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      ‘Back to the Future’ Review: The DeLorean Crash Lands on Broadway

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      The addition of 17 songs turns the 1985 sci-fi classic into a big “why?” musical with a big wow factor.The brand-extension musical is a tough genre to game, demanding something new for newcomers yet fidelity for fans. (“Hairspray” succeeded; “Frozen” did not.) “Back to the Future: The Musical,” based on the first of the time-travel films in the billion-dollar franchise, faces an additional hurdle: It hinges on a star performance that would seem to be irreproducible onstage.And by star, I of course mean the car.So, good news: In the Broadway adaptation, which opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden Theater, the famously souped-up DeLorean DMC, or a life-size replica thereof, is terrific — in some ways more exciting than the one in the movies because it does its tricks live.Well, partly live. The time-warping, plutonium-powered joy rides that shuttle young Marty McFly (Casey Likes) between 1985 and 1955 in the vehicle retrofitted by the eccentric Doc Brown (Roger Bart) are crafty illusions combining mechanical action, busy projections and a lot of distraction with fog, lights and sound.Alas, that also describes the rest of the show, directed by John Rando with Doc-like frenzy: mechanical, busy, distracting, foggy. Though large, it’s less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.Certainly the musical’s book, by Bob Gale, sticks as close to his 1985 screenplay (written with Robert Zemeckis, the movie’s director) as stagecraft and current-day taste permit. The Libyans who threaten Doc Brown are gone, swapped for radiation poisoning, which as yet has no defenders.But Marty is still the same frustrated would-be rock ’n’ roller, stuck in cookie-cutter, Reagan-era Hill Valley, Calif. — and, worse, in a family of beaten-down losers. When Doc’s DeLorean accidentally transports the teenager to 1955, during the exact week in which George McFly (his patsy father) and Lorraine (his boozing mother) fell in love at a high school dance, his presence threatens to create a causal paradox, interfering with their courtship and erasing his own existence.Roger Bart, left, as Doc Brown and Casey Likes as Marty McFly with a life-size replica of the souped-up DeLorean DMC from the film.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou wouldn’t expect the adapters to change that; the working out of the paradox is the best thing about the screenplay. Nor would you expect them to drop Doc’s unaccountably beloved catchphrase, “Great Scott,” though invoking it 13 times is perhaps a dozen times too many.Still, you might hope that something in the musical, for instance music, would change the way the material lands. It doesn’t. The numbers carried over from the movie and performed by Marty at that high school dance — including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Huey Lewis and the News’s “The Power of Love” — are of course effective as ensemble opportunities. But neither they nor most of the 17 new songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, though tuneful and in a few cases rousing, do anything different from what the movie did anyway. Like Silvestri’s John Williams-y main title music, repurposed here as a brief overture, they are too generic for that.The exceptions underline the problem. One is “Gotta Start Somewhere,” a song for Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955 who we already know will run for mayor 30 years later. That nice but underfed idea from the screenplay becomes a can’t-help-but-smile barnburner here, with a classic musical theater theme (underdog dreams big) sparking a classic musical theater performance (by Jelani Remy). Similarly, “My Myopia,” the appealingly peculiar song that introduces George in 1955, creates the illusion of depth (“My myopia is my utopia”) from a plot hole.Rando’s staging of that number is not ideal; though George (Hugh Coles) is supposedly peeping at Lorraine from a tree, it looks more like he’s in a rowboat made of leaves. And Lorraine (Liana Hunt) apparently misunderstands the physics of reflection because she’s using her open bedroom window as a mirror.It’s a rare visual misstep for Tim Hatley, the show’s set and costume designer, who has generally provided astonishingly satisfying theatrical versions of the movie’s settings and — with the sound designer Gareth Owen, the lighting designers Tim Lutkin and Hugh Vanstone, the video designer Finn Ross and the illusion designer Chris Fisher — those surprisingly old-fashioned newfangled effects.The inventiveness and surprise of the climactic sequence — we see Doc climbing the crucial clock tower in a hilariously fake layering of live action behind a scrim and animation projected onto it — makes the show’s obsessive concern with faithfulness elsewhere feel like a cheap compromise.And yet it’s not really faithful. The movie is carefully balanced in tone; the musical is dialed up uniformly to 88 m.p.h. Coles, a carry-over from the 2021 London production, which won the 2022 Olivier award for best new musical, essentially duplicates and then vastly exaggerates Crispin Glover’s already exaggerated George. Bart, too idiosyncratic merely to copy the idiosyncrasies of the movie’s Christopher Lloyd, instead adds a descant of commentary atop them, sometimes seeming to extemporize a different show entirely. And Likes, though not at all reminiscent of the expert Michael J. Fox in the movie — in tribute to whom there’s a nice Easter egg — is given nothing new to do except sing, which he does very well.Jelani Remy, center, as Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955, performing “Gotta Start Somewhere.