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

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

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

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

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

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

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      ‘Arcadia’ Review: Artistic Ambition Gets Thrown Into Chaos

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

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      Review: In ‘Scene Partners,’ Dianne Wiest Delivers Another Master Class

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      The transcendent Dianne Wiest stars in an absurd yet poignant new play about a 75-year-old woman who sets out to be a star.“Acting Like a Maniac” is not your typical acting class: You have to sign a personal injury waiver to join it. But then Meryl Kowalski, with that double whammy of a theatrical name, isn’t your typical student. Though 75, she’s no cute oldster; Hugo Lockerby, the guru-like teacher with a wandering accent, thinks she may even be a genius. Performing the autobiographical “blueprint” she’s been writing as an exercise, her fellow students are amazed and baffled by the tale (did she really get an agent at gunpoint?) but also the style. “Do you want it realism or should it be more like whoa,” one asks.“Scene Partners,” by John J. Caswell Jr., with the transcendent Dianne Wiest as Meryl, is definitely more like whoa.Twee, snarky, meta, manic, maddening and yet eventually poignant, the play is a moving target, its tone as hard to pin down as its facts. Take the setting, a maybe Hollywood in an iffy 1985. (Also, the Soviet Union and most of the 20th century.) In any case, it’s often impossible to tell whether what we’re watching is Meryl’s life, a film about her life, a dream about the film, a hallucination of the dream, or some other nesting doll of narration.If the authorial bait-and-switch too often feels like throat-clearing, it does serve a purpose, building around the story a border that is also a blur. In Caswell’s world, as in Meryl’s, limits are always permeable.“Scene Partners,” which opened on Wednesday at the Vineyard Theater in a top-drawer production directed by Rachel Chavkin, is part of a genre you might call the absurd picaresque. Meryl is a hardheaded Candide, a sharp-eyed Don Quixote. When we meet her just after the long longed-for death of her abusive husband, she is leaving Wisconsin for California so fast she doesn’t bother burying him. “Within the year I will rise to fame and fortune as an international film star,” she says in farewell to her drug addict daughter. Sure enough, she soon acquires not just her agent and acting coach, but also a contract to write the movie of her life.What makes her life a fit subject for a movie, or even this play, is a useful question. Surely it’s not the banal details: the stepfather, the trauma and the mother who looked away are all tossed off too lightly to stick. Caswell doesn’t at first seem very interested in them except as opportunities to create fascinating verbal spirals, cross-references and death drops, like a game of biographical Chutes and Ladders.Wiest and Josh Hamilton, as an acting teacher, are in top form in John J. Caswell Jr.’s play at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet the process of making the banal fascinating is, it seems, Caswell’s point. When Meryl becomes successful, it is not because her life has been special; hers is the stardom of the ordinary, built on perseverance not glamour, and on the recognition that the only thing keeping her from her life goals is her life. “We lose countless masters like this woman,” says Hugo (Josh Hamilton, hilarious yet also noble), “simply because they lacked a certain access at a certain time in history.” The play’s structural gymnastics, which also make room for the possibility of dementia, give Meryl that access, and elevate her.As does Wiest. It’s a little rich to have her play a character in an acting class, considering how many acting classes she’s given over the years, onstage and on film. Still, it’s a great pleasure to watch her make Meryl’s innocence and bloodthirstiness equally believable, equally fresh. The same age as her character, with more than 50 years of theater behind her, Wiest nevertheless seems to be discovering herself each moment, in material that can’t make that easy.The difficulty, though occasionally an indulgence — even at just 105 minutes, “Scene Partners” could stand a 10-minute trim — is also the play’s great distinction. And Chavkin, while maintaining the level of stylishness that has become her trademark in musicals like “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” is careful not to flatten its extremes. Her rigorous production commits to both cold stretches and warm ones, ripe satire (a nimble supporting cast covers dozens of characters) and barely spoken tragedy. Sometimes — as in scenes with Johanna Day (excellent) as Meryl’s sister — the crosscurrents shift so quickly you don’t know which kind you’re in.Perhaps what we feel tugging at us in those moments is the undertow of addiction and abuse in the story — subjects Caswell has also touched on in his two previous major New York outings, “Wet Brain” and “Man Cave.” Both embraced the surreal as a way of repairing and elevating what appear to be unimportant, unsalvageable lives. Yet by ricocheting off others, in an absurd plane if necessary, they may achieve a kind of magnificence.Indeed, when an interviewer, suspicious of Meryl’s story, asks if she’s ever heard of delusions of grandeur, she answers: “Oh yes, and they can be so helpful!” Without them, we might not have grandeur (or plays, or great actors) at all.Scene PartnersThrough Dec. 17 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      ‘Waiting for Godot’ Review: Old Friends Falling in and Out of Sync

