yet reach that level. It is too often difficult, with 17 cast members and nine core musicians on the small and flatly lighted stage, to tell which location we’re in: studio, club, hotel, esplanade. Sometimes which era, too, though Dede Ayite’s taxonomy of caps and fedoras, high-waisted pants, flowy tunics and sock-hop skirts (not to mention showgirl kitsch) offers delightful clues.Cramped, too, is much of the action between the songs, lending a hectic feeling to material that wants more thoughtfulness or less bulk. Seeming to acknowledge that, the show ends weirdly and abruptly, as if cut off in mid-thought by a proctor’s stopwatch.But when the staging, singing and playing come together, whether in exuberance or sorrow, I was happily reminded of another musical about music that originated at the Atlantic: “The Band’s Visit.” (David Yazbek, that show’s songwriter, is credited here as a creative consultant.) In such moments — the hypnotic “Chan Chan,” the ear-wormy “El Cuarto de Tula,” the heartbroken “Veinte Años,” the gorgeous “Drume Negrita” — you really do feel the past harmonizing with the present. What Compay says is true: “Old songs kick up old feelings.” Even, as in the showstopping and, yes, scorching “Candela,” with a flute.Buena Vista Social ClubThrough Jan. 21 at the Atlantic Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Review: In ‘Translations,’ What’s Lost When Language Is Looted

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      An exquisite revival of Brian Friel’s 1980 play at the Irish Repertory Theater is the first of three there by the Irish author.A drunken philosopher alights on what may be his pinnacle argument: That we are shaped not by the facts of history, but by our imagination of it. “We must never cease renewing those images,” he says, or we’ll stop living.That thirsty scholar is Hugh (Seán McGinley), who runs one of Ireland’s clandestine (and illegal) hedge-schools, teaching a rustic assembly of adult pupils out of his dilapidated shanty. “Translations,” from 1980, is the first play in the Friel Project, a season of three works at the Irish Repertory Theater. A modest yet exquisite revival directed by Doug Hughes, it makes a rigorous case not only for Brian Friel’s pre-eminence as an interpreter of Irish national identity, but for the vitality of art in deciphering life.It’s 1833 in Friel’s fictional small town, Ballybeg, where a sweet, putrid smell rising from the potato fields forebodes famine and an ingress of redcoats threatens to blight the local heritage. A rebellion in 1798 led not to independence but to forced union with Britain in the United Kingdom. And now, British soldiers, including the listless romantic Lieutenant Yolland (Raffi Barsoumian), are mapping the countryside and anglicizing Irish place-names. One of Hugh’s two sons, Owen (Seth Numrich), has become not just a translator, but a champion for the “King’s good English,” more enthused about the endeavor than even Yolland. The actors lend the fraternity between these young men an energy and curiosity that emphasizes the consequences of what they’re doing: renaming a homeland out from under its inhabitants’ feet.Yolland is the one who hesitates, though not on moral grounds: A hapless son of empire, he fetishizes feeling like an outsider, growing sweet on the sound of Irish vowels and even sweeter on Maire (Mary Wiseman), a milkmaid with her sights set on America. Their giddy, headlong infatuation is fueled by mutual incomprehension, before a sharp turn whose potentially tragic fallout Wiseman plays with affecting transparency.Friel’s shrewd spin on the pastoral drama is grounded in the convictions of these carefully drawn characters. But the play also confronts soaring questions about the nature of language — how it connects people to their homes (the trodden-earth set is by Charlie Corcoran) and to one another, and what happens when a native tongue is erased.Owen Campbell delivers a quieter register of heartbreak as Hugh’s humbler son, Manus, whose dream of preserving homegrown education, with Maire at his side, becomes another colonial casualty. Embodying extreme ends of the communicative spectrum are Sarah (Erin Wilhelmi), a presumed mute who struggles to articulate her name, and Jimmy Jack (John Keating), a disheveled bookworm who waxes at length in Greek and Latin about his crush on Athene, the goddess of wisdom.Dressed in clay-colored peasant garb by Alejo Vietti, and tenderly lit by Michael Gottlieb, each of these characters is illustrated with a Rembrandt-like specificity. As their portraits make clear, it’s essential to keep reimagining the plight of those consumed by imperial appetites. Doing so may lead to deeper understanding among us.TranslationsThrough Dec. 31 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      24 Things That Stuck With Us in 2023

