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      Review: Is William Finn’s ‘A New Brain’ a Stroke of Genius?

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      Barrington Stage Company’s revival of the 1998 musical brings vocal luster and newfound relevance to the story of a songwriter’s near-death experience.First comes the piano, then the bed. In between, in Barrington Stage Company’s revival of “A New Brain,” a dejected man named Gordon Schwinn plunks out the first halting notes of a song he’s writing. It’s about a frog, and he hates it.In this musical, with songs by William Finn and a book by him and James Lapine, the prominence of the piano and the bed is no accident; they are the poles of Schwinn’s, or any artist’s, existence. To write? To sleep? It’s almost Hamletian.But add an endless stream of groany rhymes and a life-threatening crisis, and it becomes something distinctly Finnian: a musical both twittery and existential, with an annoying tickle and a profound smack.For “A New Brain,” first seen at Lincoln Center Theater in 1998, Finn shaped the givens of his idiosyncratic songwriting style and of the stroke that nearly killed him in 1992 into a show that somehow transcends both. If you could never mistake its silliness and sadness for anyone else’s work, you could never miss, in its intimations of mortality, how it inevitably speaks to everyone. After all, we must all decide how to balance the bed and the piano, or our versions of them: the thing that is our destination and the thing we do on the way there.The ragged yet nevertheless powerful revival that opened on Sunday in Pittsfield, Mass., succeeds best with the darker side of that chiaroscuro. As played by Adam Chanler-Berat, Schwinn, like his rhyme-sake Finn, is a songwriter who probably doesn’t need a near-death experience to confirm his morbidly anxious disposition. Being forced to write hideous ditties for a television character named Mr. Bungee (Andy Grotelueschen) is enough to stoke his neuroses.So when a previously undiagnosed arteriovenous malformation makes his brain “explode,” landing him in the hospital to await a risky procedure, he is already primed for a despairing review of his life, love, family and art. Joining him in these semi-hallucinatory retrospections are his best friend and work colleague Rhoda (Dorcas Leung), who tries to eke songs out of him; his indulgent lover, Roger (Darrell Purcell Jr.), who’s stuck on a sailboat; a homeless woman only tangentially related to the plot (Salome B. Smith); and various medical personnel including an absurdly alpha surgeon (Tally Sessions) who sometimes goes shirtless.And then there’s his mother, Mimi, a passive-aggressive tornado of Oedipal attachment and regret. (She cleans her son’s studio while he’s in the hospital by throwing away all his books.) Mary Testa, who in the original production played the homeless woman, deploys a lifetime of stage know-how (and intimacy with Finn’s style) to create a shattering portrait of manic optimism just barely outpacing fury at a world that has already cost her too much.In outline this might all seem grim, but in practice Finn’s songs, even ones called “Craniotomy” and “Poor, Unsuccessful and Fat,” are almost always too bubbly or buoyant to sink. The homeless woman’s big number, “A Really Lousy Day in the Universe,” is a barnburner for Smith despite its bleak message: that disaster is the normal state of affairs for most humans. “Anytime,” a ballad for Roger that was cut during rehearsals in 1998 has been restored; Purcell makes it a lush tear-jerker.Chanler-Berat’s Gordon Schwinn, in green, with his lover (Purcell), at left, his mother (Mary Testa) and his best friend (Dorcas Leung), at right. Daniel RaderHow Finn turns emotional and lyrical indulgence into a kind of discipline, following no known rules of song construction yet scoring points anyway, is something I’ve never understood. Bombarded by rhymes that favor sound over sense rather than the other way around — “Thackeray” and “whackery,” really? — I alternate between cringing at their illogic and tearing up over them.Part of the trick, as in Finn’s “Falsettos” diptych and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” is surely how many of them there are. (“A New Brain,” originally formatted as a revue, is almost entirely sung.) So if at times Joe Calarco’s staging is as becalmed as Roger’s sailboat, its physical life stunted and those revue roots showing, not to worry. A fair wind will turn up soon.The fair wind will often be vocal. That’s evident not just in the unusually well-sung big solos but in the tricky ensemble numbers. (The music direction is by Vadim Feichtner; the superb original vocal arrangements by Jason Robert Brown and Ted Sperling.) “Gordo’s Law of Genetics,” a song led by the surgeon and a hospital chaplain, crystallizes Jewish fatalism (“the bad trait will