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      No Snoozing Here: This ‘Sleeping Beauty’ Is Gearing Up for a Wild Ride

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      At Abrons Arts Center, a hilarious family show in the British holiday tradition that runs “like a steam train when it goes well.”It was the first time the cast members of “Sleeping Beauty” were rehearsing in their costumes, and they were amped up. “The energy is palpable!” the director Julie Atlas Muz said late last month as the actors gathered onstage at the Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side.They would need that energy, too. “We run like a steam train when it goes well,” said the writer Mat Fraser, who is also Muz’s husband. “And that’s how it has to be.”This “Sleeping Beauty,” after all, is a pantomime, a British theatrical holiday tradition that, at its best, is fast and furious and hilarious.Muz’s first time at a panto, as they are called, was a revelation. “I was like, ‘What is this?’” she said. “I thought it was like a punk-rock concert for kids.”In this telling of the fairy tale, Belle (played by Jordanna James) gets to do a lot more than lie comatose.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesFrom left, Stefanie Gil, Yan Diaz and Jonathan Rodriguez during rehearsal.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesFraser, who is British, introduced Muz, a Detroit native, to the daffy world of pantos — broadly comic versions of classic fairy tales that incorporate such staples as cheeky topical references, groan-inducing puns, an eye-popping color palette, raucous audience interaction, popular songs boasting rewritten lyrics, and liberal amounts of cross-dressing.“I grew up watching my mum be principal boy and my dad often be the baddie,” said Fraser, 61. “Panto is ingrained in my childhood. It was what inspired me to want to do theater.”The couple have had active careers in the theatrical, burlesque and nightlife scenes, but since 2017 they have carved out a niche as the rare people who have been able to crack the panto code in the United States. “Sleeping Beauty” is their third original production at Abrons Arts Center (where it’s running Dec. 2-24) as part of the Panto Project, following “Jack and the Beanstalk” in 2017 and “Dick Rivington & the Cat” in 2021.Mat Fraser adapted the story and Julie Atlas Muz directed the production.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesUnlike many seasonal offerings, the pantos are not just dropped into the schedule but completely integrated into Abrons’s organization and mission. The institution actually plays a role in the life of Muz and Fraser, who live nearby and got married in 2012 on the playhouse’s stage. Muz, 50, also performed in the Basil Twist show “Sisters’ Follies: Between Two Worlds,” a commission to celebrate Abrons’s 100th anniversary in 2015. “I played the ghost of one of the founding sisters and I still really identify with Irene Lewisohn,” she said. “I talk to her and thank her every night.” (Twist handles the Panto Project’s puppet design.)Many of the panto actors — including the children who make up the “babes chorus” — have taken acting classes at Abrons, and 100 free tickets for each panto performance are distributed to people who participate in the various programs run by Abrons’s parent organization, Henry Street Settlement. (The theater’s seating capacity is 240.) “There’s a commitment to making sure that the folks utilizing our services are also able to engage in what’s happening at the Arts Center,” Ali Rosa-Salas, vice president of visual and performing arts, said on the phone. (It’s worth noting that tickets otherwise cost a relatively affordable $41.)Amy Lombard for The New York TimesRoyston Scott as King Crimson.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe show’s costumes were designed by David Quinn.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesWhile the previous Abrons pantos made hay of subjects like gentrification, rising prices and, on a more positive note, welcoming immigrants, “Sleeping Beauty” sticks more closely to the fairy-tale fantasy. “You can sense the cultural shifts,” Muz said, “and I think people need a little bit of escapism right now.”The regular tale has been brushed up, with a Belle (Jordanna James) who gets to do a lot more than lie comatose for most of the story. And of course there are still sly nods to the here and now: A baddie goes by Evil Queen Karen (Muffy Styler) and the saucy traditional dame is called Jenny Lopez (Jonathan Rodriguez).Family affair: The children in the cast make up the “babes chorus,” and many of the panto actors have taken acting classes at Abrons Arts Center.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesAmy Lombard for The New York TimesFraser, who also plays the drums in the show’s band, keeps the repertoire of musical spoofs sharp, too. “I’m frustrated in British pantos when they go ‘Here’s one for the parents’ and it’s a Queen song,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Guys, Queen is for the grandparents! Parents were raving on ecstasy in the ’90s.’ So I like to modernize it and add stuff that would at first seem inappropriate, like ‘Enter Sandman’ by Metallica.”While Fraser and Muz’s usual work tends to be for adult audiences, their pantos are family shows that manage to merge their cool-cat sensibility into the parameters of a genre so highly codified that it has pre-established call-and-response patterns involving the audience members. “They’re talking to you and screaming at you while you’re trying to deliver your lines,” said Jenni Gil, who plays Belle’s friend Lucky, and is in her third Abrons panto.Gil’s experience as a teaching artist in public schools has trained her well to work with young people, but she admits that the pantos can be wild. “I had a moment in last year’s production of ‘Dick Rivington’ where we all had to be super-sad and all the kids were yelling ‘he didn’t do it!’” she said. “It took so much from all of us to not laugh. When we get offstage after those moments, we’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, there is so much joy in theater.’” More