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat the problems of musical adaptation, even when solved, come to define the production — good workarounds are not the same as good work — suggests the “Why?” problem at its heart. Why, other than the opportunity to rake in a gazillion more dollars, make a musical out of a movie that clearly does not want you to?I say that because, like most pop science fiction, “Back to the Future” resists (and barely benefits from) deepening. Its plot is necessarily complex and its characters compensatorily flat — instead of, preferably for a musical, the other way around. The movie’s two hours were barely enough to tell the story; to tell it in about two-and-a-half, while leaving room for those 17 new songs, everything else has been cut to the bone, with no room for subtlety, let alone expressivity. Why then bother with the songs in the first place?Making material shallower, even if cleverly, is not a great argument for adaptation. It can be defended if some other value is countervailing. For me, the show’s stagecraft and general high spirits come closest to providing that value, but they are too often undone by 1955-ish ideas of Broadway style (cartwheeling cheerleaders, backflipping jocks) and 1985-ish plot points held over from the movie. The Libyans may be gone, but the story still valorizes a peeping Tom and suggests that a white boy introduced “Johnny B. Goode” three years before a Black man actually wrote it. That’s what we call a caucausal paradox.Though much praised at the time of its release and more recently beatified as one of the all-time greats, the movie, with its implicit consumerism and win-at-all-costs ethos, has always struck some people — including Glover — as morally hollow. One of the sour notes in the musical is the way it sings the same tune. Still, in this first post-“Phantom of the Opera” season, I have to admit that the car alone might be worth a ticket. It fills a deep Broadway longing for large objects performing audience flyovers — and, like the dear departed arthritic chandelier, may be doing so for the foreseeable future.Back to the Future: The MusicalAt the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; backtothefuturemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Cat Kid Comic Club’ Review: Tiny, Big Imaginations

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      In a musical based on works by the creator of Captain Underpants, an anthropomorphic feline urges young swamp dwellers (and the polliwogs in the audience) to let their creativity run wild.“Oppenheimer” isn’t the summer’s only work of popular culture in which atomic bombs detonate. The other such production, however, draws laughter and aims for an audience that probably worries more about long division than about nuclear fission.That show is TheaterWorksUSA’s “Cat Kid Comic Club: The Musical,” which opened on Sunday at the Lucille Lortel Theater. This family-oriented romp, set in a swamp “right this minute,” features obstreperous tadpoles, a bionic butterflyfish and a sweet-natured feline hero — all characters that spring from the imagination of Dav Pilkey, the delightfully subversive author of such best-selling children’s graphic-novel series as Captain Underpants and Dog Man. Now the writer and lyricist Kevin Del Aguila, who’s also an actor in “Some Like It Hot,” and the composer Brad Alexander, who in 2019 winningly adapted the Dog Man books for TheaterWorksUSA, have returned to bring Pilkey’s Cat Kid Comic Club series to the stage.The new production begins as the tadpoles, who have been endowed with telekinetic powers, are destroying civilization, but soon morphs into a humorous tale of redemption. Cat Kid (Sonia Roman), a feline friend to all the swamp’s residents, has an antidote to the evil force controlling the polliwogs, and Flippy the fish (Jamie LaVerdiere) adopts them. But when they still prove to be disciplinary challenges, Cat Kid starts the club in the musical’s title, hoping that teaching the tiny frogs to create comics will help tame their behavior.Drawing comics certainly helped Pilkey, who has written about his early attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But just as his irreverent novels dismay some adults, the tadpoles produce comics — all acted out hilariously onstage — that horrify their adoptive father.Curly (Brian Owen) delivers one in which a failed baby superhero inadvertently causes nukes to explode, ending the world. And Poppy (L.R. Davidson) draws “The Cute, Little, Fluffy Cloud of Death,” whose lonely, lisping title character