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      Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks star in Arin Arbus’s pandemic-delayed production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.Samuel Beckett left as little as possible to chance when he wrote “Waiting for Godot,” a play that, 70 years after its first production, usually looks substantially the same: the country road, the withered tree, the battered boots arranged at the top of Act II with “heels together, toes splayed.” In his stage directions, Beckett spent 195 words choreographing some horseplay involving hats.Live performance itself, then, would be the wild card. And so it proved on Saturday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where Michael Shannon is starring as Estragon (a.k.a. Gogo) opposite Paul Sparks as Vladimir (a.k.a. Didi). The two actors are old friends playing old friends, yet through the whole first act there wasn’t the faintest glint of chemistry between them.It was deadening to the production, and baffling for anyone who has admired Shannon’s and Sparks’s work separately or together, onstage or onscreen; I, for one, treasure the memory of them in Craig Wright’s “Lady” Off Broadway 15 years ago. Here their performances sprang into three dimensions only with the arrival, shortly before intermission, of a Boy (a lovely Toussaint Francois Battiste), who brings a message from Godot.I have no idea whether I caught the show on an off night, or if after merely a week of previews the production was still somewhat underbaked. But the inertness of Act I gave way to a high-energy Act II — rather denting the idea that one day in the nearly featureless void of Didi and Gogo’s existence is practically indistinguishable from another, but thank goodness anyway.From then on, Shannon and Sparks were in sync as scruffy, aimless, quarreling clowns who fail anew, by each fresh sunset, the test of being human. Buffeted by love and loathing, Didi and Gogo prefer to do their languishing together.“We always find something, eh Didi,” Gogo says, “to give us the impression we exist?”Arin Arbus’s pandemic-delayed production for Theater for a New Audience lacks a discernible interpretation that we can grab onto, or that can grab onto us. But it does make striking use of the space, with a paved, two-lane road (by Riccardo Hernández) running downhill from the middle of the upstage wall to the back of the auditorium. The double yellow line in the center of the road — denoting a no-passing zone — could also be decoded as a no-dying zone. From the first moments of the play to the last, Didi and Gogo speak of ending their lives, but their passing is not to be.Under merciless sunlight (by Christopher Akerlind), Shannon is a crabbed and shambling Gogo, fidgety and peckish, bedeviled by ill-fitting boots. (Costumes are by Susan Hilferty.) Though Shannon does a bit of comic tumbling on the road, he also sometimes barely has to move to land a laugh, his remarkable gestural efficiency combining with a marvelous dryness of tone.Sparks, meanwhile, brings buoyancy to Didi’s roughness, and a palpable, if bizarro, human center. Inspecting the amnesiac Gogo’s legs for proof of an attack the day before, Didi is ebullient when he finds it: “There’s the wound! Beginning to fester!”A chunk of a scene in Act II, involving Didi, Gogo and their only passers-by — the vicious Pozzo (Ajay Naidu) and the man he has enslaved, Lucky (a vivid Jeff Biehl) — would get bigger laughs if the blocking allowed more than half the house a view of the actors’ faces. A sightline worry throughout the performance is the road itself, whose incline puts some audience members at an awkward angle to the action.This “Godot” comes at a time so fraught that real-world resonances ambush us in the most unexpected shows, so it’s odd that that doesn’t happen here, or didn’t to me. Yet in some ways we are all Didi and Gogo, victims and onlookers — perpetrators, too — in the barbarism of the world.Weary of brutal cycles that keep repeating, they despair of their ability to alter the course.“I can’t go on like this,” Gogo says.And Didi tells him: “That’s what you think.”Waiting for GodotThrough Dec. 3 at Theater for a New Audience, Manhattan; tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      in Television

      In ‘Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,’ Aubrey Plaza Steps in the Ring

