Theater (Off Broadway)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      ‘Stomp’ to Close in New York in January

      by

      The long-running stage show has been a part of the city’s theatrical landscape for nearly 29 years.“Stomp,” the long-running show that repurposed mundane items like brooms and metal garbage can lids to create a gritty percussive stage spectacle, will close in New York on Jan. 8, the show announced on Tuesday. Its North American and European tours will continue to run.Created and directed by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, “Stomp” made an immediate splash when it opened at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village on Feb. 27, 1994.The wordless show “is banged, tapped, swished, clicked and clomped by eight choreographed percussionists,” Stephen Holden wrote in his 1994 review for The New York Times. “A modern vaudeville revue with a rock-and-roll heart, it is part tap-dance display (using some of the heaviest taps ever attached to shoes), part military drill, part swinging street festival.”The New York production is ending its run because of declining ticket sales, the show said.The news comes on the heels of the closings of long-running Broadway shows like “Come From Away” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” and the news that Broadway’s longest-running show, “The Phantom of the Opera,” will play its final performance in April. All of those shows cited the damage done by the lengthy pandemic lockdown, and the fact that audiences have not fully returned.When “Stomp” closes, it will have played 13 previews and 11,472 regular performances.“While we’re sad to see it close at the Orpheum Theater, we couldn’t be prouder of the impact that ‘Stomp’ has had — and will continue to have — as the tours run both here and in Europe,” the producers said in a statement announcing the closure.Few shows have had such staying power, let alone widespread popularity around the globe — with performances reaching the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Japan and Norway, among dozens of other locales. There was a time when it was difficult to escape the troupe of performers, who showed up at the Academy Awards, on TV in a “‘Stomp’ Out Litter” public service announcement filmed across New York City and at President Bill Clinton’s millennium New Year celebration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.In 2019, the show celebrated its 25th anniversary. It shut down just over a year later, in March 2020, in response to the coronavirus and later became one of the first Off Broadway productions to resume performances when it returned to the stage in July 2021. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘Becky Nurse of Salem’ Brings the Witches but Forgets the Magic

      by

      Deirdre O’Connell shines as a modern-day descendant of an accused witch in Sarah Ruhl’s unfocused new play at Lincoln Center Theater.A wax statue of a 17th-century Salem woman stands at the center of the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater’s spare stage. We’re in the Salem Museum of Witchcraft, and this woman, wearing a fearsome scowl and a black frock, was one of the victims of the town’s infamous witch trials.If that brings to mind your English class lesson on Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” or what Becky, a Salem museum tour guide, dismissively refers to as her town’s “goddamn Christmas pageant,” that’s part of the intention of this new Sarah Ruhl play, “Becky Nurse of Salem.” The Lincoln Center Theater production, which was directed by Rebecca Taichman and opened on Sunday, brings in the witches but forgets the magic.Becky (Deirdre O’Connell), who introduces herself to the audience as descendant of the wax woman, Rebecca Nurse, goes off script delivering a colorful, expletive-ridden summary of Miller’s work to a tour group. On another tour, she sets the record straight on “The Crucible”: Abigail, the young woman who supposedly seduced the older, married John Proctor, wasn’t 17 as rendered in the play, but 11. And that one of Miller’s personal inspirations for the work was his lust for the younger Marilyn Monroe.After Becky is fired for her improvisations, she turns to a local witch (Candy Buckley) for help. One spell leads to another, and soon Becky is magically manipulating her interpersonal relationships, including those with her longtime friend (and crush) Bob (Bernard White) and her granddaughter, Gail (Alicia Crowder), who has been hospitalized for depression.When Becky isn’t dealing with the repercussions of using hocus-pocus to fix her life, she’s conversing with her dead daughter or stepping into Rebecca’s memories. And the play is strongest in these scenes, when it bridges Rebecca Nurse’s witch trial with Becky Nurse’s contemporary witchcraft.O’Connell, left, and Alicia Crowder as Gail. Riccardo Hernández’s spare set design leaves a lot to the imagination.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn her afterword to the play, Ruhl (“In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play,” “The Clean House”) writes, “I thought that I would end up writing my own historical drama about the Salem witch trials, but every time I tried to dip my toe into the 17th century my pen came back and told me to stay in my own era.” That bit of authorial indeterminacy, unfortunately, is apparent in the script, whose disparate elements are like individual puzzle pieces rather than one cohesive portrait.The technical elements also feel incongruous. The folky original music, composed by the singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche, is too sentimental for the show’s tone. And the lighting, a range of flashy disco-magic hues and otherworldly flickering designed by Barbara Samuels, comes across as too enchanting for a staging that is short on whimsy. Riccardo Hernández’s set design leaves a lot to the imagination — a large black feathered wing is suspended from the ceiling, while an unadorned stage with a cedar clapboard back wall evokes the forest.Set during the Trump presidency, “Becky Nurse of Salem” obliquely comments on the ways women are portrayed and judged in society. The most exciting part of this work is halfway through, when the cast, all in Puritan garb, circle Becky, now Rebecca, chanting “lock her up.” Suddenly the play becomes frightening, the stakes more immediate. But soon the references are dropped and the play moves on.Then there are Becky’s more existential issues: She feels trapped in her hometown, facing limited job prospects, being in love with her married best friend, and trying to raise a granddaughter. Also in the mix is opioid addiction, which has rocked Becky’s family.The more realistic bits of Becky’s story feel like little more than loose sketches of characters and circumstances, and there’s a lack of chemistry among cast members. Her boss at the museum, Shelby (Tina Benko), is a sneering academic with little empathy. Bob is the sweet friend who’s always loved her. Gail is the grieving teenager who wants to both connect with and liberate herself from Becky. And Stan (Julian Sanchez), Gail’s new morose, goth boyfriend, seems to be there to provide another conflict in Gail and Becky’s relationship.O’Connell, who won a Tony this year for her performance in Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.,” elevates the not quite three-dimensional Becky, giving her a rough-around-the-edges New England charm — along with the nasal, r-dropping accent to match.The production, under Taichman’s tepid direction, is full of short scenes whose transitions have the cast quickly and unceremoniously rolling furniture on and off the set. O’Connell carries much of the humor, but otherwise the show’s comic timing is oddly off, and flat attempts at laughs, like the witch’s unique pronunciations of words like “oil” (“ull”), are unrelenting.In its final minutes, “Becky Nurse of Salem” tries to wrest its themes together via a heartfelt monologue and a cloying ritual. But by that time it’s too late. The play spends two hours dancing around a vaguely defined feminist message. That’s the very problem in this production: It hasn’t figured out the spell that will bring real magic to the stage.Becky Nurse of SalemThrough Dec. 31 at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Sandra,’ a Search for a Friend Leads to Self-Discovery