finds friendship with a ghost girl and her skeleton dog. (Emmarose Campbell created the dog; AchesonWalsh Studios did the other ingenious puppets that augment the nimble human cast, and Cameron Anderson designed the inventive set.)Now, parents who think gallows humor is inappropriate for the young may not buy tickets to “Cat Kid.” But they would be depriving their children of not only the wit of the musical’s book and the inventiveness of its numbers — they range from Bon Jovi-esque power ballads to bluegrass to rap — but also of its serious import.In addition to urging its audience to be fearlessly imaginative, the show promotes equity for girls in a subplot involving the combative tadpole Naomi (Markia Nicole Smith) and her smug brother, Melvin (Dan Rosales). The action reveals that Naomi’s prickliness derives partly from having to work harder for the rewards that boys like Melvin take for granted.But the musical, deftly directed and choreographed by Marlo Hunter, also endorses a more global inclusiveness. At one point, Cat Kid announces a lesson on perspective, which led a little boy at the performance I attended to whisper, “What’s perspective?”The show answers by demonstrating how the concept plays a role in society as well as in art. At a time when some communities are banning certain children’s books — Pilkey’s included — “Cat Kid” emphasizes the value of learning about diverse points of view and encouraging creativity in young people. And if what they create makes their parents uncomfortable? It’s not the end of the world.Cat Kid Comic ClubThrough Aug. 27 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; twusa.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      ‘The Notebook’ Musical to Land on Broadway in the Spring

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      The adaptation of the popular Nicholas Sparks romance novel, with music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson, had a well-reviewed run last year in Chicago.“The Notebook,” Nicholas Sparks’s best-selling 1996 novel about a star-crossed couple’s lifelong romance, which was adapted into a 2004 film starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling, will soon arrive in New York in another form: a Broadway musical.The production had a well-reviewed world premiere at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater last fall. Steven Oxman of The Chicago Sun-Times wrote that it represented “a significant leap in artistic quality over its sources, which it respects, while also providing a clear, resonant and unique voice of its own.” He had particular praise for the “poetic” songs, by the indie singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, and the “impressive” onstage rainstorm.Previews are scheduled to begin Feb. 6, and the opening is set for March 14 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, most recently home to “Life of Pi.”The story of the couple, Noah and Allie, is relayed in flashbacks that come to life as the older Noah reads from a notebook detailing their love story to the older Allie, who has dementia. (In a change from the book and the film, the story now begins in the 1960s instead of the 1940s.)In the Chicago production, Allie and Noah were each played by three different actors, who embodied them at various ages. The younger and older versions of the characters often share the stage, with the older couple watching as scenes from their past unfold. (Jordan Tyson and John Cardoza played the teenage Allie and Noah; Joy Woods and Ryan Vasquez depicted them in their late 20s; and Maryann Plunkett and John Beasley played the older versions.)Casting for Broadway has not yet been announced, but one casting change is certain: Beasley, who played the older incarnation of Noah, died in May at 79.The Chicago creative team will return for the Broadway run: Michael Greif (“Dear Evan Hansen,” “Rent”) and Schele Williams (“Aida,” “The Wiz”) will direct, with choreography by Katie Spelman (associate choreographer of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”). Bekah Brunstetter (“This Is Us”) wrote the book, with music and lyrics by Michaelson, a first-time theater composer. It will be produced by Kevin McCollum (“Six,” “The Devil Wears Prada”) and Kurt Deutsch, an executive at Warner Music Group.“The Notebook,” which was Sparks’s first published novel, consistently ranks among the most popular of his more than 20 books. Though the film adaptation — directed by Nick Cassavetes from a screenplay by Jeremy Leven and adapted by Jan Sardi from the novel — received mixed reviews, it became one of the highest-grossing romantic dramas of all time. More

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      ‘Spamalot’ Revival to Open on Broadway This Fall