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      Films, TV shows, albums, books, art and A.I.-generated SpongeBob performances that reporters, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.Art‘Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick’“October’s Gone…Goodnight,” by Barkley HendricksClark Hodgin for The New York TimesAt the Frick, where Barkley Hendricks’s shimmering ’70s portraits are hanging, posthumously, in the museum’s first solo show by a Black artist, I kept thinking about that Langston Hughes poem: What does happen to a dream deferred? Hendricks didn’t live to see his subjects, with their plentiful Afros and bell-bottom cool, leaping, communing, strolling across the walls of an institution he frequented. But after quietly railing at the omission, I realized the exhibition is actually about Hendricks taking his rightful place — a kind of insistence that a dream, rather than fossilizing, can go on forever. REBECCA THOMASTheater‘The Engagement Party’Given the heaviness of the current news cycle, I was grateful for the respite of Samuel Baum’s confection of a play, “The Engagement Party“ at the Geffen Playhouse. With sharp writing, a first-rate cast and elegant scenery, who says theater isn’t alive and well in Los Angeles? ROBIN POGREBINRap Albums‘Michael’ by Killer MikeIt’s dangerous for an artist to invite André 3000 for a feature, such are his prodigious talent and penchant for outshining anyone on a track. Killer Mike stays with André 3000 on “Scientists & Engineers” and, dare I say, even delivers the better verse, a standout on his well-balanced album, “Michael.” JONATHAN ABRAMSContemporary ArtRagnar Kjartansson at the Louisiana Museum of Modern ArtBefore a trip to Scandinavia, I heard from several people that the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, north of Copenhagen, was their favorite museum in the world. After five hours on the grounds, I understood why. Beyond a robust children’s area and the meditative sculpture gardens, I was transfixed by an exhibition on the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who uses repetition to examine human emotions, motives and desires. JASON M. BAILEYHip-Hop ReunionsThe DA.I.S.Y. Experience at Webster HallDe La Soul’s pioneering rap peers, including KRS-One, Chuck D, DJ Red Alert, Q-Tip, Common and Queen Latifah, all showed up at Webster Hall in March to buoy the remaining members of the group, Maseo and Posdnuos, as they celebrated the long-awaited streaming release of their catalog, just weeks after the death of Trugoy the Dove. Part catalog retrospective, part homegoing celebration, the night was a warm act of community crystallized, for me, in a single gesture: Late in the night, as Posdnuos rapped onstage, a grinning Busta Rhymes clasped him from behind in a hug I haven’t forgotten since. ELENA BERGERONTV‘Fellow Travelers’Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey in “Fellow Travelers.”Ben Mark Holzberg/Showtime“Fellow Travelers” bounces between the perils of McCarthy era Washington and the advent of AIDS in the 1980s, examining the country through the lens of the relationship between a finely chiseled, roguish diplomat and the naïve, morally tortured younger man who loves him over three decades. Created by Ron Nyswaner and based on a novel by Thomas Mallon (the book makes a perfect companion piece to the show), it is a political thriller/sizzling romance/slice of history worth waiting up for to catch each new episode as it drops. HELEN T. VERONGOSFolk Albums‘The Greater Wings’ by Julie ByrneJulie Byrne’s third album is earthy and otherworldly at once; a mournful, healing dispatch from somewhere between heaven and the dew-glazed grass around a freshly dug grave. “I want to be whole enough to risk again,” she sings, as synthesizer tones and harp strings melt behind her. GABE COHNCultural Juggernaut‘Barbie’Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in “Barbie.”Warner Bros. PicturesNo one can say “Barbie” was overlooked in 2023, but was it really among the best? Absolutely. It featured a sharp script, even sharper performances, at least three great songs as well as a brilliantly directed showstopping dance sequence. And in a dumpster fire of a year, it brought joy back to the multiplex. STEPHANIE GOODMANTheater‘Stereophonic’David Adjmi’s play, set almost entirely in a Northern California recording studio in 1976, follows a Fleetwood Mac-inspired band as they lay down tracks for a new album. Sexy, savage and sneakily heartbreaking, it explores the intricacies of communal creation and the sacrifices that art demands and invites. ALEXIS SOLOSKIStreaming K-Drama‘Queenmaker’This South Korean Netflix drama follows Hwang Do-hee (Kim Hee-ae), a former fixer for a corrupt family conglomerate in Seoul who decides to put her might behind the mayoral campaign of a frazzled human-rights lawyer, Oh Kyung-sook (Moon So-ri). Netflix has been investing in K-dramas for a reason. “Queenmaker” presents some delicious commentary on class and entitlement at a time of increasingly visible economic inequality in Korea and in the United States. KATHLEEN MASSARANonfiction‘Status and Culture’“Status and Culture” by W. David Marx I finished W. David Marx’s book “Status and Culture” early in the year, and afterward its point of view about taste and trend cycles felt like it applied to — well, just about everything. If you’re interested in why people (including you!) like the things they like, and why culture in the internet age feels stuck in place, read this. DAVID RENARDAnimated Film‘The Boy and the Heron’We’re lucky to be alive in a time when Hayao Miyazaki is still making hand-drawn animated films. With “The Boy and the Heron,” we have the privilege of following him into