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      Broadway Babies, Singing Show Tunes for Seniors

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      What happened when four young theater actors performed for an older generation? “I was expecting to have the best show ever and that happened.”“Oh, baby, give me one more chance,” sang Corey J, a former Little Michael in the Broadway musical “MJ.” Dressed in a black rimmed hat and a black turtleneck, jacket and pants, he slipped through the explosion of joy that is the chord progression of the Jackson 5 song “I Want You Back.”He had performed the song hundreds of times in the Broadway show, a biographical Michael Jackson jukebox musical, at the Neil Simon Theater. But on this particular afternoon, he was on a much smaller stage: an Upper East Side senior center, where about 50 residents seated in floral chairs clapped along to the beat.The performance was part of a monthly series at the senior living community, Inspir Carnegie Hill, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt was the latest in a monthly series of Broadway-related events staged in the dining room of the senior living community, Inspir Carnegie Hill, by Evan Rossi, its senior director of resident experience, in partnership with the events company Broadway Plus. Though Inspir has hosted numerous events with Broadway actors — including Julie Benko (“Harmony,” “Funny Girl”), Charl Brown (“Motown: The Musical”) and the comedian Alex Edelman (“Just for Us”) — this was the first to feature children actors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      10 Performances That Pushed Emotional Limits

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      For our critic-at-large, the year was marked by the Black excellence of “Purlie Victorious,” the brutality of “Bottoms” and rage of “Beef.”For me, 2023 was a year of entertainment that captured people pushed to their emotional limits, whether that was the rage of two bitter enemies, the desperation of a widow who only sees a future of annihilation or the pent-up aggression of a bunch of high school girls. But it was also a year of colorful, funny and biting Black stories on stages. Throw in a dancing goth, a freshly single New York City fashionista and a chronicle of a dying band, and you’ve got my top picks for everything that tickled my fancy in the past year across theater, film and TV.‘Swing State’Call me a masochist, but what I most loved about Rebecca Gilman’s devastating play was that it tapped into multiple registers of despair: individual, communal, ecological. Peg, a widow living on a prairie in Wisconsin, is nursing concerns about endangered animals and environmental catastrophe, and how everything is leading us to an uninhabitable planet. But alongside Peg’s global anxieties are a host of much more intimate sorrows — grief for her husband, a sense of hopelessness, and isolation — that are driving her to consider suicide. Gilman’s script offers black humor, suspense and a crushing ending. And the empathetic direction, by Robert Falls, of a stellar cast led by Mary Beth Fisher and Bubba Weiler, provides a sense of existential urgency to every minute. (Read our review of “Swing State.”)‘Purlie Victorious’From left: Billy Eugene Jones, Kara Young, Leslie Odom Jr. and Jay O. Sanders in “Purlie Victorious.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the end of this Ossie Davis play, our hero, Purlie Victorious (a larger-than-life Leslie Odom Jr.), heartily declares, “I find, in being Black, a thing of beauty: a joy, a strength, a secret cup of gladness.” I nearly cried at this ecstatic celebration of Blackness, because this Broadway production, cleverly directed by Kenny Leon, was itself a prime example of Black excellence. As hilarious as it is biting, “Purlie Victorious” follows Purlie’s scheme to reclaim the inheritance owed to his family in the Jim Crow South. Kara Young, as Purlie’s love interest — the uniquely named Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins — proves she can carry off a fearless comedic performance on par with her dramatic roles. (Read our review of “Purlie Victorious.”)‘Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’Even if the hairstyles in this play weren’t as fabulous as they were, Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” about a day in the life of African immigrants working in a Harlem hair-braiding shop, would still be a sparkling Broadway delight. That’s thanks to Bioh’s colorful characters and brisk, playful dialogue. Whitney White’s direction provided extra spark, and the production’s re-creation of real braid hairstyles and salon culture felt novel; it’s not often that Black spaces are so lovingly portrayed, or portrayed at all, on Broadway. (Read our review of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.”)