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      The new production, directed by Josh Rhodes, had a brief run at the Kennedy Center in Washington in May. Casting has not yet been announced.Make way for shrubbery: “Spamalot” is returning to Broadway.The show, a Monty Python-inspired spoof of Arthurian legend, first opened on Broadway in 2005, won the Tony Award for best musical, ran for four years, and has been widely staged since then.This new production, which had a 10-day run in May at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, will be the musical’s first Broadway revival.Previews are scheduled to begin Oct. 31, and the opening is set for Nov. 16 at the St. James Theater. The executive producer will be Jeffrey Finn, who is the Kennedy Center’s vice president of theater producing and programming.“I have been a crazy fan of ‘Spamalot’ since I saw the opening in 2005,” Finn said. “I feel as though in 2023, audiences are really looking for a fun escape and an opportunity to laugh as much as possible, and I believe this show delivers all of that.”The casting for Broadway has not yet been announced; at the Kennedy Center the cast included Alex Brightman, James Monroe Iglehart, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, Rob McClure, Matthew Saldivar, Jimmy Smagula, Michael Urie and Nik Walker.The musical, based on the screenplay for “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” features a book and lyrics by Eric Idle, who was a member of the Monty Python comedy group. The music is by Idle and John Du Prez. Reviewing the original production, The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “resplendently silly” and a “fitful, eager celebration of inanity.”The revival is directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, who will be making his Broadway directing debut; he has worked on Broadway as a performer and choreographer. (Rhodes’s husband, Lee Wilkins, was a replacement swing in the original “Spamalot” company.)Rhodes described “Spamalot” as “a beautiful satire of Broadway, and of the class system,” and said he is excited to introduce Monty Python to a generation of theatergoers who may be unfamiliar with the group’s history and work. “In D.C., there was some sort of incredible energy from the audience that made us realize people were so hungry for this material,” he said. “There was a rowdiness that maybe wasn’t there before, and made it feel very special.”The “Spamalot” revival will be the first production developed by the Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage program to transfer to Broadway; Finn created the program in 2018, and it has evolved from presenting semi-staged concert versions of existing musicals to presenting fully staged, but short-run, productions. The Kennedy Center had a previous history of nurturing work that transferred to Broadway; the last Kennedy Center-produced transfer was a 2014 revival of “Side Show.”A few years ago a movie version of the musical was in the works, but Paramount Pictures, which held the rights to produce it, is no longer pursuing the project, and Idle suggested on Twitter earlier this year that that the film adaptation had been killed. More

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      ‘Let’s Call Her Patty’ Review: Rhea Perlman as an Uptown Matriarch

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      Rhea Perlman stars as a quintessential Upper West Sider in Zarina Shea’s snapshot of affluent, self-flagellating motherhoodShe shops at Zabar’s, does Pilates on Columbus Avenue and resides comfortably in a prewar high rise between West End and Riverside, where she gossips about private lives as though they were front-page news.That she could be any number of women, of some advanced years and moderate means, who live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is suggested by the taxonomic title “Let’s Call Her Patty,” a new play by Zarina Shea that opened on Tuesday night at the Claire Tow Theater, overlooking its subject’s natural habitat.Close your eyes to picture the type, and the production’s star, Rhea Perlman, may spring directly from a sidewalk crack, with her featherweight frame, babka-colored curls and voice like gravel and honey.Patty is introduced to the audience, chopping onions behind a long and luxe marble-topped kitchen island, by her niece Sammy (Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer). Scene-setting banter between the two demonstrates their shorthand intimacy, and Patty’s reflexive tendency to make other people’s business her own (and, more specifically, about her). That notably includes the triumphs but mostly troubles of Patty’s daughter Cecile (Arielle Goldman), an artist who struggles with body image and addiction.Patty’s maternal relationships with Cecile and Sammy are the play’s sources of conflict (Patty’s offstage husband, Hal, we’re told, is “fine”). When Cecile, who appears onstage only in brief interludes, falls out of touch, Patty considers it personal punishment, simultaneously convinced that she’s to blame for her daughter’s problems and defensive at her own accusation. Sammy, a font of patience as she is of exposition, gently suggests, “I think this is not about you.”Of course, she’s right. Patty is presented as a quintessential Jewish mother, but the qualities she exemplifies are not culturally exclusive; anyone who recognizes her narcissism from their family dynamics might appreciate a trigger warning. And yet, the play’s own narrow focus on Patty works to its detriment.The matriarch is little more than an amalgam of stereotypes; that