      by

      In the playwright David Cale’s thriller, a woman looking for a vanished friend discovers a new sense of self.David Cale’s new play, “Sandra,” is packed with classic thriller tropes, as if he had challenged himself to cram as many of the genre’s staples as possible into a 90-minute show — I kept waiting for someone to transfer information from a computer to a USB key as seconds ticked by.Though this tale of a woman’s search for a missing friend is built using basic potboiler blocks, “Sandra,” which opened Sunday at the Vineyard Theater, is far from generic.Cale is operating, as he has been for over 35 years, within the parameters of the monologue — a style demanding of writer and actor, and not one usually associated with white-knuckle suspense. He also weaves in the themes that have long permeated his work, including the way people reinvent themselves, often to deal with trauma, and the need for transformation in the face of adversity.The playwright usually performs his own shows, but here he is lending his voice to another actor, as he did with his 2017 hit, “Harry Clarke,” which starred Billy Crudup and introduced Cale to a wider audience.Marjan Neshat (“English,” “Wish You Were Here”) plays all the characters, chief among them the narrator, Sandra Jones, a woman in her 40s who owns a cafe in Brooklyn and is vaguely dissatisfied with her life. One day, a close friend, a musician named Ethan, leaves for a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; he never returns. Ethan’s compositions live on with Sandra (the lovely piano score is by Matthew Dean Marsh, Cale’s collaborator on the 2019 play with music “We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time”), who listens to them often. But physically, it’s as if he has vanished off the face of the earth.Our heroine decides to look for him, jumping on the first of several flights she will take over the course of the show. Once in Mexico, Sandra — who is separated from her husband and, perhaps, had not realized how emotionally and physically bereft she was — falls for Luca, a younger hunk. He says he’s a student, and glows with a magnetic, insouciant masculinity, with just the right amount of enticing mystery about his background. Luca is a male counterpart to the sultry sirens who have long lured film noir’s male protagonists, and at times it feels as if Cale is having great fun flipping the codes of the 1990s erotic thriller.Though the show’s plot can seem outlandish, Neshat acts as an anchor, infusing Sandra with a perfectly calibrated balance of effortless warmth.Sara KrulwichLeigh Silverman’s sober staging can dull the impact of the show’s suspenseful set pieces, as when Sandra surreptitiously searches a bag while its owner is in the shower, or when she stealthily records an incriminating conversation on her phone. Thom Weaver’s lighting is the great technical asset, romantically moody in the early stages of Sandra and Luca’s relationship, then suggesting the ominous chiaroscuro of film noir when the plot thickens.Neshat mostly stays rooted to a spot, sometimes standing and sometimes sitting, and the show feels uninterested in the body as a storytelling tool. The actress is literally at the center of it all, and has been handed a thorny gift of a role that requires the protean ability to portray a variety of characters, including the manager of Sandra’s cafe, an Australian surfer dude and an older gentleman straight out of a Tennessee Williams play. She struggles to differentiate them, and even Luca does not register much as Neshat goes in and out of his accented “potpourri of a voice.”But she shines as Sandra herself, a woman who was confident enough in her identity to name her cafe after herself but feels adrift, and defined mostly in relation to others. As far-fetched as the plot gets, Neshat is a steadying force, infusing Sandra with a perfectly calibrated balance of anxious hope and effortless warmth — her smile alone is a masterpiece of complexity, in turn melancholy, joyous, triumphant, bittersweet. We immediately understand, for instance, why Sandra throws herself into the relationship with Luca (the reverse is not as convincing).Early on, Sandra informs us that when Ethan was about to depart for Puerto Vallarta, he told her that they were “so simpatico, if I vanish you’d probably disappear from your life too.” Yet Sandra does build herself out of Ethan’s absence, and even, ultimately, her own.SandraThrough Dec. 11 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More