‘Stereophonic’Earlier this year, after guiltily binging the soapy Amazon Prime series “Daisy Jones & the Six,” I wondered what a better version of this narrative — the band drama full of drugs, sex and music that’s kinda-but-not-really about Fleetwood Mac — would look like. I didn’t know until I saw David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic,” which kept me fully engaged through its full three-hour running time. The central band’s journey to celebrity then collapse, the addictions, the toxic relationships — the bones of the material are the same, but “Stereophonic” is unique in the way it uses music to do some of the storytelling. Entirely diegetic, the songs aren’t used for exposition or ornamentation; they exist as products in themselves, which we hear in different incarnations, in different parts, sometimes several times before we hear the final version. We learn about the characters through the parts they play in making and performing this music — which, by the way, is amazing, and written by Will Butler, formerly of Arcade Fire. The cast is flawless, and the production is so meticulously composed, including David Zinn’s stunning set and Ryan Rumery’s explosive sound design, that it feels like you’re actually being ushered into this world of Billboard hits, giant bags of cocaine and ego-driven rock stars. I can’t wait to see it again. (Read our review of “Stereophonic.”)‘Flex’There are a lot of reasons I liked this Lincoln Center Theater production about a high school basketball team, but one of them was, to my surprise, more a feat of athleticism than of drama. Throughout the performance I went to, Starra, the team’s talented, headstrong captain played by Erica Matthews, never missed a shot to the basket set above the stage at the Mitzi E. Newhouse. A story about the clash of beliefs, personalities, priorities and ambitions among these girls in lower-class, rural Arkansas, “Flex” was a win in all respects, from Candrice Jones’s engaging script to Lileana Blain-Cruz’s dynamic direction to the strong cast. I’m no fan of team sports, and in any other context would find taking the role of basketball spectator tedious; but, even if for only two hours, “Flex” transformed me into a fan. (Read our review of “Flex.”)‘Bottoms’Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri in “Bottoms.”Orion PicturesI loved the chaos of this weird, perversely satisfying film about two unpopular high school students who start a girls’ fight club with the ultimate goal of losing their virginity. Rachel Sennott, who delivered a panic-inducing performance in “Shiva Baby,” plays the similarly unstable and unpredictable PJ, opposite Ayo Edebiri’s adorably dweeby Josie. “Bottoms” has a brutal sense of humor that gleefully spirals into a violent finale I won’t forget anytime soon. (Read our review of “Bottoms.”)‘Beef’The only reason I didn’t ravenously consume this phenomenal Netflix series in one go was that “Beef” was so effective in its storytelling, performances and direction that every episode felt staggering, but in the best way. It would have been so easy for this series, about the way rage rips apart and connects the lives of two unhappy strangers (played by Ali Wong and Steven Yeun), to stay in one lane and offer us 10 straight-up comedic episodes of steadily escalating acts of sabotage and retribution. But “Beef” also offers up pathos and humanity, getting to the brokenness underneath its characters’ rage without forgiving or dismissing their most heinous actions. Wong and Yeun are stellar in every scene, and beautifully navigate the chaotic turns of the script. (Read our review of “Beef.”)‘Primary Trust’A story about a grown man named Kenneth (William Jackson Harper) with no family living a quaint, routine small-town life with his imaginary best friend, “Primary Trust” was one of those shows that left me practically clutching my chest with feeling by the end. Harper delivered one of the finest, most exacting performances I saw this year; his Kenneth was delicate but not fragile. A contemporary fable about alienation, loneliness and facing the wild unknowns of adult life, “Primary Trust” felt cathartic, especially given how quarantines and six-foot distances changed many people’s understanding of isolation. (Read our review of “Primary Trust.”)‘Survival of the Thickest’The actress-comedian Michelle Buteau has so much charm that it seems to radiate from the TV. She exudes a playful energy and has a deep pocket of grand, larger-than-life facial reactions that serve punchlines without her even saying a word. So watching “Survival of the Thickest,” her bright, stylish confection of a sitcom on Netflix, feels like a soul-affirming treat. Buteau stars as Mavis Beaumont, a personal stylist forced to re-evaluate her relationship, home and career when she catches her longtime boyfriend cheating. Mavis starts at square one, moving into a tiny apartment with an eccentric New York City roommate and building her brand from the ground up. A little awkward, a bit misguided but full of heart, brains, talent and personality — and also, let’s not forget, style — Mavis is infinitely relatable, and, importantly, a Black full-figured heroine with supportive and snarky Black friends. In other words, she feels real.‘Wednesday’Jenna Ortega in “Wednesday.”NetflixWhen it comes to gothic, sexy teen revamps of old franchises, like “Riverdale” and “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” I’m often turned off by the baroque plots, aesthetic preening and self-conscious … well, adolescence of it all. “Wednesday” is a delightful exception, in part because the Addams daughter did goth before it was cool. (And it doesn’t hurt that the director, Tim Burton, has been the goth king of filmmaking for decades.) The show strikes the perfect balance between juicy teen dramedy and ghoulish supernatural thriller, with Jenna Ortega starring as the ever-dour and ever-surprising young mistress of darkness. Her performance delivers flashes of color behind Wednesday’s signature dead eyes and deadpan mannerisms; she manages to carry off a character with a sociopathic disconnect from the world around her and yet still make her the charming antiheroine. And I’m still waiting for anything to come along that I enjoyed as much as Wednesday’s dance in Episode 4. (Read our review of “Wednesday.”) More