there is truth to them is hardly a revelation. But the play does little to question or disrupt the preconceived notions it assumes New York audiences will have about “an Upper West Side lady” like Patty. Nor does Perlman mine much unseen depth from a character exclusively defined by circumstance.The production, from the director Margot Bordelon, confines Patty behind her cutting board, where she chops imaginary onions without shedding a tear for much of the play’s brief 70 minutes. If this is a character study, Patty’s pungent, messy center is largely withheld from view.Goldman’s Cecile occasionally drags a folding chair onstage to insert herself into her mother’s narrative, trembling like a frazzled live wire. Unfortunately, Cecile is kept at arm’s length from a story in which she seems to have the most compelling inner life. Sammy is likewise sketched mostly in relation to her aunt; that Sammy’s mother-in-law is near death is relevant only insofar as it keeps her from being with Patty.Patty’s co-op apartment, one of her primary distinguishing features, is suggested with chic austerity by Kristen Robinson’s set, reflecting a fixation on wealth that the play seems unsure whether it means to critique. Pivots in focus and time are punctuated with abrupt shifts in lighting (by Oliver Wason) and sound (Sinan Refik Zafar) that drum up tension and surprise the drama otherwise lacks.“Let’s Call Her Patty” gestures toward an oral tradition of storytelling that aims to preserve local, and often endangered, histories. Sammy’s narration acknowledges the Lenape tribe, who once lived on the land now occupied by New York City, and suggests that one day it will all be underwater. Dutifully recording for posterity the era of the affluent and self-flagellating mother seems to be as much an act of ambivalence as of love.Let’s Call Her PattyThrough Aug. 27 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Review: This ‘Summer Stock’ Cast Is Having a Blast

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      The Goodspeed Opera House takes on Charles Walters’s 1950 film with zest and humor.At this point we have been burned by many musical adaptations of beloved movies, and reactions have ranged from “Why did they even bother?” to “Dear God, please make it stop.” So it was with some trepidation that I traveled to the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut to check out its take on Charles Walters’s “Summer Stock,” from 1950.The movie’s plot in shorthand: Gene Kelly and Judy Garland put on a show in a barn, and then she sings “Get Happy” at the end. Naturally, that last exhortation pops up in the world-premiere stage version (twice, even) currently running in East Haddam, but it is easy to take to heart: The show may not be perfect, but its craftsmanship, zest and good humor — which are deceivingly hard to achieve without falling into bland cheerleading and forced joy — are perfectly dosed and on target.The book writer Cheri Steinkellner stuck to the movie’s spirit rather than its letter, though she wisely did not mess with the central conceit: A group of theater kids led by the director Joe Ross (Corbin Bleu, last seen on Broadway in the 2019 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate”) find themselves rehearsing a musical on the struggling farm of one Jane Falbury (Danielle Wade).A notable change is that in the director-choreographer Donna Feore’s production, the local businessman and Jane’s sort-of antagonist, Jasper Wingate, has become the stern Mrs. Wingate (Veanne Cox, in supreme form), who wants to take over our heroine’s land to create “the largest commercial farming operation in the Connecticut River Valley.” The Wingate heir is still an oaf named Orville (Will Roland, from “Be More Chill”), but this time around he has a secret — no, not that one. When Jane must find money to save her farm, Joe suggests using his show for a benefit.In the movie, Jane’s barn looks to be of an average New England size from the outside, but magically turns out to be capacious enough to accommodate big numbers. In contrast, the Goodspeed building is impressively large when you walk up to it, but the theater nestled within only has about 400 seats and a fairly small stage, lending “Summer Stock” a welcome intimacy and suggesting the gee-whiz enthusiasm the story requires.Steinkellner and Feore know when to update, when to leave well enough alone, and when to have it both ways. In the reprise of “Get Happy,” for example, the ensemble wears the same black suits and coral shirts as in the movie, though now we also get amusing explanations for how Jane ended up in a fedora and a tuxedo jacket, and how the painted background acquired its pink hue. Hint: The beefed-up character of Jane’s sister (Arianna Rosario) has a hand, or foot, in both.But what really makes this “Summer Stock” pop is its cast, which appears to be having a blast — another element that is too often missing. Bleu, who got his start portraying a young basketball star in the “High School Musical” franchise, has become a terrific interpreter of golden-age fare. His athleticism and deceptively casual nonchalance allow him to effortlessly lead energetic dance numbers like “Dig for Your Dinner,” and his voice has matured into a warm baritone that works wonders on “It Had to Be You” (one of the too many songs added to the show). As Jane, Wade can’t quite summon up the same firepower, but they still make a fine couple.Chewing up the barn with great gusto, Cox, Roland and J. Anthony Crane (playing the hammy, vain thespian Montgomery Leach) leave behind contrails of laughter every time they exit the stage. As Garland sang in another classic “let’s put on a show!” movie, “Girl Crazy”: Who could ask for anything more?Summer StockThrough Aug. 27 at the Goodspeed Opera House, East Haddam, Conn.; goodspeed.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Amour,’ Putting a Palme d’Or Winner Onstage