another dream world, and there are scenes and sequences so achingly gorgeous they brought me up short. BARBARA CHAIExperimental Theater‘ha ha ha ha ha ha ha’At this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, I saw, at 1:30 in the morning, a clown called Julia Masli try to solve her audience’s problems — everything from feeling too hot to being a hypochondriac. It was madcap, but by the show’s euphoric finish, involving a heartbroken audience member being forced to crowd surf to boost their mood, I’d started thinking Masli was better than any therapist and most other comedians. ALEX MARSHALLSeconds after the Opera Ends‘Dead Man Walking’Ryan McKinny, center, as Joseph De Rocher and above in a video in “Dead Man Walking” at the Metropolitan Opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI still remember the silence during the final moments of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “Dead Man Walking.” To be in such a huge space with so many people, in utter silence — thinking back, I was relieved no one’s phone had rung. LAURA O’NEILLHorror-Comedy‘M3gan’I’m a sucker for art that reflects my greatest fears — bonus points if doused in satire — maybe because it’s evidence that my anxieties aren’t mine alone or maybe because there’s no better way to exorcise dread than to discuss it. Top of my list is the prospect of humanity being conquered by robots (hence my fixation on, say, the “Terminator” movies and “2001: A Space Odyssey”), and in 2023, artificial intelligence seemed to go from peripheral conversations about a future menace to an imminent threat that industry leaders warned may pose a “risk of extinction.” Enter “M3gan,” about a TikTok-dancing, baby-sitting cyborg that managed to be both extraordinary camp and chilling cautionary tale about what could happen when we outsource human emotional care to humanoids who can’t exactly care at all. MAYA SALAMBroadway Revivals‘Parade’Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” is one of my favorite shows, so when I saw his musical “Parade” was returning to Broadway, I knew I had to see it. I didn’t know much about it going in, but I was eager to hear Brown’s wonderfully rhythmic piano phrases live. What I didn’t bank on was a gripping story from the past whose themes still resonate. Micaela Diamond’s powerful singing of “You Don’t Know This Man” was unforgettable — the tragedy with which she imbued every note gave me chills. JENNIFER LEDBURYArtificial IntelligencePlankton SingsA.I.’s depiction in culture this year was almost universally sinister: stealing jobs, spreading misinformation, antagonizing Ethan Hunt. It seems like bad news for humanity, except in one very particular application — generating cover versions of songs sung by cartoon characters. The breakout star of this genre was Plankton from “SpongeBob SquarePants.” He crushes “Even Flow,” he nails “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” but he really shines on “Born to Run.” You’re laughing during the first verse, but by the time he tells Wendy he’ll love her with all the madness in his soul, you really believe. DAVID MALITZOld-School Sci Fi‘2001: A Space Odyssey’In August, I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey,” for just the second time, in 70-millimeter projection at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Afterward, I texted a friend: “Is it just the greatest movie ever made?” MARC TRACYMagic‘Asi Wind’s Inner Circle’My job as the theater reporter comes with an occupational hazard: Everyone I meet asks me what show they (or their mother-in-law, or their neighbor, or some random co-worker) should go see. And throughout this year, my answer has been Asi Wind, a smooth-talking Israeli American magician who has been holed up in a Greenwich Village church gymnasium, astonishing audiences with close-up card trickery and mind-blowing mind reading. His run at the Gym at Judson is to end in mid-January after 444 performances; catch it if you can. MICHAEL PAULSONPodcasts‘The Diary of a CEO’Steven Bartlett is the host of “The Diary of a CEO.” It is not an exaggeration to say that the “Diary of a CEO” podcast has changed my life this year. The host Steven Bartlett poses engaging questions to some of the world’s finest thought leaders, with answers that can truly transform the way you think and the way you take action; all for free, with invaluable results. MEKADO MURPHYIndie Albums‘The Record’ by boygeniusThe boygenius album “The Record,” the full-length debut of the indie supergroup, landed, for me, like a geyser in a parched landscape. Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus were all singular talents whom I’d loved individually, but the way they rode their vocal harmonies through discord, on lyrics and guitar, lashed with humor and vulnerability — I couldn’t get enough. “I want to you to hear my story,” they sing, “and be a part of it.” Ladies, you got it. MELENA RYZIKOne TV Episode‘Long, Long Time’ From ‘The Last of Us’How did a zombie show based on a video game bring me to tears? Episode 3 of HBO’s “The Last of Us” reveals how love can survive and even thrive in the worst of times. The show’s sudden detour away from the violence and infected masses to focus on the life that Bill and Frank have built together is a poignant reminder of what really matters. ROBIN KAWAKAMI`Theater‘Sad Boys in Harpy Land’Alexandra Tatarsky in her solo show “Sad Boys in Harpy Land” at Playwrights Horizon.Chelcie ParryIn this brilliant, semi-autobiographical solo performance, Alexandra Tatarsky plays “a young Jewish woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree.” “Sad Boys in Harpy Land” is a demented clown show/unhinged cabaret/deranged improv, but also a fearless exploration of self-loathing that will stick with me for a very. Long. Time. TALA SAFIEFilm‘Past Lives’The closing scene of “Past Lives” is really just two people, standing on the street, waiting for a cab, in silence. But the two people have a long, intertwined history, the cab is coming to whisk one of them away and it is hard to imagine a heavier silence. The goodbye breaks Greta Lee’s character, sums up this subtle, deeply affecting film and has stayed with me all year. MATT STEVENS More

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      Mentalist Mayhem in ‘Mind Mangler’ and Other New Magic Shows

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      There is something for everyone, even the kids, in “Mind Mangler,” “The Magician” and “Mario the Maker Magician.”Are most minds worth the read? I can picture my personal table of contents on most evenings: anxieties, petty grievances, errands to run. It’s not exactly scintillating. Want a few frazzled paragraphs on whether we need milk? Great. Start skimming.But some of us must invite and enjoy this perusal. Because mentalism acts, such as those perfected by Derren Brown, Derek DelGaudio or Scott Silven, remain popular. So popular that Mischief theater company, the creators of blissfully inane comedies like “The Play That Goes Wrong” and “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” can spoof the form in “Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic Illusion” at New World Stages in Manhattan.Created by Mischief’s cheerfully unusual suspects, Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, “Mind Mangler” begins in the way of many mind-reading shows: ominous music, flickering lights, an invitation to write a secret on a piece of paper. On one side of the stage, a locked box dangles. On the other, a safe stands — audience members are invited to guess its four-digit combination. Then with some fanfare and a very large gold medallion necklace, Lewis, the Mangler of the title, arrives.Bestriding the stage with the growl of a lion shaking off last night’s Ambien dose, the Mangler vows that we will be “delighted, astounded and amazed.” Promise or empty threat? As Mischief fans can predict (and the Mangler most likely can’t), the first few tricks, parodies of subliminal suggestion and neurolinguistics programming, don’t go well. The Mangler flounders. He flails. He flops. Other tricks are absolute face plants, especially those relying on an audience stooge, his roommate, Steve (Sayer), who wobbles under the stage lights like an animate Jell-O salad. That Steve wears a shirt emblazoned with the words “Audience Member” doesn’t exactly sell the deception.Mischief specializes in trampling the boundary between offstage and onstage, reality and make believe. In its oeuvre, the private lives of actors, directors and stagehands become public with hilarious, disastrous results. Here, under Hannah Sharkey’s giddy, amused direction, the Mangler is revealed as a grandiose idiot in the midst of a messy divorce, with Steve as his sole, rickety support. As premises go, this one is too flimsy to shoulder the show’s two hours. Still, there’s pleasure in Lewis’s tetchy, improvised crowd work and in Sayer’s gibbering terror — not so much a deer in the headlights as a deer already under the wheels.Yet as the show goes on (a few gentle spoilers follow), something surprising happens: The tricks start to work. While the Mangler remains the butt of nearly every joke, the jokes come off. Rubik’s Cubes cooperate. Metal bends. Unless (as at the matinee I attended) a teenager decides to mess with him, secrets are unveiled. The piece builds to a rousing, grisly finale, and further delights spring from that locked box, which spends the show, as the Mangler says, “like me at the New York Magic Society, suspended until further notice.”Dan White delivers an elegant, polished performance in “The Magician,” at Fotografiska on Park Avenue South in Manhattan.via theory11Mentalism fans may find these final delights familiar, particularly if they have seen Dan White’s “The Magician,” an elegant, polished performance, directed by Jonathan Bayme and Blake Vogt and held in a loftlike space atop Fotografiska on Park Avenue South. Ascend past a delightful exhibition of pet photos, and you will find a room of cafe tables and chairs. The stage is empty. And then, after a blinding flash, White is there.White, in a fussy three-piece suit ornamented with a watch chain, commands these few square feet with dapper authority. He assures his viewers that this is “a magic show unlike any you’ve ever seen.” Which isn’t really true. But if none of White’s tricks are new, he does put a distinct spin on them, a debonair torque. His tools are commonplace, but in his hands — or without his hands ever touching them — they feel novel and distinct. No matter how impossible it might seem to