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      10 Works and Performances That Helped Me Make Sense of 2023

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      Global conflict and personal loss encouraged our critic to seek out art that gave her a better understanding of grief and healing.“I hope you don’t mind if we carry on,” Juicy says at the end of “Fat Ham.” The other characters in the play then begin cleaning and clearing the stage, an act that affirms Juicy’s proposition and, in this work inspired by Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, suggests that there might be a way for them to work through their shared trauma together.Those words hit me hard when I heard them last spring. I was staving off my own mourning as my family prepared for the 10th anniversary of my brother Shaka’s death from cancer. That, coupled with political crises and global despair, pushed me to find film, television and performances that helped me make sense of my grief and, hopefully, find a release for it.‘Fat Ham’I almost didn’t see what ended up as one of my favorite plays of the year. I could not wrap my head around the story line of a Black, queer, “Hamlet”-like play, even after it had won over my fellow critics and earned the Pulitzer Prize for best drama. Then I saw it on Broadway. I was startled by its clever transformation of an Elizabethan-era depressive into Gen Z ennui through its main character Juicy (Marcel Spears), a 20-something mourning his father’s death as well as the hyper-masculinity that his family and society impose on him. Though Juicy sneaks glances and shares asides with the audience, “Fat Ham” truly breaks theater’s fourth wall when the cast stages a surreal group cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” and then again with its unexpectedly liberatory final scene that invites us to join them in a party filled with glitter, gender fluidity and Black joy. (Read our review of “Fat Ham.”)The Last Season of ‘Succession’Who knew that if you killed off Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the show’s most dynamic character, his children would easily make up for his lost charisma? The “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong, that’s who knew. I can’t think of three more heart-wrenching performances of parental loss than Shiv (Sarah Snook), her voice breaking as she pleads, “Daddy? I love you. Don’t go, please. Not now,” on the phone; Roman (Kieran Culkin), breaking down during his eulogy; and Kendall (Jeremy Strong), the most tragic, as he loses his bid to replace his father as chief executive. In the end, Kendall simply stares out at the water rather than being buoyed up or submerged in it as he has been in the past. A man without a company, it is a fate that, for him, is far worse than death. (Read our review of the “Succession” finale.)‘A Thousand and One’In “A Thousand and One,” Teyana Taylor plays Inez, a mother scarred by her childhood in foster care. Aaron Kingsley Adetola plays Terry.Focus FeaturesWinner of a grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, A.V. Rockwell’s debut feature, “A Thousand and One,” sensitively explores the failure of society’s safety nets to protect Black families and the lengths Black mothers will go to ensure their children’s future. But underneath that story is another: one about the personal voids we try to fill. Appearing in her first leading role, Teyana Taylor plays Inez, a mother scarred by her childhood in foster care. She infused this character with such electricity and vitality that I found myself championing her every move, even, or especially, her most morally ambiguous decisions. (Read our interview with the director.)‘Past Lives’What if someone you pined for turns out to be your soul mate, not in this life, but another? This tension drives Celine Song’s debut film “Past Lives,” a tender portrait of two adults, Na Young (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who forged a special bond as classmates in Seoul but lost touch over the years. Their poignant performances and Song’s intimate directing style make the chemistry between these two characters believable. But, we, and they, are left with the sense that the chasm caused by immigration (and the self-invention it requires) is insurmountable, making longing the most consistent emotion available to them. (Read our review of “Past Lives.”)‘Purlie Victorious’When he first conceived of writing a play based on his childhood in rural, segregated Georgia, Ossie Davis tried to write it straight. Once he realized that satire was better suited to capture the absurdity and tragedy of American racism, he premiered his first play, “Purlie Victorious.” Back on Broadway 62 years later, the play, directed by Kenny Leon, stars Leslie Odom Jr. as the ambitious preacher Purlie and Kara Young as Lutibelle, a naïve young woman he brings home to impersonate a dead cousin whose inheritance Purlie wants. The resulting ruckus undercuts an enduring racial stereotype — that all Black people look alike — while sharing a radical vision of Black pride and interracial solidarity. Odom is a mesmerizing triumph and Young a hilarious tour de force, while this is Leon (“Fences,” “Topdog/Underdog”) at his very best. (Read our interview with the cast and director.)Jeffrey Wright in ‘American Fiction’Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison in “American Fiction.” Ellison is torn between staying true to his highbrow literary vision and caricaturing Black life to make money and take care of his mother. via TIFFJeffrey Wright is a consummate screen stealer — this year alone, I wanted more speeches from his General Gibson in “Asteroid City” and more shade from his Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in “Rustin.” But not since “Basquiat” in 1996 have I seen Wright as a lead in a feature-length film, and his performance in Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” reminds us what an actual loss this is for those of us who love watching movies. He wholly embodies Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a novelist who, in the process of mourning the death of his father and sister, is torn between staying true to his highbrow literary vision and caricaturing Black life to make money and take care of his mother. Wright gives a nuanced, captivating performance, punctuated with humor, anger, desire and vulnerability, while his character conveys the frustrations of Black artists who refuse to conform to the white gaze.