always predominate”) in wacky doo-wop style. And the finale, revising the opening frog song as a hymn to the human capacity for reawakening — “I feel so much spring within me” — is almost impossibly moving.That capacity for reawakening is particularly wanted now. News of the disastrous effects of the Covid pandemic on the theater keeps coming, with aftershocks that are often worse than the earthquake itself. Through some combination of careful husbandry and audience loyalty, Barrington Stage has kept steady, continuing to succeed with worthwhile productions of thoughtful plays and complex musicals.Not all its neighbors have been so fortunate. Indeed, this production, which runs through Sept. 10, is being presented in association with the Williamstown Theater Festival, 20 miles up Route 7; Williamstown, facing an existential crisis as serious as Schwinn’s, needs all the help it can get. It’s not beyond the brief of “A New Brain” to suggest that everyone’s survival, especially in the arts, is ultimately linked to everyone else’s.Luckily, as this ultimately uplifting revival demonstrates, Gordo’s law of genetics isn’t always right. Sometimes the good trait predominates.A New BrainThrough Sept. 10 at Barrington Stage Company, Pittsfield, Mass; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      After 122 Years, a Lost Edith Wharton Play Gets Its Debut

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      The Shaw Festival in Canada is staging the novelist’s 1901 script, discovered only a few years ago. But how to get its mix of satire and melodrama just right?Edith Wharton’s 1934 autobiography, “A Backward Glance,” glances a bit more carefully at some things than others. She gives her close friend and fellow literary lion Henry James a chapter, but names her husband of 28 years exactly once. (And that’s only because she quotes James referring to him.)One subject Wharton doesn’t mention at all? “The Shadow of a Doubt,” a full-length 1901 play that got close to a Broadway opening before foundering under murky circumstances. It was all but forgotten — which is perhaps what Wharton had intended — until two scholars unearthed a script in 2016.Mary Chinery, of Georgian Court University in New Jersey, and Laura Rattray, of the University of Glasgow, found the script in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. (Crucially, the play was filed not under the center’s well-combed-over Wharton holdings but rather in its collection of “Playscripts and Promptbooks.”)“We often don’t have the complete picture, especially with women writers from that period,” Chinery said. “Their work is so spread out that there’s a lot we still don’t know about.”Audiences will finally be able to see for themselves at the Shaw Festival, in the bucolic Canadian hamlet Niagara-on-the-Lake, which presents works written by and in the spirit of George Bernard Shaw each summer. Nestled alongside works by Shaw, J.M. Synge and Noël Coward this year is the world premiere of “The Shadow of a Doubt,” which opened Aug. 20 at the Royal George Theater.From left, Gauthier, Patrick Galligan and Claire Jullien, whose face is projected onto the set.David CooperTim Carroll, the festival’s artistic director, said he was constantly on the lookout for new works to add to the festival’s repertory. “I have friends all over the world sending me links to articles about new discoveries,” he said. “And 95 times out of 100, you realize this is a forgotten play for a reason.”But he said “Shadow,” a somewhat lurid mash-up of Oscar Wilde’s drollery and Henrik Ibsen’s noose-tightening melodrama, “ticked three boxes”: It was by a well-known author, it was written during Shaw’s lifetime and it had never received a full staging. (There was a BBC Radio adaptation in 2018, and the Red Bull Theater staged a reading the following year.)Carroll felt Wharton’s play was in that 5 percent of discoveries worth unearthing. “It’s not perfect, but it’s jolly interesting,” he said.As it happens, Wharton’s interest in the theater went well beyond the occasional stage adaptations of her novels. Before she found success with “The House of Mirth” in 1905, Chinery said, Wharton had forged relationships with several New York theater professionals and worked on adaptations and brief works that she called “dialogues.”