guess a number, a word, a birthday (my god, the birthday!), White accomplishes it all. Sometimes he’ll appear to put a foot or a flourish wrong, but these flubs are deliberate and never diminish White’s urbane effortlessness. Serious-minded and nimble-fingered, he knows how to build dramatic tension and also how to puncture it with a self-deprecating joke. He can relax even the most jittery viewers.White’s audience, lubricated by several rounds of pricey cocktails, lost their minds at each reveal. Some of the tricks are revealed in stages, which meant that they could lose them again and again. The only trick that went awry (at least for me, and I was sober) was one that I was asked to perform myself, using a handful of halved playing cards. Magic, I would argue, isn’t easy for everyone.The children’s magician Mario Marchese is in residency at SoHo Playhouse with the show “Mario the Maker Magician.” He reminds kids that “with a little curiosity and imagination, you can create magic.”Daniel EdenMario Marchese might disagree with me. A superb children’s magician, Marchese is in residency at SoHo Playhouse with “Mario the Maker Magician.” Shaggy-haired, wild-eyed and excitable, he contends that a person can make magic out of anyone and anything. “My job today,” he tells his height-challenged crowd, “is to take the things that you call boring and remind you that with a little curiosity and imagination, you can create magic.”True to his word, he conjures wonder from a tape measure, a pizza box, a handkerchief, soup cans and torn paper. He makes his own robots and also his own inflatables, though at the performance I attended, one was rapidly deflating. As a mother of young children, I have seen many, many kids’ magicians. He is very likely the best, delighting in their participation, never talking down to them.Have you spent much time with elementary schoolers? Unruly and distractible, they are rarely capable of sustained attention. Marchese held them in the palms of his deft hands. The children, onstage and in the seats, were rapt throughout, following along diligently, responding enthusiastically.Marchese seemed to know just what they wanted, just what they needed, just what would thrill them most. Almost as if he could read their minds.Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic IllusionThrough March 3 at New World Stages, Manhattan; mindmanglernyc.com.The MagicianThrough Jan. 20 at Fotografiska, Manhattan; themagicianonline.com.Mario the Maker MagicianThrough Dec. 30 at SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan; sohoplayhouse.com. More

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      Review: In ‘The Salvagers,’ a Battered Family Finds Strength

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      Harrison David Rivers’s new drama, featuring a strong cast, is having its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theater.Harrison David Rivers’s merciful new drama, “The Salvagers,” is not a romance, but it emphatically is a love story: about a furious, heartsick young actor and his imperfect parents, steadfastly trying to help him heal.At 23, Boseman Salvage Jr. hadn’t meant to end up back in snowy Chicago, where he grew up and where his parents split while he was away at college. He certainly hadn’t meant to move in with his father, whom he loathes with a smoldering, adolescent contempt. But after an episode that Boseman Sr. refers to, obliquely, as “your cry for help,” Boseman Jr. came home.In Mikael Burke’s world-premiere production at Yale Repertory Theater, Taylor A. Blackman makes a blistering young Boseman — self-hating, self-harming and horribly lost, but with such a huge chip on his shoulder that hostility could easily be all his father sees.Yet Boseman Sr., played by the rock-solid Julian Elijah Martinez, is stability itself. He is not the soul of patience — who could be, with such a tetchy grown kid around the house? — but he is not going anywhere. And he will nudge his son about taking his pills, and cook multicourse meals for him night after night, for as long as it takes to nurture him back to mental health. (The suggestion of a domestic interior, with a glacial mountain of snow hulking over it, is by B Entsminger.)A significant detail about Boseman Sr., a locksmith, and Nedra (Toni Martin), his postal worker ex-wife: He was only 14 and she just 16 when they had Boseman Jr. But their son’s torments have their roots elsewhere, tangled in notions of filial inheritance and parental expectation — as if, by virtue of sharing his father’s name, he is meant to be a duplicate of him. In which case being gay, which Boseman Jr. cannot admit, would count in his own mind as a failure.The doting, extroverted Nedra, who can recite her son’s “King Lear” audition monologue in unison with him — his “Hamlet,” too — already sees her child for who he is. When he tells her he’s met a woman, she blurts her surprise: “Your person’s a she?”That would be Paulina (Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew), the least organically written of the principal characters. Blackman and Bartholomew never find even a friend-crush energy for the relationship, the script’s single over-engineered strand.Far more magnetic is the tiptoe tumble into love between Boseman Sr. and Elinor (McKenzie