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      ‘Manahatta,’ Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Play About the Lenape, Comes Home

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      The show, which toggles between the 17th century and the early 21st, arrives on the island on which it is largely set.Mary Kathryn Nagle moved to Manhattan in 2010. Back then, she would often run to work along a path that skirted the East River, absorbing the city and its history from the shoreline.“I was interested in learning more about whose lands I was on,” she said.Nagle, a lawyer and a playwright, grew up in Oklahoma, an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She had not known much about the Lenape, Manhattan’s original residents, though Lenape tribes (some of whom refer to themselves as Delaware Indians) lived in Anadarko and Bartlesville, not far from her hometown. That year, through contacts at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, she discovered more, including details of the purchase of Manhattan, which was then part of the Lenape’s homeland, Lenapehoking, by Dutch colonists.This was not long after the 2008 financial crisis. Nagle’s firm, Quinn Emanuel, was engaged in litigation, suing banks implicated in that crisis. The ceding of Manhattan and the subprime mortgage catastrophe began to mingle in her mind, especially once she discovered that Wall Street, a fulcrum of the subprime collapse, was named for the wall built by the Dutch to keep the Lenape out.These dueling histories, recent and long ago, inspired Nagle’s play “Manahatta.” Now in previews at the Public Theater, it will run through Dec. 23. Named for the Lenape word for Manhattan, which translates to “island of many hills,” the drama volleys between the 17th century and the early 21st, and between Manahatta and Manhattan and Anadarko. The seven actors in the cast each play a character in each period. This is the play’s third production, but the first on the island on which it is largely set.“It got really real when we all descended upon Manhattan,” said Rainbow Dickerson, an actress who has been with the play since 2018. “We feel it. We feel it every day.”I met with Nagle, who was nine months pregnant, earlier this month on a warmish Saturday evening just after rehearsal. She had agreed to walk around Lower Manhattan, along streets that pertain to the play. We began on Pearl Street, named, Nagle said, for the mounds of oyster shells the Lenape had left there.Then she moved past Beaver Street, named to reflect the fur trade, and onto Wall Street, where no trace of a wall remained, and then to Broadway, which runs at an oblique angle, reflecting a Lenape trading route. “It is not a street created by the colonizers,” she said.It was dark by then. And any vestiges of the Lenape were long paved over. “At the end of the day, even when you do see grass in Manhattan, it was probably concrete and then changed back to grass,” she said. But she could still feel some remnant, she said, particularly at the island’s tip.Rainbow Dickerson, standing, and Sheila Tousey in “Manahatta” at the Public Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“They had ceremony, they had prayer at the water’s edge,” she said. “So even though we have changed the outline of the island in terms of where it meets the water, that shoreline is still here.” So is the sun, she continued. And the moon. “We’ve imposed so much on top of this island,” she added. “But in a way nature is still here.”Nagle, 40, has the focused, no-nonsense demeanor one might expect of a lawyer specializing in federal Indian law and appellate litigation, and the occasional flights of lyricism fitting for a playwright. She wrote the first draft of “Manahatta” in 2013, as part of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group. She moved back to Oklahoma in 2015, but the play stayed with her. “Manahatta” had its world premiere in 2018 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was produced in 2020 by Yale Repertory Theater.“Nagle,” one reviewer of the Oregon production wrote, “weaves the stories together skillfully, one mirroring the other, often using the same language, to drive home the point that the American story has always been one of putting commerce above people, especially when those people aren’t white. It’s devastating.”As “Manahatta” evolved, it came to center on Jane Snake, a Lenape econometrics whiz hired by a Manhattan investment bank. (The same actress also plays Le-le-wa’-you, a 17th-century Lenape woman.) Through Jane’s conflicting ambitions, desires and loyalties, Nagle explores questions of ownership and allegiance. Jane reminds her in some ways of herself, a young woman who believed she had to leave Oklahoma to make her way in the world. The character’s choices are not always ones that Nagle, who has since relocated to Washington, D.C., might have made, but it was important to her that Jane felt real and active, not merely the victim of a wider, non-Indigenous world.