“Shadow,” the story of a nurse who marries uneasily into a wealthy family after her patient’s death, was poised to become Wharton’s big step forward. The play entered rehearsals in February 1901 with the impresario Charles Frohman and the noted leading lady Elsie de Wolfe on the bill. It was scheduled to be performed as a one-off matinee at the Empire Theater, then a Broadway venue, which was a common prelude to a longer run, but it never got that far.Wharton, circa 1905.Culture Club/Getty ImagesWhy? Accounts vary, with culprits ranging from the subject matter (assisted suicide) to a discontented Frohman to an unenthusiastic de Wolfe. Wharton reportedly planned to “strengthen some of the roles” during the announced postponement. But for whatever reason, the postponement became permanent and essentially marked the end of her playwriting days.Much of the play’s raw material would soon provide fodder for her 1907 novel “The Fruit of the Tree,” which served as a useful resource for the cast and crew of the Shaw Festival’s new production. This was especially valuable since the script raised some questions of its own. Katherine Gauthier, who stars as the upwardly mobile (and potentially sinister) Kate Derwent, said she identified several aspects that she believes would have been tweaked after the initial Empire Theater performance.“It had kind of a smorgasbord of genres,” Gauthier said of the original text. “Our challenge has been to put all of these people in the same world.”Gauthier is a playwright herself, as is the director, Peter Hinton-Davis, who described the initial script as “a bit like getting a rehearsal draft” — to the point where he felt almost queasy about taking it on.“We really don’t know why it didn’t get produced, and part of me wonders if Wharton even wanted it produced,” Hinton-Davis said. “We all have stuff at the bottoms of drawers.”“It had kind of a smorgasbord of genres,” Gauthier said of Wharton’s text. “Our challenge has been to put all of these people in the same world.”David CooperHe said the “Shadow” actors, eager to make a good first impression on behalf of the piece, felt more beholden to the original text than they would have for a better-known work. All of the words being performed are Wharton’s, but Hinton-Davis described the rehearsal process as “a constant navigation between the found text and the edited text that we used.” For one thing, he arrived at rehearsals with a considerably leaner version, only to reinsert certain witticisms and plot points along the way.Hinton-Davis also added some audiovisual components, including real-time close-ups courtesy of four onstage cameras, that might have sent de Wolfe to her fainting couch. “Some people will be divided on this production, no question,” said Carroll, who contrasted this approach to what he called the “archaeologically exact sort of staging” common to so many period pieces.Gauthier drew a different comparison from the perspective of Shaw Festival audiences. “I think some people are coming in primed to see another ‘Gaslight,’” she said, alluding to last year’s reboot of another woman-in-trouble drama that played in the same atmospheric theater. “But while a lot of plays come to you, this one asks you to lean forward and listen.”Those who do will hear a fledgling playwright take a tentative but intriguing step toward many of the themes that would animate her novels — the persistence of class, the fluidity of our personas and how they change from relationship to relationship. “Given her mastery of multiple genres, I think she would have done well had she stuck it out as a playwright,” Chinery said.That possibility remains unknowable (unless other plays also surface, including a missing title called “The Tightrope” that Wharton alluded to in her letters). Still, “Shadow” offers a titillating look at what she might have done with — and to — the prevailing theatrical styles of the time.“A lot of people think of realism as the antithesis to artifice, as opposed to melodrama or farce,” Hinton-Davis said. “But I think of realism as the antithesis to idealism, and Wharton excelled at that. I see her as a wonderful satirist.” More

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      At the Ruhrtrienniale, Industrial Ruins Become Stages

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      The best productions at the Ruhrtriennale festival created a sense of unity with their unique, often vast, settings.For six weeks each year, the Ruhrtriennale festival transforms the economically depressed Ruhr region of northwest of Germany into ground zero for cutting edge art and performance.Since 2002, this lavishly funded event, which puts on roughly 30 productions each summer, has lured artists and audiences to Germany’s rust belt with its robust and unexpected programming. And whereas many of Europe’s summer arts festivals can feel interchangeable, the Ruhrtriennale is devoted to works that can’t be experienced the same way anywhere else. Many have been created specifically for the postindustrial sites that dot the region.Earlier this month, the Ruhrtriennale’s artistic director Barbara Frey inaugurated her third and final festival program with her own staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” presented in the Kraftzentrale, the cavernous former power station of a disused steel and coal plant. It was the opening salvo in an interdisciplinary program, running through Sept. 23, that includes an immersive production