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      The actress makes her stage debut alongside Christopher Abbott in an Off Broadway revival of John Patrick Shanley’s compact and combative play.Nursing beers and munching on pretzels, Danny and Roberta are sitting at neighboring tables in a Bronx bar as Hall & Oates’s slinky hit “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” booms out of the jukebox. “Where do you dare me/To draw the line?/You’ve got the body/Now you want my soul,” the song goes, as if laying out a playbook for the complicated courtship that they are about to enact.These two hopeless loners are the only people in the bar in this Off Broadway revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Though modest in scale, the show is one of the fall’s hottest thanks to its stars, Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott. Plaza, who is making her stage debut, has seen her screen career shift to a higher gear in the past few years, with acclaimed performances in the film “Emily the Criminal” and Season 2 of “The White Lotus.”It’s easy to see why she and Abbott (an in-demand actor since making a name as the boyfriend of Allison Williams’s character on “Girls”) decided to do Shanley’s compact piece. Since its premiere, in 1984, the play has become a favorite of actors looking for audition monologues or mettle-testing exercises. Shanley’s writing sometimes devolves into hard-boiled mannerisms, but it also has a sharp pugnaciousness. As the story progresses, cracks appear in the barrage of hostilities, as the characters reveal flashes of circumspect vulnerability. Similarly, Abbott and Plaza’s performances move beyond histrionics and gain confidence as their characters start letting themselves feel.When Danny and Roberta finally strike up a conversation, it immediately reveals their combustible approaches to life itself. She is a 31-year-old divorced mother who is unhappily living with her parents. He is 29, and informs Roberta that he plans to kill himself when he turns 30. (He puts it in blunter terms; most of the play’s best lines are laced with profanity.)As quickly as their push-pull attraction is made clear, we realize that the characters’ default attack mode is a manifestation of their pain and self-loathing: Danny doesn’t know how to express himself without resorting to violence (we learn he recently beat up a man and left him for dead); Roberta is haunted by a traumatic episode that has filled her with soul-sapping guilt. The big question, then, is whether they will stop snarling long enough to realize solace is possible.Abbott and Plaza are more at ease with their roles and with each other as their characters try to navigate the possibility of trust and emotional intimacy, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis early Shanley work feels like a matrix of some of the playwright’s themes: Guilt is also at the heart of his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Doubt: A Parable” (a 2004 play that is being revived on Broadway in February), and a romance between two prickly people is central to his screenplay for the 1987 film “Moonstruck.”“Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” also bears quite a few markers of a certain kind of gritty theater from the 1970s and ’80s, centering as it does on bruised working-class characters whose lives are permeated with brutality. The New York Times review of the original production, which starred John Turturro and June Stein, mentions that as Danny, Turturro skillfully elicited laughs from the audience. Mores concerning depictions of and reactions to abuse have considerably shifted since then, and levity is mostly absent from Jeff Ward’s production, aside from some isolated line readings.Tonally, the show struggles most to nail the first scene, which is nearly always at top volume. The characters can’t decide if they will throttle or embrace each other. We get it, but we still have to buy their picking the second option, and Abbott and Plaza don’t click enough at that point to entirely sell that scenario.Fortunately their performances deepen in parallel with the accord between Roberta and Danny. Fittingly for a play subtitled “An Apache Dance,” after a type of belle epoque ruffians, the production’s turning point is a wordless danced transition: they push and pull, fight their attraction and give in to it. They end up in her room, where they have sex. (The movement direction is by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber; Scott Pask designed the appropriately dingy set.)As Roberta and Danny gingerly try to navigate the possibility of trust and emotional intimacy, the actors are more at ease with their roles and with each other. It is a testament to their skill that they are better at listening than at yelling.Yes, Danny’s final turnaround stretches credibility close to its breaking point, and the way he finally pierces Roberta’s abscess of shame and fury is rather over the top — not to mention the idea that a physical remedy would shock a psychic wound into healing. But by then Abbott and Plaza have made us care enough for these two misfits that we are ready to believe that maybe, just maybe, they can get a break.Danny and the Deep Blue SeaThrough Jan. 7 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; dannyandthedeepbluesea.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      Curtains Down, Bottoms Up: When the Show Ends, the Night’s Just Getting Started

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      “Dead Letter No. 9,” “Cocktail Magique” and “Hypnotique” are offering theatergoers a taste of nightlife.A funny thing happened at Dead Letter No. 9, a new performance space in Brooklyn. It was just after 10 p.m. on a Saturday in late October. The evening’s show had finished, but the audience wouldn’t leave — crowding instead into the adjoining bar for cocktails, mocktails and flatbreads.Though New York City has its cabaret spaces and piano bars, theater and nightlife mostly occupy separate addresses. Blame temperament or real estate or the lingering effects of cabaret laws (finally repealed in 2017), which required a license to allow patrons to dance, but in general those who long for a drink and a show at the same time have had to settle for overpriced chardonnay in sippy cups. Ah, the glamour.New shows and new venues are blurring those lines. Though I am a lady with a hilariously low tolerance for alcohol who likes to be in bed just as the cable TV shows are getting good, I attended three of these performances over the last few weeks, trading a good night’s sleep for this superabundant approach (drinks, snacks, dance, card tricks, elaborate lingerie) to evening entertainment.Audience members sit facing the stage at “Cocktail Magique.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesStrong cocktails complement the dance routines at the show.Justin J Wee for 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