“Probably every play of mine is critiquing a white system of power that has been forced on us,” she said. “But also, it’s 2023, we’re all living in it now. So how are we responsible? How are we involved?”The director Laurie Woolery has been with the play since its premiere in Oregon. She was initially attracted to the challenge of the play and how it demanded that the actors move back and forth in time without any major change of scene.“I’m really drawn to work that feels impossible to stage,” she said during a recent interview at the Public Theater.But traveling between two eras was only one difficulty. Avoiding stereotypes was just as important. “There’s so many different ways in which we have been depicted in American culture not based on fact, reality or truth,” Nagle said. “If you want to present the truth, you’re doing that in a space where your representation has been not authentic. So you’ve got to deconstruct that before you can fully introduce the authentic, and that’s a challenge.”While there is no Lenape performer among the cast (casting directors would not have asked about particular tribal enrollment during auditions), the production has hired Joe Baker, a co-founder and the executive director of the Lenape Center in New York, as a cultural consultant.Baker has advised the production on matters of costume, props, language and Lenape aesthetics. “We’ve had many conversations about different traditions, different characters,” he said in a phone interview. Asked if Nagle’s play felt truthful to the Lenape experience, he said that it did.“There is clarity there,” he said. “She totally understands the protocol, the practice.”Lenape artists have also contributed some of the show’s props and design elements, including a wampum necklace, which Woolery shared as she led a recent technical rehearsal. “It’s a gift for us,” she said, holding out the three-strand necklace, “to keep us rooted.”Avoiding stereotypes is perhaps slightly easier now than it was a decade ago, when Nagle began her playwriting career. (Her other plays include “Sliver of a Full Moon,” Sovereignty” and “Crossing Mnisose.”) Recent years have brought many more depictions of Native Americans onscreen, often in projects created by or with Native writers and directors. And Native playwrights are experiencing more prominence, too. Nagle mentioned peers like DeLanna Studi (“Flight”), Madeline Sayet (“Where We Belong”) and, particularly, Larissa FastHorse, whose “Thanksgiving Play” had its Broadway debut last season.“The whole landscape has changed,” Nagle said. “It’s not enough. It’s definitely not enough. But we had our first Native woman on Broadway, which is a big deal.”What would be enough?“When we’re as much in the American theater canon as any other group,” she said.Nagle’s ambitions have always been as political as they are literary. If she has a need to tell stories, she also has the canny understanding that stories can be more persuasive than any number of appellate briefs.“In playwriting you can make an argument and force people to listen to it and hear it, in a way that they will never listen to it or hear it in a legal argument,” she said.The arguments here have to do with how history repeats itself and the dangers of making homes into tradable commodities. And as the play began preview performances just before Thanksgiving — the rare holiday that involves Indigenous history, however mythologized — and opens just after, it is also intended as a corrective to previous forms of representation.“My hope with ‘Manahatta’ is that we can provide non-Native Americans with a genuine narrative about Native people that just might supplant one or more of the false narratives American society has ingrained in them,” Nagle said.The significance of telling this particular story only a mile or two from where it happened has not been lost on any of the “Manahatta” cast or crew. “How do we recognize that we are standing on the ground of Lenapehoking and the genocide and forced removal of that tribe?” Woolery asked just before a rehearsal. “That’s a lot to hold.”Baker, the Lenape cultural consultant, was glad to see the play come home. He sees traces of the Lenape everywhere in Manhattan. “Everything you see is Lenape,” he said. “The breath and vitality of this place continues.” He hopes that audiences will learn something of the place’s history and its Indigenous people.“It’s a significant, significant moment,” he said. “And it’s exciting to share this moment.” More