of a Janacek opera and an art installation in a Brutalist church.The desolate set for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” designed by Martin Zehetgruber, features rusting cars half-sunken in the earth and sparse trees that suggest Shakespeare’s enchanted forest is on the verge of collapse. This is a gloomy “Midsummer,” both visually (thanks to Rainer Küng’s lighting) and atmospherically, and while it is enlivened by fine acting by a troupe of 10 performers, the production itself is oddly sterile and detached. Dorothee Hartinger’s wry and insouciant Puck and Oliver Nägele’s gruff and bittersweet Bottom are standouts. However, most of the time, the actors, drawn largely from the permanent ensemble at the Burgtheater, in Vienna, recite Shakespeare’s text with fine, crisp diction, but without truly inhabiting their characters.Cast members from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from left: Meike Droste, Marie-Luise Stockinger, Sabine Haupt, Markus Scheumann, Sylvie Rohrer, Gunther Eckes, Oliver Nägele and Langston Uibe.Matthias Horn/Ruhrtriennale 2023For a play that dances on the threshold between dream and waking, and art and reality, Frey’s production feels like a slow waltz. (The frequent music box-like tinkering by an onstage musician quickly grew tiring.) There is much to admire, but little to quicken the pulse.I missed the site specificity of the festival’s most memorable productions. When Florentina Holzinger staged “A Divine Comedy” at the Kraftzentrale, in 2021, she made fuller use of the space to create an infernal cabaret-variety show. Although I was not a fan of that production, I must admit that Holzinger’s spectacularly overstuffed staging, featuring joyriding motorcycles and cars, and even a grand piano suspended from the ceiling, was visually stunning. By contrast, Frey’s production, which will transfer to the Burgtheater in September, seems designed for any theater with a rotating stage.There was greater sense of unity between the production and the venue at the world premiere of Gisèle Vienne’s “Extra Life,” at the Salzlager, in the city of Essen.Two years ago Vienne, a distinctive French choreographer and director, was at the Ruhr with her clammy and hallucinatory chamber piece “L’Étang” (“The Pond”). While that previous work was insistently small-scale, with two actors playing 10 roles on a mostly bare set, “Extra Life” embraces the vastness of a former salt storage facility.From left: Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick and Adele Haenel in “Extra Life,” at the Ruhrtriennale in Essen, Germany.Katrin Ribbe/Ruhrtriennale 2023Like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Vienne’s latest creation is a nocturnal piece. In the vast, often fog-shrouded confines of the Salzlager, she unspools a simple yet enigmatic tale about two estranged siblings (Adèle Haenel and Theo Livesey), who reunite at a party and rekindle their relationship, sifting through a painful family history. A third character (Katia Petrowick), who emerges during their long night of the soul, might be a kindred spirit who follows them from the party into the woods. Or perhaps she is a composite of figures from the siblings’ past, or of unconscious wishes.This is a demanding and elliptical production, in which much is implied, but little is ever settled. Vienne and her fellow artists achieve uncanny and cathartic effects through pared-down dialogue, controlled slow-motion choreography and dazzling laser stage lighting (by Yves Godin) that suggests both being at a club and inside a video game. Immersed in the swirl of fog, lasers and a synthesizer score by Caterina Barbieri, the audience seems bathed in postindustrial electricity.With its disquieting blend of surreal and blandly quotidian elements, “Extra Life” can be an exasperating puzzle. It’s best to just surrender to its visual and sonic rhythms over the course of its unhurried 140 minutes. Over the coming months, the production will travel to Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and France.This is Frey’s last summer leading the Ruhrtriennale. Her time at the festival has widely been judged a success, especially next to the troubled reign of her predecessor, Stefanie Carp. But the creators Frey championed were often extreme, or obscure.From next year, the Belgian director Ivo van Hove will be in charge. Like his predecessors, he is sure to put his stamp on the festival, and there is no doubting that van Hove has a questing and disruptive bent. The Ruhrtriennale will give him his biggest canvas yet. I’m curious to see how he chooses to fill the Ruhr region’s majestic cathedrals of industry.RuhrtriennaleThrough Sept. 23 at various venues in northwestern Germany; ruhrtrienniale.de. More

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      Feminist Stories Are Being Set to a Pop Beat. But Are They Empowering?