Chinn), a substitute teacher whom he meets when she locks herself out of her apartment. Martinez and Chinn have an appealing chemistry, and Chinn manages the delicate task of keeping Elinor sympathetic even when she vastly oversteps, revealing secrets that require Boseman Jr. to rethink his own history.Rivers pushes too hard at times, as when characters twice voice confusion about the practicalities of two people in the same family having the same name — not exactly unheard-of.What he does with tremendous dexterity, though, is show us a family, battered by pain, that through devotion and forgiveness declines to rupture. There is good that the Salvages can restore, all of them, by tending to one another and letting themselves be tended to.The SalvagersThrough Dec. 16 at Yale Repertory Theater, New Haven, Conn.; yalerep.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      ‘Manahatta’ Review: Tracing the Blood-Soaked Roots of American Capitalism

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      Straddling the 17th and early 21st centuries, Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play at the Public Theater examines the exploitation of the Lenape by Dutch settlers.Acknowledgments that New York was once home to the Lenape people have become a familiar refrain at arts venues. In “Manahatta,” the playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle undertakes a vital investigation of that willfully forgotten history so often rendered in shorthand. Now open at the Public Theater, just a few subway stops away from Wall Street, Nagle’s play traces the origins of American finance and the follies of its bottomless appetite for capital to the exploitation of the Lenape by the city’s Dutch settlers.The Lenape people have been so forcefully expelled from their Northeastern homelands that the descendants Nagle depicts, beginning in 2002, live in what is now Oklahoma. Jane (Elizabeth Frances), an MIT and Stanford graduate, is interviewing for an entry-level Wall Street job when her father dies on an operating table. By the time she returns home, her sister Debra (Rainbow Dickerson) and their mother Bobbie (a delightfully dry Sheila Tousey) are preparing for his funeral, and Bobbie is stuck with medical bills because the Indian Health Service, a government agency responsible for providing health services to Native peoples, has refused payment.Intercut with this family drama are fable-like scenes set in 17th-century Manahatta, where West India Company traders barter with the Lenape for furs coveted by the women they left behind in the Old World. The ensemble of seven actors appear in both timelines, including Enrico Nassi, who plays Luke, Jane’s childhood friend and would-be sweetheart, and Se-ket-tu-may-qua, an emissary who communicates with the Dutch and teaches Le-le-wa’-you, a Lenape woman also played by Frances, to speak their foreign tongue. Back in Manhattan, Jane is learning the sort of blustery talk necessary to chart her climb through the corporate ranks.First developed at the Public in 2014, when Nagle was a member of its Emerging Writers Group, “Manahatta” premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2018. Its purview is promising and ambitious: In addition to the blood-soaked roots of American capitalism, Nagle addresses the erasure of Native languages through forced assimilation, and the irrevocable impacts of Western violence, religion and consumer currency on Native culture.But the concept of homeownership, in the modern sense of subprime mortgages and the more ancient one of who can lay claims to land, forms the strongest throughline: The Dutch dupe a Lenape elder, played by Tousey, into selling them Manahatta for a song, while Michael (David Kelly), who is both the local pastor and a banker, helps Bobbie take out a loan against her house. Jane, though not without her misgivings, is meanwhile helping to manufacture the 2008 financial crisis, by selling mortgage-backed securities — it turns out she works for Lehman Brothers.Sheila Tousey, center, with ensemble members, all of whom appear in both timelines.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDirected by Laurie Woolery, the production shifts seamlessly between the alternating time periods and locales, on a wilderness-meets-boardroom set by Marcelo Martínez García, and with particular help from Lux Haac’s costumes, whose fusion of fabrics and styles (a pinstripe pilgrim silhouette, for example) accomplish an impressive narrative arc on their own.The play draws direct, and at times reductive, parallels between the past and recent present. Jane’s bigwig bosses, played by Joe Tapper and Jeffrey King, are flat, greedy villains, figured as heirs to the deceptive, and ultimately murderous, founders of the market system (Tapper’s Dutch trader, at least, demonstrates some measure of humanity). But the white bad guys’ lack of complexity, though a missed opportunity, isn’t the most pressing problem.The Native characters, too, are almost exclusively products of circumstance, reacting to the systems that oppress them rather than approaching life with innate motivations. That defensive posture is understandable in the colonial context, but when Jane is asked why she wants to work on Wall Street, her only answer is because she has overcome