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      Suzanne Shepherd, Actress Known for Playing Mothers, Dies at 89

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      After establishing herself as a teacher, she started a prolific screen acting career in her 50s that included roles in “Goodfellas” and “The Sopranos.”Suzanne Shepherd, an influential New York acting teacher who found success in midlife as a character actress, including memorable turns as the mothers of Edie Falco’s character on “The Sopranos” and Lorraine Bracco’s character in “Goodfellas,” died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.Her daughter, Kate Shepherd, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and kidney failure.After establishing herself as a stage actress and director, Ms. Shepherd became well known as an acting instructor — her students included Gregory Hines, Bebe Neuwirth and Christopher Meloni — before she began acting in film and on television when she was in her mid-50s.She began her big-screen career with two 1988 romantic comedies: “Working Girl,” in which she secured a role from its director, her old friend Mike Nichols, appearing alongside Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford; and “Mystic Pizza,” playing an aunt of Julia Roberts’s character. She would accumulate about 40 film and television credits in the decades to come, with maternal roles a signature.In Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” (1990), Ms. Shepherd turned in a fiery performance as a protective suburban Jewish mother who is horrified when her daughter Karen (Ms. Bracco) starts dating Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), a charming young associate of Italian American mobsters from Brooklyn. “You’re here a month, and sometimes I know he doesn’t come home at all,” her character seethes to Karen in a memorable scene in the family’s living room. “What kind of people are these?”Her other films include the John Candy comedy “Uncle Buck” (1989), the Tim Robbins psychological thriller “Jacob’s Ladder” (1990) and the 1997 film version of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Joss Ackland, Busy, Versatile Actor on Stage and Screen, Dies at 95