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      An adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 movie at the Salzburg Festival eschews cinematic realism, instead taking a highly stylized approach.“How can I speak of love when I’m dead?” runs a powerful line in “Amour,” a stage adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 film that premiered on Sunday at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria.Love and death are, of course, the two great themes of art, but rarely have they been brought together so hauntingly as in Haneke’s film, a portrait of an elderly couple forced to confront the issue of when life is no longer worth living. Told in Haneke’s characteristically severe style, the film earned the Austrian director both a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar for best foreign language film.Karin Henkel, the adaptation’s director, eschews the film’s realism, opting instead for a highly stylized and self-consciously artificial staging that achieves its visceral impact through a combination of Brechtian estrangement techniques, emotionally naked performances and biographical monologues written by onstage extras.Henkel scored a triumph in Salzburg two summers ago with “Richard the Kid and the King,” a sweeping epic of Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty monarch that ran to four hours. The German director’s “Amour” — a co-production with the Münchner Kammerspiele theater, in Munich, where it will run in late October — is as affectingly tender as her earlier Salzburg outing was grimly savage.At the beginning of the production, the stage is dominated by a white tunnel, whose pristine, antiseptic interior is progressively sullied: Its walls written on with watery black paint, its floor stained by thick black ink that trickles onto the performers, and mounds of dry earth that fall in heaps from the ceiling. One of the characters reclines on a metal-frame hospital bed that begins to resemble a medieval torture device when operated by a zealous nurse.The tunnel, with its clinical associations, is eventually dismantled, revealing an unadorned stage strewn with an assortment of chairs, a piano, microphone stands and stage lights. Muriel Gerstner’s stage design is a constant negotiation between sterile everyday objects (harshly lit by Stephan Mariani) and elemental imagery of earth, water and flowers.Like the film, however, this reimagining of “Amour” is anchored by its two central performances. Unlike the film, which starred two aging French cinema greats, the stage version is ignited by a dose of counterintuitive casting.Jung is 69 and Bach, 38. In Haneke’s movie, the actors who played their characters were in their mid-80s. Matthias HornKatharina Bach, who is just 38, brings unexpected vitality and deep pathos to her portrayal of Anne, an elderly music teacher who is paralyzed by a stroke. (Emmanuelle Riva was in her mid-80s when she played the same role in Haneke’s movie.) Bach’s is a fitful and tormented performance, marked by intense physical and dramatic control. As Georges, Anne’s still-vigorous husband, André Jung, 69, brings an embittered and defiant spirit that is a thoughtful departure from Jean-Louis Trintignant’s pained and subtle performance in the film.The German-language stage adaptation, by Henkel and the dramaturg Tobias Schuster, hews closely to the French screenplay. At the same time, they employ strategies to defamiliarize the piece. The dialogue is heightened by frequent, often uncanny repetition. And many of the script’s stage directions are read out loud by two actors, Joyce Sanhá and Christian Löber, whose limber performances — as narrators, nurses and other characters — add to the production’s anxious, off-kilter energy.Henkel’s greatest gamble is including a twelve-person chorus of nonprofessional extras. Each of them is old, infirm or in mourning, and, although they don’t speak much onstage, they have written moving testimonies about living with health conditions, or losing loved ones to illness that are recited as monologues by the main cast. In the wrong directorial hands, this sort of intervention could easily have curdled into sentimentality. Here, however, the emotional charge of these testimonies is balanced by understatement and restraint. By a similar token, the production’s depiction and discussion of euthanasia, while sometimes shocking, resists moralizing.Hovering somewhere between the cast of extras and the main performers is the actress Nine Manthei, a little girl who acts as an ambiguous intermediary. Is she a protecting angel? The personification of Anne’s soul? Along with Bach’s skillful performance, Manthei’s poise and onstage presence suggests a double exposure of Anne as an old woman and a child.