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      Our critics debate how well shows like “Six,” “& Juliet” and “Once Upon a One More Time” engage with the inner worlds of women onstage.During the first act of “Once Upon a One More Time,” the Broadway jukebox musical that grooves to the Britney Spears oeuvre, a fairy godmother arrives with a present for Cinderella. A gown? No. Glass slippers? No. Cin has enough already. Instead, her godmother gifts her a copy of Betty Friedan’s 1963 best seller, “The Feminine Mystique.”It’s a clumsy gesture in the show, which plans to close next month. (Feminist thought has advanced in 60 years!) And arguably emblematic of a recent spate of Broadway musicals that set feminism to a pop beat, including “Six,” a zippy modern retelling of the lives of Henry VIII’s six wives; “& Juliet,” whose protagonist, miraculously alive, embarks on a girls’ trip of self-discovery; and “Bad Cinderella” (now closed), a chaotic rejiggering of the classic fairy tale. Aimed at girls and women (historically the majority of Broadway ticket buyers), these shows may be sincere attempts to engage with women’s issues — or they’re hollow efforts to capitalize on calls for change. Empty political gestures on Broadway? To quote a song used in two of these shows: “Oops! … I did it again.”On a recent morning, Laura Collins-Hughes, contributing theater critic and reporter; Salamishah Tillet, critic at large; and Lindsay Zoladz, pop music critic, gathered to debate facts and fairy tales. They discussed how narrowly these shows define empowerment, if they define it at all, and why Prince Charming gets the best song. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The recent musicals “Six,” “& Juliet,” “Bad Cinderella” and “Once Upon a One More Time” take female empowerment as their central theme. Are these shows actually empowering or legibly feminist?LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES I wouldn’t say any of them are feminist.SALAMISHAH TILLET Some are empowering, others are not. “Six” is partly feminist, because it shows the impact of King Henry VIII’s misogyny. With the exception of Anne Boleyn, most of his wives have been relegated to the margins. My 11-year-old daughter really loved that these women finally reclaimed their stories and did it with style! But I felt like I was at a fun pop concert rather than at a big Broadway musical.COLLINS-HUGHES “Six” drives me completely up the wall. It wants to have a good time in the neighborhood of spousal murder and abandonment, singing “I don’t need your love.” As if Henry’s love had anything to do with it. As if abuse is what a man’s love for a woman looks like.Lauren Zakrin, second from left, as Little Mermaid gets her voice back upon reading “The Feminine Mystique” in “Once Upon a One More Time.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLINDSAY ZOLADZ I like “Six,” but probably for the reason Salamishah doesn’t — it’s basically a pop concert. I do think the overarching problem with these musicals is the way they fail to define terms, presenting “empowerment” and “feminism” as given, unexamined virtues. Instead of the marriage proposal that supposedly leads to the happily ever after, it’s … empowerment ever after? “Once Upon a One More Time” provided the clearest distillation of the trend. Cinderella’s “feminist awakening” is spurred by her fairy godmother giving her “The Feminine Mystique.” Seriously. The book is treated like a magical talisman throughout the rest of the show, but its actual content is never engaged with. That seems beyond the show’s grasp. Though the book is on sale for $20 in the lobby gift shop.TILLET I gasped when she discovered the book.ZOLADZ Not in a good way, I’m guessing.Doesn’t Cinderella know that women’s studies syllabuses have moved on?TILLET Or that Friedan was heavily criticized for her bourgeois feminism back in the day? Is it weird that we are still locating the beginnings of feminism exclusively in the sexual liberation of straight, white, middle-class, stay-at-home 1950s wives? But that’s an ongoing problem, not just on Broadway.Why do you think we’re seeing these shows now? Is it a cynical attempt to appeal to female ticket buyers or something more organic?TILLET These shows, despite their best intentions, seem limited by their source material. There was a lot of Cinderella this year! The publicity appeal of anything Cinderella is obvious, so for Broadway theaters struggling to get audiences back into the theater, of course it is a ploy.From left: Justin David Sullivan, Melanie La Barrie, Lorna Courtney and Betsy Wolfe in “& Juliet.” With its thoughtful casting of a Black Juliet and the nonbinary character May, the