obstacles to get there. Jane’s professional trajectory is rather one piece of Nagle’s grand design, which feels undersynthesized throughout much of the show’s 105-minute running time until it reaches a too-obvious conclusion.Even if this corrective account does not feel convincingly yoked to the drama onstage, an urgent significance to the facts is laid out in “Manahatta.” Nagle notes in the script that the play is a work of fiction, though it’s based on real events and was written in consultation with Lenape elders, whose ancestors are often evoked before curtains rise on New York stages. We would all do well to remember what they have lost.ManahattaThrough Dec. 23 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      Off Broadway, a Vital Part of New York Theater, Feels the Squeeze

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      The small theaters that help make the city a theater capital are cutting back as they struggle to recover from the pandemic.New York’s nonprofit Signature Theater has three modern performance spaces designed by the starchitect Frank Gehry, a long history of cultivating and championing major playwrights like Edward Albee and Lynn Nottage, and a board chaired by the Hollywood star Edward Norton.What Signature doesn’t have this fall are plays. The company, a mainstay of the Off Broadway scene, closed its most recent production in July and is not set to start its next show until the end of January.Even as Broadway claws its way back from the coronavirus pandemic, New York’s sprawling network of smaller theaters, many of them noncommercial in both tax status and taste, is struggling.“This is the hardest season yet,” said Casey York, the president of the Off-Broadway League, citing the combined effects of smaller audiences, shifting philanthropic patterns, rising wages and costs, and labor shortages at a time when the emergency government assistance that helped many theaters stay afloat through the lengthy pandemic shutdown has largely run out. “There is an incredible squeeze.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      His ‘Dracula’ Project: Creating a Funny Vampire

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      The great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker has written a comic version of “Dracula” that is appearing Off Broadway.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll meet someone who can laugh at Dracula because he’s like family. We’ll also find out why grade inflation has become an issue at Yale University.Matthew MurphyIn the past, Dacre Stoker has written or co-written serious fiction about his great-granduncle Bram, the man who gave the world that famous bloodthirsty Transylvanian at the end of the 19th century. Tonight, the younger Stoker will venture into comedy in an Off Broadway theater where “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors” is playing.He told me last week that he had put together some funny material to deliver when joining the cast onstage after the performance. He said he would take along a prop and tell the actors: “Loved the performance. You might need a transfusion.”The prop won’t really be a transfusion: It will be red wine from a winery in Romania in which he has an interest. The winery is in Walachia, “the state below Transylvania,” he said. “We have given vampires to the country — why not get involved in commerce?”Stoker said his mission was to raise the profile of his ancestor “so the creator himself becomes at least half as famous as his creation.”He added: “This is how I started getting into writing the books and leading tours — asking, ‘Who is Bram Stoker?’ Bringing him into an Off Broadway comedy is another way to increase awareness of this guy.”He also enjoys making Dracula funny. “It’s nice to see that people can poke fun at a scary, horrifying novel that’s been around for 127 years,” he said. (Our reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli called “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors,” at New World Stages, “a gender-bending play” that “pays no mind to the ‘terrors’ part of its title.”)Dacre Stoker said his illustrious relative had connections to the world of theater: Bram Stoker’s “claim to fame before Dracula was running the famous Lyceum Theater in London for 27 years,” he said. He was the accommodating business assistant in the long shadow of the notoriously mercurial star Sir Henry Irving, the first actor ever knighted.“Irving had extravagant tastes,” he said, and Bram, who had a master’s in math, “had to hold him back while he crunched the numbers” at the theater, the great-grandnephew said.He also talked about the time his great-granduncle spent in New York: Bram Stoker joined the Players, the private club on Gramercy Park South, in 1893, when he and Irving were on one of eight American tours.