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      He was a villain in “Lethal Weapon 2,” C.S. Lewis on TV in “Shadowlands” and Falstaff onstage in “Henry IV” — and had a cameo in a Pet Shop Boys video.Joss Ackland, a self-described workaholic actor who appeared in more than 130 movies, TV shows and radio programs, most notably — for American audiences, at least — as a villainous South African diplomat in “Lethal Weapon 2,” died on Sunday at his home in Clovelly, a village in southwestern England. He was 95.His agent, Paul Pearson, confirmed the death.He was a renowned character actor onscreen, having held memorable supporting roles in movies like the Cold War thriller “The Hunt for Red October” (1990) and the hockey comedy “The Mighty Ducks” (1992). He also earned a British Academy Film Awards nomination for “White Mischief” (1987), a drama set in colonial Kenya. But Mr. Ackland’s true home was the London stage.He was among the actors who provided the firm foundation of English theater during the postwar years, ranking alongside Ian Holm, Maggie Smith and Claire Bloom. Many in that generation, like Mr. Ackland, later found success in Hollywood.A bear of a man with a gravelly voice and a gregarious, opinionated presence onstage and off, Mr. Ackland was prolific and versatile. He played Falstaff, Shakespeare’s great comic character in “Henry IV, Part 1” and Henry IV, Part 2”; the writer C.S. Lewis in the British TV version of “Shadowlands”; and Juan Perón in the original London cast of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Evita” (1978), opposite Elaine Paige in the title role.“I don’t think I’ve made any role my own,” he told The Evening Standard in 2006. “My quality is variation. I’m a hit- and-run actor. I get to do a lot of villains, but that’s because I’m English.”Mr. Ackland was Juan Perón in the original London cast of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Evita” (1978), opposite Elaine Paige in the title role.Donald Cooper/AlamyMr. Ackland could be self-disparaging about his willingness to take work wherever it became available, a predilection driven less by money than a need to be constantly on the move.He came to regret many of his nontheatrical roles, like those in the comedy “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey” (1991) and a meaty cameo in the video for the song “Always on My Mind” by the English pop band the Pet Shop Boys.“I do an awful lot of crap, but if it’s not immoral, I don’t mind,” he told The Guardian in 2001. “I’m a workaholic. Sometimes it’s a form of masochism.”He was even ambivalent about his role in “Lethal Weapon 2” (1989) as Arjen Rudd, the oily, racist South African who battles two Los Angeles police detectives, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover).Rudd, a consul-general dealing drugs on the side, gets away with murder by claiming diplomatic immunity, even at the point where he appears to kill Riggs — just before Murtaugh shoots him in the head.“It’s just been revoked,” Murtaugh says, a punchline that became a catchphrase of the late 1980s, much to Mr. Ackland’s chagrin.“Not a day goes by without someone across the street going ‘diplomatic immunity,’” he said in a BBC interview in 2013. “It drives you up the wall.”Mr. Ackland as the “Lethal Weapon 2” villain Arjen Rudd, the oily, racist South African who battles two Los Angeles police detectives.Moviestore Collection Ltd/AlamySidney Edmond Jocelyn Ackland was born on Feb. 29, 1928 — a leap day — in the North Kensington neighborhood of London. His father, Sydney Ackland, was a journalist from Ireland whose serial philandering kept him largely out of his son’s life, leaving him to be raised by his mother, Ruth Izod, a maid.He gravitated to acting as a child, inspired, he later said, by the mysterious smoke and fog of Depression-era London.“To be in the fog was to be in an adventure where the imagination could stretch itself, allowing me to be anywhere in the world,” he told The Independent in 1997. “Houses and streets would disappear, and a lamppost would faintly emerge from the gloom and become a pirate ship.”He attended the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, paying his way by cleaning barracks for U.S. Army troops stationed there during World War II. He graduated in 1945, the same year he started acting professionally.Mr. Ackland spent decades performing in repertory and small-town theater. In 1951, he traveled to Pitlochry, a small town in the Scottish Highlands, to appear in J.M. Barrie’s play “Mary Rose.” Among his fellow actors was Rosemary Kirkcaldy.Though she was engaged at the time, the two fell in love and married later that year.With a growing family — the couple eventually had seven children — Mr. Ackland despaired of making a career in acting. In 1955, he and his wife, with two infants in tow, moved to East Africa, where he spent six months running a tea plantation in Malawi.But the stage beckoned, and they spent two years in South Africa picking up acting work. The country’s intrusive apartheid regime disgusted them; at one point the police raided their home looking for subversive material and left with a copy of the novel “Black Beauty,” the tale of a horse by Anna Sewell, which investigators thought might be anti-apartheid.After returning to Britain, the couple restarted their careers, even as their family was growing rapidly.One evening in 1963, when Mr. Ackland was performing as the lead in Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo,” a fire broke out in their London home. Ms. Kirkcaldy, pregnant with their sixth child, managed to get the other five out of the house but broke her back when she leaped from an upper floor.Doctors said that she would miscarry and never walk again; instead, she delivered a healthy child and was on her feet again within 18 months.Ms. Kirkcaldy was diagnosed with motor neuron disease in 1999 and died in 2002. Mr. Ackland is survived by his daughters Sammy Greene, Penny Macdougall, Kirsty Baring, Melanie Ackland and Toni Ackland; his son Toby; 32 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Another son, Paul, died in 1982.Mr. Ackland in the role of King George V of Britain in a London stage production of “The King’s Speech” in 2012. Ferdaus Shamim/WireImage, via Getty ImagesAfter his wife’s death, Mr. Ackland developed stage fright and stayed away from theater for 12 years, he said. During that time, he edited her diaries, a project she had encouraged him to pursue, and published them in 2009 as “My Better Half and Me: A Love Affair That Lasted Fifty Years.”He returned to the theater in 2012 to play King George V in David Seidler’s play “The King’s Speech” (later adapted as a movie). By then, he had soured on the turns that his profession had taken toward instant stardom and pyrotechnic productions.“They give them all these car chases, the villain dying twice, and they play down to the audience,” Mr. Ackland told Strand magazine in 2002. “But I believe you should never give people what they want. Give them something a little more than what they want and that way they grow up.” More