“Old age might be tragic, but it is not individual,” we hear Haneke’s voice say in an excerpt from an interview about “Amour” that plays during the production.More than a decade ago, Haneke employed his formal austerity and emotional restraint to immerse us in one elderly couple’s tragedy. But where film encourages realism, theater can embrace allegory and abstraction. With her sensitive, at times idiosyncratic, approach to this same material, Henkel uses her theatrical artistry to reach the universal.AmourThrough Aug. 10 at the Salzburg Festival, in Salzburg, Austria; salzburgerfestspiele.at. More

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      ‘The Half-God of Rainfall’ Review: Basketball Under the Heavens

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      Borrowing its powers from Greek and Yoruba mythologies, Inua Ellams’s play tells the story of a demigod who becomes an N.B.A. superstar.Turning verse into action is tricky, especially with ideas as lofty as the ones in Inua Ellams’s epic poem “The Half-God of Rainfall,” now appearing in theatrical guise at New York Theater Workshop.The poem is a melodious, sky-high tale of a basketball superstar born as a result of a celestial contest between the Greek and Yoruba gods of thunder, Zeus and Sango. But the stage adaptation, which opened on Monday, runs into some flaws that, while not fatal, strand this Nigerian writer’s work in the mortal realm.A storm of plot and themes is squeezed into an intermission-less 90 minutes: After defeating Sango (Jason Bowen) in a race, Zeus (Michael Laurence) has his pick of Sango’s subjects. To Hera’s (Kelley Curran) defeated disdain, Zeus rapes Modúpé (Jennifer Mogbock), a Nigerian woman, and soon the mixed-race half-god Demi (Mister Fitzgerald) is born.Neighborhood boys ostracize Demi, who can turn the soil to swamp with his tears. But he gradually comes into his powers and makes his way to the Golden State Warriors, learning about other demigods who had to suppress their own supernatural talents on the court. Demi’s growing celebrity eventually lands him face to face with Zeus, providing a chance to avenge his mother.As the deities Elegba and Osún (Lizan Mitchell and Patrice Johnson Chevannes, fantastic as always) narrate Demi’s ascent to sports stardom, they intersperse meditations on the gendered violence that permeates Greek mythology, and later, on the imperialist violence the West perpetrated to obscure African traditions.Ellams’s scope is staggering, and he mostly pulls it off. Each line, heavy with information and emotion, is shot back and forth by the able actors, who turn Ellams’s vibrant, poetic flow into a nonstop athletic match.But there are few scenes of interactions between characters — instead presentational, narration-driven exposition makes up the bulk of the play. And Taibi Magar’s direction displays an uncertain grasp over whether the piece should play naturally or at a distance: There’s the work’s traditional methods of self-aware, oral storytelling — having the cast address the audience, and change into Linda Cho’s athleisure costumes onstage — and the production’s sumptuous, almost immersive elements, courtesy of Stacey Derosier’s lighting, Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound and especially Tal Yarden’s gorgeous projections.Though Orlando Pabotoy’s fluid movement direction, along with Beatrice Capote’s Orisha choreography, strikes a powerful balance between the seamless and more Brechtian styles, the production finds itself stuck between them.I was reminded of Ellams’s “Icarus,” a short piece presented during the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival in 2021. It transformed the parable into the heartbreaking tale of a young Nigerian refugee who, detained at an Italian entry point, takes to the sky. Recited by just two performers, the work, in its simplicity, soared. The poignancy and concision left me wanting a one-by-one re-envisioning of Greek mythology through a contemporary African diasporic lens.Ellams certainly has it in him to assemble a universe of distinctive characters connected by their shared humanity, as he proved in his globe-trotting play “Barber Shop Chronicles.” But here, his ideas, vast and evocative as they are on the page, overwhelm the story onstage, and the sheer amount of talking at the audience becomes draining. Ninety minutes becomes too long for one solidly conveyed story; too short for an entire pantheon of players.His interest in and approach to mixing and remixing Western and African traditions is fascinating, however. This is a writer whose intuitive understanding of the common threads of tradition, globalization and human instinct could very well create a new mythological tapestry for our interwoven times.The Half-God of RainfallThrough Aug. 20 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More