show enables us to see Shakespeare differently, one critic said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCOLLINS-HUGHES “Bad Cinderella” could have been so much more than it was. It is a messy show, it’s always been a messy show, but in London it was actually fun. It had a bit of substance to it. And magic. The feminism, which was so clear and so dramatically propulsive in the London version, was wiped away for Broadway.I took my daughter to “Bad Cinderella” and afterward we had a conversation about the show’s messaging, which was confused at best. Is it asking too much of a musical to also have great messages?COLLINS-HUGHES This question makes me think we all live in fear of that riposte that often greets girls and women who won’t laugh along at a joke that’s not funny: “Where’s your sense of humor?” It’s perfectly legitimate to recoil from a show whose message bugs you, and all the more if it’s at odds with its girl-power, you-be-you marketing.And yet if a show is successful enough in other ways, the messaging may not matter. That was my delighted experience of “& Juliet.”TILLET This was definitely my favorite pop feminist musical of the year. I was genuinely intrigued by the conceit of what happens if Juliet doesn’t die. What life does she make for herself beyond the formula prescribed for her? The musical opens up possibilities for her as a protagonist. And with its thoughtful casting of Lorna Courtney as a Black Juliet and Justin David Sullivan as the nonbinary character, May, it enables us to see Shakespeare differently, too.COLLINS-HUGHES When it has a top-notch cast, “& Juliet” is a blast. But I am baffled that people perceive it as feminist. It really is not.ZOLADZ Say more!COLLINS-HUGHES I don’t mean that it’s anti-feminist, but I don’t think it’s particularly female-centered — not on Juliet, nor on Anne Hathaway [Shakespeare’s wife], who gets one of the subplots.“Bad Cinderella,” starring Linedy Genao, had a brief run this spring. “The feminism, which was so clear and so dramatically propulsive in the London version, was wiped away for Broadway,” one critic said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith the exception of “Six,” these shows are largely created by men. Does that explain anything?COLLINS-HUGHES Of course. It’s not that men can’t and don’t write women well or can’t imagine women’s lives. And it’s certainly not that artists should stick to writing only about people just like them. But they are writing from the outside. That can come with a lot of blind spots and a lot of misapprehensions.All of these musicals use a pop vernacular, “Bad Cinderella” somewhat less so. Is pop, particularly pop written and produced by men, a useful form for feminist discourse?ZOLADZ Something I’ve been thinking about regarding “Once Upon a One More Time” and especially “& Juliet,” which uses the songs of the massive millennial hitmaker Max Martin, is the lyrical limitation of a lot of modern pop music. Martin and the generation of pop architects who followed him treat lyrics almost as an afterthought. Martin has referred to his method of songwriting as “melodic math.” “& Juliet” was fun and more cleverly written than “Once Upon a One More Time,” but a lot of that had to do with the ironic distance between the lyrics themselves and the winking, metatextual way the characters employed them — like when “I Want It That Way,” by the Backstreet Boys, becomes not so much a love song as a narration of an argument between Shakespeare and his wife, who have conflicting opinions about how his latest play should end.TILLET I hated a lot of those pop songs and found them anti-feminist when they originally came out, but when I sang along with the “& Juliet” audience and my tween daughter, I found that they aged better than I had expected. Or maybe, because I’m now middle-age, I’m mistaking nostalgia for progress.COLLINS-HUGHES Inattention to lyrics is a limitation of jukebox musicals, but it doesn’t hold for original pop songs, which can be whatever the writer makes them. It would help, though, if more of the songwriters getting musicals produced were women.ZOLADZ I generally pay more attention to pop music than Broadway musicals, so I found the sound of these shows to be quite striking. Modern pop’s influence is everywhere, especially in a show like “Six,” which is full of electronic beats, hip-hop cadences and direct nods to artists like Beyoncé and Ariana Grande. Is that a trend you have observed over time? And given that this is such a golden age for female pop stars, do you think that crossover appeal has something to do with the rise of these empowerment musicals?COLLINS-HUGHES Musically, “Hamilton” changed Broadway, but it is very much a guy story. Having proved the hunger for modern pop musicals, it left a lot of room for female artists to fill.Do these shows do that filling?COLLINS-HUGHES Musically? Sometimes. But in terms of storytelling, generally no. There are such blinders on imagination, and there’s such an aversion to nuance. It’s a question of whom you’re trying to please. The perception of risk is about displeasing men, not the women and girls who might want to see smart, muscular new musicals.Megan Hilty, left, and Shoshana Bean in “Wicked,” which is partly about a girl learning to harness the power of her outrage to fight against injustice in the world.