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      Theater to See in N.Y.C. This Holiday Season

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      Christmas classics, comedic musicals and a star-studded Sondheim revival: a guide to the shows to see this season.The holiday season is upon us, which means it’s an excellent time for theatergoers to pack into cozy venues for a feast of the eyes. Our critics have selected a handful of options for tourists and locals looking to catch up on Broadway and Off Broadway shows this holiday season. And we’ve included some other choices as well.For those who prefer to be entertained from home, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this year will feature performances by Broadway shows like “& Juliet,” “Back to the Future: The Musical,” “How to Dance in Ohio,” “Shucked” and “Spamalot,” along with an appearance by Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells of “Gutenberg! The Musical!”Other theater-related streaming options include “Dicks: The Musical,” with Nathan Lane, and the 2015 documentary that the “How to Dance in Ohio” musical is based on.Here is a selection of notable shows onstage in New York City.Fun for the Whole FamilyBig Apple CircusStraw hats thrown like Frisbees. Death-defying aerial acts. Dizzying foot juggling routines. All accompany the contortionist, trapeze and tightrope circus classics that spectators young and old have come to ooh and aah at. This year, Big Apple presents “Journey to the Rainbow,” a collaboration with the German troupe Circus Theater Roncalli, complete with humans dressed as polar bears and cotton candy galore. Through Jan. 1 at Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center, Manhattan. Read the review.Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City RockettesIt’s a New York City classic. It’s a Christmas classic. The Rockettes are back with sensational high kicks set to state-of-the-art lighting and projections. Little ones will be dazzled by animated trains, ribbons and wintry displays. Their adult companions will delight in a Nativity procession and holiday maximalism. Through Jan. 1 at Radio City Music Hall, Manhattan. Read the review.A Christmas CarolSet in a home built in 1862, in an intimate parlor room, this telling of the timeless Christmas tale stars John Kevin Jones as Charles Dickens. Audience members, surrounded by 19th-century holiday décor and candlelight, will travel back more than a century, to when Dickens wrote the story. The production also features a streaming version. Through Dec. 24 at the Merchant House, Manhattan.Craving Song and DanceSweeney ToddJosh Groban stars on Broadway as everyone’s favorite tall, dark and handsome throat slitter. Opposite the demon barber is a superbly zany Annaleigh Ashford as the murder-accomplice-baker Mrs. Lovett (our critic called her “a brilliant comic for whom comedy is not the end but the means”). The two stars will leave the production after the Jan. 14 performance, so be sure to catch them in full bloody glory before they go. Come for the meat pies and Stephen Sondheim’s gigantic score, stay for the shadowy lighting, which won Natasha Katz her eighth Tony Award. At the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, Manhattan. Read the review.Merrily We Roll AlongJonathan Groff stars alongside Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez in this acclaimed revival of the former Sondheim flop, directed by Maria Friedman. Our critic called the show, which sweetly and gravely warns of the dangers of great ambition, “a palpable hit,” with “a thrillingly fierce central performance” by Groff and “high-wattage, laser-focused performances” by Radcliffe and Mendez. Through March 24 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan. Read the review.Jonathan Groff, obscured, Daniel Radcliffe, aloft, and Katie Rose Clarke in the musical “Merrily We Roll Along” at the Hudson Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHere We AreUnderfed and yet very full: Will the people who have it all ever find something to eat? Inspired by two Luis Buñuel films, David Ives’s chic, surrealist musical was one of the most anticipated Off Broadway shows of the year, and a star-studded farewell to Sondheim’s final work. Through Jan. 21 at the Shed, Manhattan. Read the review.StereophonicFive members of a rock band try to record a studio album. That’s the premise, which hinges upon heartache, copious drug use and fragile rock star egos, of David Adjmi’s first New York production since 2013, set entirely in a recording studio. It’s a play, not a musical, so it’s not squarely in the song-and-dance category, but the music, written by Will Butler (formerly of Arcade Fire), is chock-full of captivating pop songs and gripping ballads. Through Dec. 17 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan. Read the review.For the FaithfulPurlie VictoriousLeslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young star in Ossie Davis’s raucous 1961 comedy, directed by Kenny Leon, about a charismatic preacher who must outwit a plantation owner to buy and restore the local church. The play exposes racism as laughably absurd in a Broadway revival our critic called “scathingly funny.” Through Feb. 4 at the Music Box, Manhattan. Read the review.Leslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young, center, lead the ensemble cast in a revival of Ossie Davis’s 1961 play, “Purlie Victorious,” at the Music Box Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCovenantIn his New York debut, the playwright York Walker’s Southern gothic, directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene, follows a small Georgia town’s reaction to a bluesman’s homecoming. The potent little Off Broadway play, about communing with God and making deals with the Devil, is based on the real-life bluesman Robert Johnson, whose technique inspired rumors that he had traded his soul for musical genius. Through Dec. 17 at Roundabout Underground, Manhattan. Read the review.Nearing ExpirationShuckedIf a cornucopia of puns is your thing, this lowbrow comedic musical about a small-town woman who leaves home to save her corn just might scratch the itch. With a book by Robert Horn, songs by the country music songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally and campy scenes — including a mini-kickline of plastic corncobs — directed by Jack O’Brien, our critic called the show low humor “but hard not to laugh at.” Through Jan. 14 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan. Read the review.Sleep No MoreArguably one of New York City’s crown jewels of immersive theater, the Hitchcock-style take on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is set to close on Jan. 28 after 12 years. In an enchanting act of voyeurism, audiences members wear masks — the Venetian type, not the health-protecting kind (those are optional) — and follow characters from room to room, into densely packed apothecary dens, eerie miniature forests and dark, elaborate dining halls. Through Jan. 28 at the McKittrick Hotel, Manhattan. Read the review. More

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

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

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

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

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      ‘Gardens of Anuncia’ Review: The Broadway Star and the Women Who Molded Her