‘The Last of Us’There are so many painful separations and sentimental reunions on “The Last of Us,” the dystopian HBO series based on the video game of the same name, that it is hard for me to pick the most affecting one. I am choosing the story in which Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a 14-year-old orphan who is immune to the brain infection that has decimated most of the world, reconnects with her former roommate Riley (Storm Reid), who left to join the resistance. When Riley takes Ellie on an overnight trip to an abandoned mall, we see how liberating their adolescent female desire for each other is, making this night of last memories even more apocalyptic. (Read our review of “The Last of Us.”)Jodie Comer in ‘Prima Facie’When Jodie Comer, best known as an assassin on “Killing Eve,” decided to do her first major stage role, she went big with “Prima Facie.” Alone on a Broadway stage for 100 minutes, Comer commands our attention as Tessa Ensler, a barrister who has moved up in the British class system only to be pulled back down as a victim of a sexual assault. Tessa finds herself in a paradox: In the past, she has defended male clients from assault accusations. Comer moves through the emotions of grief, shame, self-doubt, rage and hope with such intensity that it still seems impossible to me that this was her professional stage debut. (Read our review of “Prima Facie.”)‘Reservation Dogs’Graham Greene as Maximus, left, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Bear in “Reservation Dogs,” a show that redefined American television.Shane Brown/FXDespite its notable lack of Emmy nods, “Reservation Dogs,” the first television show where every writer, director and main character was Indigenous, redefined American television over three seasons. While it is primarily a coming-of-age story, this final season’s episodes veered thrillingly into family drama, horror, science fiction and comedy. I am sad to say goodbye to these characters, but I am grateful for its brilliant ensemble and its affirmation of community, and how a people who lived and grieved together can, through ritual and remembrance, find their way back to each other and teach themselves, and those watching them, how to heal. (Read our interview with the “Reservation Dogs” showrunner.)Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour“Uncle Jonny made my dress,” Beyoncé rhymes on “Heated,” a single from her 2022 album “Renaissance.” “That cheap spandex, she looks a mess.” That playful line reminds us that she dedicated this album to her maternal uncle Jonny, a Black gay man who helped raise her and died of H.I.V./AIDS-related causes. (She released her concert film on Friday, which was World AIDS Day.) The lyric also declares the political aesthetics of “Renaissance” and the house music and Black queer ballroom cultures that inspired its sound and her style on this year’s behemoth world tour. She encouraged us to wear our most fabulous silver fashions and become human disco balls that mirrored “each other’s joy.” And so we came, witnessed and participated in what was more like a Black church revival than just a stadium concert, in which we left feeling as beautiful in our skin (and our clothing) as she appeared to us onstage. (Read our review of Beyoncé’s tour.) More

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      Review: A Shady Documentary Becomes a Weapon of War in ‘Spain’

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      Jen Silverman’s noir play considers the role of artists in the making of propaganda.“Financing is complicated when it comes to the arts,” says a low-budget filmmaker in Jen Silverman’s “Spain.” That’s hardly news, but the clever if murky play, which had its world premiere on Thursday at Second Stage Theater, offers a solution: Let the Soviets foot the bill.In Silverman’s telling, the filmmaker, Joris Ivens, a Dutchman working in the United States, is already an undercover infiltrator for Soviet interests when the Spanish Civil War breaks out in 1936. Over bloody steak in a dim restaurant, his handler “offers” him the chance to make a big-budget pro-Republican documentary whose theme would be “The Noble Peasant Crushed by the Rich Fascist.” The goal: to end American neutrality, overthrow Franco and change the world. The part about communizing the emergent republic by any means necessary is left unsaid.Ivens was a real filmmaker, and his movie “The Spanish Earth,” released in 1937, was a real cause célèbre among leftists and artists. The frenemies Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos did write the screenplay, as Silverman relates. The financial role of Soviet intelligence is debatable, but then so is the intelligence of those who failed to perceive the threat of Stalinist terror in what was obviously propaganda.Despite the actual names, “Spain” behaves like a work of fiction. Much honored as an artist in his lifetime, Ivens (Andrew Burnap) could not have been as dim, especially about film, as Silverman makes him. (He imagines shooting part of the documentary from an ant’s point-of-view, or a raindrop’s.) Nor, for