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDoes the success of the Barbie movie, directed and co-written by a woman, with its several song and dance numbers, point a way forward?COLLINS-HUGHES Absolutely, if the idea is to give the best numbers to the guys.ZOLADZ And the charisma! That’s what ultimately sank “Once Upon a One More Time” for me: Cinderella was often the least compelling character onstage. Juliet didn’t fare much better. I don’t know if blandly “empowered” female characters are the answer. Too often it just feels like a shortcut. Writing flawed, idiosyncratic and more interesting female characters seems like a worthier goal, but most of these shows don’t want to take the risk.TILLET If song choice in a musical is any indication of narrative priorities, “Once Upon a One More Time” had difficulty sustaining its attention on Cinderella and her awakening. Prince Charming got “Oops! … I Did It Again” and her stepmother had “Toxic.” When I watched “Barbie,” I realized how seductive patriarchy is onscreen or onstage, even when we say we are trying to smash it. Why do the Kens get that massive and amazing dance scene?COLLINS-HUGHES A story about or aimed at women is so seldom deemed interesting enough on its own. But Hollywood, like commercial theater, is often in the business of blandification. And who’s blander than Ken? I’d like to think audiences want more than that.These recent shows define empowerment narrowly, restricting it to questions of romantic and sexual relationships with men rather than any broader political awakenings. Why can’t these stories dream bigger or attempt something more intersectional?TILLET I do think a lot of these producers feel that they are being intersectional, simply through casting. But while I appreciate so much more diversity onstage, it is still not enough. The musicals would really have to try to dismantle various forms of oppression at once. That takes nuance, patience and a really radical imagination. An older musical, “The Color Purple,” was successful at this, which brings us back to the strength of the source material, Alice Walker’s novel, and then a sizable female team behind its Broadway staging. It is an understatement to say that the evolution of Celie, who endured such abuse and trauma, is far more compelling than Cinderella’s!ZOLADZ What I find missing from a lot of contemporary art about female empowerment is the way it focuses on the attainment of power and then stops there. What about stories about how easily power can corrupt those who have it? Yes, even women!COLLINS-HUGHES This is a thing that “Wicked” imagines. And two decades on, it’s still packing houses and making loads of money. That show is partly about a girl learning to harness the power of her outrage to fight against injustice in the world.TILLET I’ve seen “Wicked” twice recently. The depth of the storytelling — when the villain and heroine aren’t what they seem — it is just so good. Is it feminist? Maybe. Does it reveal the power and heartbreak of female friendship as the ultimate love story? Very much so. For that alone, it provides a wonderful model for how to really revel in the inner worlds of women onstage. More

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      ‘On Cedar Street’ Meets ‘Here You Come Again’

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      “Here You Come Again” and “On Cedar Street” are very different new musicals about people who are unmoored and seek companionship to make it through.There is little to be gained from getting overly attached to source material. When a story told first in one form is adapted into another, it becomes a different creature — in the details and sometimes the broad outlines, too. So it goes with art; so has it ever gone.And yet I ask for a special dispensation in the case of the new musical, “On Cedar Street,” onstage through Sept. 2 at the Berkshire Theater Group’s Unicorn Theater in Stockbridge, Mass. The show is inspired by Kent Haruf’s slender final novel from 2015, “Our Souls at Night,” about