“I saw the book where he was nominated by Samuel L. Clemens, his good friend and neighbor from Chelsea,” Dacre Stoker said, “so Mark Twain nominated him. He had more names seconding him than any other page I saw in the book.” Others have written about Bram Stoker’s fascination with the American poet Walt Whitman.Dacre Stoker, 65, a former member of the Canadian men’s pentathlon team who coached the team at the 1988 Olympics, said he had been “like this Indiana Jones version of a literary guy, trying to find the story behind the story, to bring this writer to life, to find out who Bram Stoker was.” He used material he found for “Dracul,” a prequel written with J.D. Barker and published in 2018 that envisioned what might have prompted Bram Stoker to create Dracula.That book followed a 2009 novel, “Dracula: The Un-Dead,” which Dacre Stoker wrote with the screenwriter Ian Holt, himself a Dracula historian. It was the first Dracula project authorized by the Stoker estate since the 1931 film that starred Bela Lugosi.WeatherA system sliding across the Mid-Atlantic states will mean a partly sunny day, with temperatures reaching the low 40s. At night, clouds will give way to a clearer sky, and the temperature will drop to around 30.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Friday (Immaculate Conception).The latest Metro newsAhmed Gaber for The New York TimesConflict and CrisesIsrael-Gaza: Long before the temporary cease-fire ended in Gaza, the mood in Paterson, N.J., home to one of the largest communities of Palestinians outside the Middle East, was tense.Migrants and the mayor: New York City’s comptroller has restricted the mayor’s ability to quickly spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the migrant crisis — a major blow to his emergency powers.A Changing CityToward a quieter city: New York City, not exactly known for its peace and quiet, is expanding its use of “noise cameras,” which ticket the drivers of loud cars and motorcycles.The rich are back: At the height of the pandemic, the richest New Yorkers left in droves. A new report based on census and state tax filing data has found a reversal.Small theaters: New York’s nonprofit Signature Theater has three performance spaces, a history of cultivating major playwrights, and a board chaired by the Hollywood star Edward Norton. What Signature doesn’t have this fall are plays.Lots of A’s at YaleChristopher Capozziello for The New York TimesOne consequence of the pandemic has proved lasting at Yale University: Nearly everyone is getting A’s.A new report found that nearly 80 percent of the grades given to Yale undergraduates during the 2022-23 academic year were A’s or A minuses. The mean grade point average — 3.7 out of a possible 4.0 — was also up from before the pandemic.My colleague Amelia Nierenberg writes that the findings have frustrated some students and professors. What does excellence mean at Yale if 80 percent of the students get the equivalent of “excellent” in almost every class? Shelly Kagan, a Yale philosophy professor with a reputation as a tough grader, said that when “virtually everything that gets turned in” receives an A, “we are simply being dishonest to our students.”The post-pandemic spike in grades is not unique to Yale. At Harvard, 79 percent of all grades given to undergraduates in the 2020-21 year were A’s or A minuses. A decade earlier, that figure was 60 percent. In 2020-21, the average G.P.A. at Harvard was 3.8, compared with 3.41 in 2002-3.“Grades are like any currency,” said Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who tracks grade inflation: They tend to increase over time.This is not just happening at elite schools. G.P.A.s have been increasing at colleges nationwide by about 0.1 per decade since the early 1980s, he said. But private colleges tend to have higher average G.P.A.s than public colleges and universities.At Yale, where an A is the new normal, the proportion of A’s and A minuses has been climbing for years. In the 2010-11 academic year, just over two-thirds of all grades at Yale — 67 percent — were A’s or A minuses. By 2018-19, the last full academic year before the pandemic, 73 percent were in the A range.Then, during the pandemic, the figure jumped. Almost 82 percent of Yale grades were in the A range in 2021-22. The figure slipped slightly, to about 79 percent, in 2022-23. The new statistics come from a report by Ray Fair, an economics professor whose work was first reported by The Yale Daily News. He declined to comment on his findings.Does any of this really matter?Pericles Lewis, the dean of Yale College, acknowledged that students could be overly concerned with G.P.A.s.But he added: “I don’t think many people care, 10 years out, what kind of grades you got at Yale. They mostly care that you, you know, you studied at Yale.”METROPOLITAN diaryTiffany frameDear Diary:I was cleaning out my closets when I came across a small Tiffany box. Much to my surprise, it did not appear to have ever been opened. Inside, covered in plastic, was a lovely sterling silver picture frame nestled in a Tiffany blue felt bag.Unfortunately, on close examination I could see that the silver had become tarnished. I tried to clean it, but to no avail.I called Tiffany and was told to bring it in for repair. So I traveled to Rockefeller Center, brought the box into the store and was directed to the repair department downstairs.I showed the frame to one of the women at the counter there. She called two other women over to take a look.The three of them admired it, but then said that they didn’t sell Tiffany items.“How could Tiffany not sell Tiffany?” I asked.“You’re in Saks Fifth Avenue!” one of the women said.— Eileen RosenbergIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More