all his faults, was Hemingway (Danny Wolohan) so complete a buffoon, given to shouting such hollow nonsense. (“We are all Spain! But how?”) And though turning Dos Passos (Erik Lochtefeld) into a whiny milquetoast is a questionable liberty, it’s less problematic than the way he’s set up as the play’s firm moral center. His later support for right-wing causes suggests that his own moral center was movable.To correct for such blurriness, Silverman throws a largely invented (yet somehow truer) character into the mix. Helen (Marin Ireland) is another infiltrator, given the assignment of assisting Ivens under cover of being his girlfriend. In Ireland’s typically incisive performance, here colored with a touch of period archness, she is fascinating to watch even when seemingly stuck with Burnap in a Möbius strip of suspicion and self-doubt. The scenes in which they wrangle over their goals as artists and as citizens — wondering whether making the movie might be morally acceptable despite the compromises and risks involved — are the best in the play.“Can a false story be so good,” Helen asks, “that it does something true?”Danny Wolohan, left, as Hemingway and Andrew Burnap as the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens in the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRegarding “Spain,” a synthetic yarn with too many twists to follow in 90 minutes, the answer to that same question is no. I soon stopped trying to make sense of it, realizing that the story didn’t matter; ultimately Silverman is less concerned with Russian influence in the Spanish Civil War than with the permanent problem of art in the world. A final underwhelming gesture takes us even further from the facts to consider whether Soviet-style propaganda really died with the Soviet Union or merely moved elsewhere, co-opting more artists in the process.Dramatizing that airy premise by marrying it to a familiar entertainment template does neither spouse any favors. Silverman’s dialogue has the clipped rhythm of screwball comedy but not the wit — strange, because several earlier works, including “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties,” “The Roommate” and “The Moors,” are so pointedly funny. Here, despite the quite palpable efforts of the actors, even the best lines seem unable to escape the dark gravity of Tyne Rafaeli’s staging.To be fair, that staging is faithful to Silverman’s instructions in the script, which emphasize the conventions of noir thrillers. Certainly, the clichés of the genre are reproduced too numerously and obviously not to be purposeful: Brutalist black boxes with sliding panels; shadowy figures in evening dress; slanting shards of chiaroscuro; reverberant amplification and portentous music cues. (Sets by Dane Laffrey, costumes by Alejo Vietti, lighting by Jen Schriever, sound and original music by Daniel Kluger.)The overall effect is heavy, and less clarifying than perplexing. When we finally see a bit of Ivens’s film — not projected on a screen but enacted live onstage — it is for some reason an opera, featuring an aria (“We Pray for Rain”) sung by the big-voiced bass Zachary James, who otherwise plays a Soviet agent.It may be that we are not meant to parse the scene’s meaning, or anything else in this overloaded effort. “Spain” is, after all, a play about propaganda, which is most effective when swallowed whole, if only that were possible.SpainThrough Dec. 17 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      A Wood-Carved Protagonist, Enduring the Brutality of War

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      Mid-morning on Tuesday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, a puppet named Michael K had just grabbed a mug when the director Lara Foot called a pause to the action onstage.“Let’s stop here,” she said, and he did so instantly.Still clasping the mug in his right hand, he gazed at her with black, glass-bead eyes like someone who had been taken by surprise. Even frozen mid-gesture, he was subtle, human, uncanny — a striking alchemy of art and imagination.In “Life & Times of Michael K,” based on the 1983 novel of the same name by the South African-born Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, this puppet is the sinewy, carved-wood star, designed and created by Adrian Kohler of Handspring Puppet Company. At two-thirds the size of an average adult human, Michael is operated bunraku-style by a team of three puppeteers. Craig Leo, the show’s puppet master, is in charge of Michael’s head and right arm.The puppeteers Markus Schabbing and Carlo Daniels with Michael K. The story is set amid a fictional civil war, whose Kafkaesque landscape Michael navigates with his ailing mother, Anna.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesManipulation is not the job, though. To Leo, it’s more a matter of following the puppet’s lead.“There’s something strange that happens,” he said in an interview in the lobby of St. Ann’s, game to chat despite feeling under the weather. “You have these moments — and you kind of aim for them, and you hope that you can do it as much as possible — where he just comes alive. It’s when the synchronicity really clicks in between the three puppeteers, and then all of a sudden you’re holding him and he becomes incredibly light. And he’s suddenly almost moving on his own.”Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel is set amid a fictional South African civil war, whose Kafkaesque landscape Michael navigates as he attempts to take his old and ailing mother, Anna, on the long journey from Cape Town back to the countryside she loved as a girl.Foot, the artistic director of the Baxter Theater Centre at the University of Cape Town, adapted the novel in collaboration with Handspring. Kohler and Basil Jones, a fellow Handspring founder, directed the production’s puppetry. At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August, the show impressed critics, with The New York Times calling it “stylish” and a “standout.”The puppeteers Faniswa Yisa and Roshina Ratnam with Michael K’s mother, Anna.