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      Michael John LaChiusa’s beautifully sung tribute to sisterly admiration, starring Priscilla Lopez, was inspired by the early life of the show’s director, Graciela Daniele.At the heart of “The Gardens of Anuncia,” Michael John LaChiusa’s sweet reverie of a musical, is a respect and recognition for the renowned Broadway choreographer Graciela Daniele, a longtime friend and collaborator.The show, which opened on Monday at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, debuted in 2021 at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. It arrives in a Lincoln Center Theater production with its original cast mostly intact, and Daniele back directing and sharing choreography duties with Alex Sanchez. But now the acclaimed stage veteran Priscilla Lopez is the star, and her knowing performance as Anuncia (a present-day version of Daniele) enriches this lovely, slightly repetitive, but beautifully sung tribute to sisterly admiration.While tending to her garden on the day she’s set to receive a lifetime achievement award, Anuncia thinks back to the women who raised her in Buenos Aires during the Perón regime. She’s ambivalent about the prize (“Who needs an award for living so long?”) and jokes that her decades of work in the theater (Daniele has received 10 Tony Award nominations and, yes, one career-spanning award in 2021) simply dominoed from the first English word she ever learned: “OK.”A gifted dancer from an early age, she was hired by a major national dance company before moving on to international success.But she’s passionate when conjuring up her Mami (Eden Espinosa), Tía (Andréa Burns), and Granmama (Mary Testa). In the show we watch this matriarchal triumvirate, which Anuncia credits for her resilience and compassion, interact with her younger self (Kalyn West). Each woman details for Anuncia her particular relationship with men. Granmama is “agreeably separated” from her seafaring husband (Enrique Acevedo), whom she met while working as his housekeeper and still allows to woo her whenever he is in port. Tía, a gal’s gal, entertains lusty advances from the “Moustache Brothers” (Acevedo and Tally Sessions), but also prefers her independence.It’s Mami who presents this work’s richest complexities. Anuncia cannot understand why her mother, after years of sordid abuse from her husband (Acevedo again), tries to steer her daughter away from hating the man. Nor can she reconcile her mother’s distaste for the government even though she works as a gubernatorial secretary.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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      ‘United States v. Gupta’ Review: Father’s Trial, Daughter’s Song

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      Deepali Gupta offers a meandering and muddled take on the trial of Rajat Gupta, a former head of McKinsey & Company.“The problem with exposition is, why would you want a map when you’re trying to get lost?” asks Deepali Gupta near the start of “United States v. Gupta.”Lost is certainly how one feels at several points of this meandering production about the trial and conviction for insider trading of Rajat Gupta — Deepali’s father and a former head of the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Over the course of its three hours, what is billed as a “musical tragedy” attempts to use Rajat’s trial as a dramatic trampoline for other topics: Deepali’s involuntary commitment in a psychiatric ward, the legacy of her grandfather (a freedom fighter and journalist), and the biases of business reporters.Confusion is immediately sown when Deepali tells us, by way of introduction, “I am writing a play, and I am making an appeal. The appeal is a play. I am appealing to your humanity. I am appealing to you. I am trying to make your humanity seem appealing.” The last line throws us back on our heels: Why is it our humanity that needs to be upholstered into something appealing?This question is never answered. And confusion reigns throughout the performance. Though based on an actual trial, characters’ identities are collapsed or otherwise destabilized. Arti Gollapudi plays all three of Deepali’s older sisters, for example, differing mainly by degrees of uptightness. To further complicate matters, Deepali addresses each of them as “Didi,” an honorific of endearment, so that it’s impossible to tell exactly which sister she’s seated next to while they watch their father’s trial.As the musical lurches from topic to topic — the show, directed by Caitlin Sullivan, is seasick with non sequiturs — it continually defers judgment about her father. It ends on the biggest unresolved question of all: whether Rajat Gupta was “a good man.” The jury has by then made its decision, but Deepali, a songwriter and performance artist, primes us to reconsider. When she sings, about a map of India, “how malleable are our borders, how permeable are our boundaries,” she could by hymning the boundary-free nature of not just her own existence, but her father’s, encouraging us to see him as a fallible being.Genre-wise, the play is also at war with itself. Despite its billing as a musical tragedy, it struggles to become either of those things. None of the tunes stuck out as particularly memorable, and many could be safely excised, including a nonsensical duet about SweeTarts sung by Deepali and one of her sisters.The inclination of “Gupta” toward digression merely distracts from the main point, which becomes increasingly muddled as the work inches along. By the end, the show is stuck somewhere between takedown and tribute, between reflecting on what a daughter stands to inherit from her father’s convictions, in both senses of the word, and ceding space to the patriarch to tell his own story. “Gupta” would have benefited, no question, from a map, but even more from a compass.United States v. GuptaThrough Nov. 28 at Jack, Brooklyn; jackny.org. Running time: 3 hours.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More