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesA young Michael K, with the puppeteers Markus Schabbing and Andrew Buckland.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“Puppets hold philosophy in them, and poetry,” Foot said in a separate interview. “Coetzee’s work, some of his work, lends itself to that because there’s a lot of thought-provoking narrative.”Having long wanted to work with Handspring, she thought a puppet would be perfect to embody Coetzee’s Michael — a gardener whose cleft lip makes people think him inferior — as a kind of everyman confronting existential questions.“When I sent ‘Michael K’ to Basil and Adrian,” she said, “Adrian had already read it and it was one of his favorite novels. We agreed that it would just be Michael, his mother, the children and the animals that would be puppets. And the rest of the world would be the context of the war.”So the company also includes five actors. One of its four puppeteers, Leo, arrived in New York this week from Mexico. That was the terminus of his nearly three-month tour across North America with the giant child refugee puppet Little Amal, who along with the horses of “War Horse” — another show on Leo’s résumé — is among Handspring’s most famous creations.“If you look at his left side of his face and his right side of his face, there are different expressions,” said Craig Leo, the show’s puppet master.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“He has kind of a tortured look on the one side,” Leo said. “From the other side, he’s actually very beautiful. In the light, his expression changes all the time.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesAfter stilt walking to operate Amal from the inside, unable to see what her face was doing, Leo was palpably pleased to be reunited with Michael, a puppet he has worked with on and off for more than two years, and one he could keep his eye on from the outside.“If you look at his left side of his face and his right side of his face, there are different expressions,” he said. “He has kind of a tortured look on the one side; I don’t know how else to describe it. From the other side, he’s actually very beautiful. He’s a really handsome man. In the light, his expression changes all the time. It catches all those carved lines in the wood.”“He holds the pathos,” Craig Leo, the show’s puppet master, said of Michael K. “He holds it even when he’s hanging on his puppet rack.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesOf the dozen-plus puppets in the play, there are four Michaels: a baby, glimpsed only briefly yet made, Foot said, with legs fully capable of kicking; a child; a miniature adult; and the main adult, with a head carved from Malaysian jelutong, legs of carbon fiber and ribs of Indonesian cane.“The joints are very finely made,” Leo said. “It breaks fingers because they’re so delicate. We just glue them back on. But as a whole, the puppet has never broken.”Which is lucky, because there is only one of him, no backup.“I’ve thought about that often, actually,” Leo said. “Should we be locking him up at nights? It’s a work of art, you know.”To him, Michael is also a magnet for empathy, as puppets are generally — and a portal into the story in a way that a human actor would not be.“He holds the pathos,” Leo said. “He holds it even when he’s hanging on his puppet rack.” More

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      Frances Sternhagen, ‘Sex and the City’ Actress and Tony Winner, Dies at 93

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      Her Tony-winning Broadway career included “Driving Miss Daisy,” “On Golden Pond” and “The Heiress.” On TV she had maternal roles in “Cheers” and “Sex and the City.”Frances Sternhagen, the Tony Award-winning actress who played leading roles in stage productions of “Driving Miss Daisy” and “On Golden Pond” as formidable older women when she was so young that she had to wear aging makeup, died on Monday at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 93.Her son Tony Carlin confirmed the death.Ms. Sternhagen won Tonys as featured actress in a play for her performances in two very different productions. In a 1995 Broadway revival of “The Heiress,” based on Henry James’s novel “Washington Square,” she was Cherry Jones’s well-meaning, matchmaking Aunt Lavinia. In “The Good Doctor,” Neil Simon’s 1973 take on Chekhov, she played multiple roles in comedy sketches.Ms. Sternhagen came into her own in mature Off Broadway roles: as the strong-willed 70-something-and-up Southern widow in Alfred Uhry’s “Driving Miss Daisy” in 1988, when she was still in her 50s, and the concerned retirement-age wife in Ernest Thompson’s “On Golden Pond” in 1979, when she was 49.She received Tony nominations for her roles in the original productions of “On Golden Pond,” “Equus” and the musical “Angel” and in revivals of “Morning’s at Seven” and “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”People who never saw a Broadway show or even went to the movies may have known Ms. Sternhagen’s face from television. Beginning in the 1980s, when she played the controlling working-class mother of the oddball postal carrier Cliff Clavin on “Cheers,” she sailed through a period of playing maternal figures in memorable recurring roles in a number of hit series.Ms. Sternhagen in a 1990 episode of the sitcom “Cheers.” She played the controlling working-class mother of the oddball postal carrier Cliff Clavin (John Ratzenberger, right).Kim Gottlieb-Walker/NBC Universal, via Getty ImagesOn “ER,” she was Dr. John Carter’s aristocratic Chicago grandmother. On “Sex and the City,” she was Trey MacDougal’s rich but peculiar mom. Most recently she played the mother of Kyra Sedgwick’s Southern character on the police procedural “The Closer.” She received three Emmy Award nominations, two for “Cheers” and one for “Sex and the City.”Ms. Sternhagen was known to turn down movie roles because they would take her away from her family for too long, but over the years she did appear in some two dozen films. She was Burt Reynolds’s intensely caring sister-in-law in “Starting Over” (1979), a perfectionist magazine researcher in “Bright Lights, Big City” (1988), and the cookbook author Irma Rombauer in “Julie & Julia” (2009). Her other films included “The Hospital” (1971), “Independence Day” (1983) and “Misery” (1990).But stage was her first home, and her career flourished in Off Broadway productions. She made her New York stage debut at 25 in Jean Anouilh’s “Thieves’ Carnival” at the Cherry Lane Theater, and she won her first Obie Award the next year, for George Bernard Shaw’s “The Admirable Bashville” (1956). She won again in 1965 for two performances (“The Room” and “A Slight Ache”) and received a lifetime achievement Obie in 2013.Ms. Sternhagen, right, and Cherry Jones in the 1995 Broadway revival of “The Heiress.” In a Tony-winning performance, Ms. Sternhagen played the well-meaning, matchmaking Aunt Lavinia.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHer reviews were positive from the beginning. “When an intellectual comedy is about to be staged, it is always a wise notion to send for Frances Sternhagen,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times in 1959, reviewing “The Saintliness of Margery Kempe,” an Off Broadway comedy. “She is the mistress of sardonic fooling.”Frances Hussey Sternhagen was born on Jan. 13, 1930, in Washington, D.C. She was the only child of John Meier Sternhagen, a United States tax court judge, and Gertrude (Hussey) Sternhagen, a World War I nurse who became a homemaker.Frances attended the Potomac School and the Madeira School, both in Virginia. At Vassar College, she originally studied history but was persuaded by an adviser to give drama a try.Ms. Sternhagen in 1999 at her home in New Rochelle. “It’s through working on characters in plays that I’ve learned about myself, about how people operate,” she said in 2001.Chris Maynard for The New York TimesAfter graduation in 1951, Ms. Sternhagen taught briefly at the Milton Academy in Milton, Mass. When she auditioned at the Brattle Street Theater in nearby Cambridge, she was rejected. “They said I read every part as if I was leading a troop of Girl Scouts out onto a hockey field,” she told The Toronto Star decades later.Returning to Washington, she took theater courses at the Catholic University of America and began appearing in Arena Stage productions.At the same time she began working in New York theater, Ms. Sternhagen also ventured into television work; she made her small-screen debut in 1955 in Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” alongside Helen Hayes, on the series “Producers’ Showcase.” But she didn’t make her feature film debut until a decade later, with a supporting role as a high school librarian in “Up the Down Staircase” (1967). Like many working actors, she appeared on soap operas, including “Love of Life,” and in television commercials.She continued working into her 80s. Her last Broadway appearance was in a 2005 production of Edward Albee’s “Seascape.” Her last New York stage appearance was Off Broadway in “The Madrid” (2013) at City Center, playing the mother of a kindergarten teacher, played by Edie Falco, who up and leaves her job and family.In Ms. Sternhagen’s final film, “And So It Goes” (2014), a comic drama with Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton, she played a wise, snarky and chain-smoking real estate agent.Ms. Sternhagen and Phoebe Strole in an Off Broadway production of “The Madrid,” at City Center in Manhattan in 2013. It was Ms. Sternhagen’s last stage performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMs. Sternhagen married Thomas Carlin, a fellow actor, in 1956, and they had six children. The couple had met briefly at Catholic University, acted together in “The Skin of Our Teeth” in Maryland and fell in love when both were in the cast of “Thieves’ Carnival” in New York. Mr. Carlin died in 1991.In addition to their son Tony, she is survived by three other sons, Paul, Peter and John; two daughters, Amanda Carlin Sanders and Sarah Carlin; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. She lived in New Rochelle for more than 60 years.In 2001, Ms. Sternhagen talked to drama students at Vassar and gave an interview to the college’s alumni publication. She revealed that as an actress she liked working from the outside in, starting with how a character speaks and walks rather than with her inner motivation. And she attributed a good deal of her personal emotional development to acting.“It’s through working on characters in plays that I’ve learned about myself, about how people operate,” she said.As for young aspiring actors who look down on paying their dues by appearing in commercials, Ms. Sternhagen suggested, “Think of it as children’s theater.”Alex Traub More

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      How Jewish People Built the American Theater

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      HOW ARE THINGS in Glocca Morra?” is a song from the 1947 musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” which is about, among other things, a leprechaun. Glocca Morra doesn’t exist, and if it did, it wouldn’t be in, say, Poland. The song is sung by a homesick Irish lass in the American South; like the show overall, it […] More