how two widowed, small-town neighbors, Addie and Louis, gingerly find their way into each other’s lives after she proposes a remedy for their loneliness: that they start sleeping together platonically, for conversation and companionship.The book is a quiet, gentle thing, and it takes its time, layering in the details of Addie and Louis’s pasts and presents. Each has been lonely since long before their spouses died: his marriage marred by a scandalous affair, hers numbed by the death of a child. When Addie’s young grandson, Jamie, comes to stay with her, he’s lonely at first, too, and scared of the dark.But the novel’s forlorn heart is nowhere to be found in “On Cedar Street,” which has a book by Emily Mann; music by Lucy Simon (“The Secret Garden”), who died last October, and Carmel Dean; and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead. Directed by Susan H. Schulman, who staged “The Secret Garden” on Broadway, the musical presents Addie (Lauren Ward, in excellent form) and Louis (Stephen Bogardus, not quite disappearing into the role) as essentially fine with being alone, despite Addie’s comic difficulty with sleeping solo, which we witness in her toss-and-turn opening number.“I prefer the single life,” Addie and Louis sing early on, and though they’re skittish about getting romantically involved, they recognize that that’s exactly what they’re doing. Addie didn’t pick her one hot widowed neighbor for nothing. Like the middling Netflix film adaptation of the novel, starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford, this production is definitely a beautiful-people incarnation of the tale.The ache of aloneness is gone, though, and with it the sense of two people cautiously choosing each other, trying not to unduly disturb their respective ghosts. And despite a physical design that’s all patchwork and wood, evoking a kind of sun-dappled Middle America, “On Cedar Street” has mostly discarded the straitening social pressure that Addie and Louis, in the novel, are rebelling against — taunting the local gossips by choosing happiness. (The set is by Reid Thompson, projections by Shawn Edward Boyle.)“On Cedar Street” skitters along, too busy for depth. At 105 minutes, it feels both scant and overcrowded, with narrative context pared away to make space for inorganic plot lines that seem like bids for timely social resonance: one involving a dangerous drought and another a left-winger-vs.-right-winger battle between Addie’s friend Ruth (Lana Gordon) and her neighbor Lloyd (Lenny Wolpe).Ruth serves one laudable new purpose in the musical, though: urging Addie to stand up to her grown son, Gene (Ben Roseberry), who treats her abominably and gets away with it because he blames himself for the accidental death of his sister when they were children. With his pain approximately one cell beneath the surface of his skin, he is forever ready to burst into emotionally lucid song.But Jamie (Hayden Hoffman), Gene’s 8-year-old son, is missing the tender vulnerability that the story needs from the child. That isn’t the fault of the actor; a high school student, he is simply too old for the role. Jamie’s dog, Charley, is played by a sandy-furred stage veteran named Addison. (Animal direction and training are by William Berloni; Rochelle Scudder is the dog handler.)The score, which includes additional music by Deborah Abramson, is a mixed bag stylistically. Much of the music is lovely, but almost no songs get the affective underpinning from the show that would make them land with any impact. The closest it gets to poignant is “The Girl We Were,” with strings underneath Addie’s remembrance of the passionate soul she used to be. (Music direction is by Kristin Stowell.)It’s Charley, ultimately, who elicits a moment of genuine emotion toward the finish of “On Cedar Street” — an overly neat ending (albeit an improvement on the novel’s) orchestrated by way of the drought plot line. A forest fire is involved, which might seem terribly of the moment, but then again so is loneliness.This spring, the U.S. Surgeon General released a report titled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, warning of the need for social connection and the dire harm that its absence can bring. Addie, Louis and Jamie are prime examples — first of the ailment, then of the cure — if only “On Cedar Street” would let them be.Kevin (Matthew Risch) and Dolly (Tricia Paoluccio) in “Here You Come Again” at Goodspeed Musicals’ Terris Theater in Chester, Conn.Diane SobolewskiLoneliness is far more top of mind in the hallucinatory new jukebox comedy “Here You Come Again,” running through Aug. 27 at Goodspeed Musicals’ Terris Theater in Chester, Conn. The mind in question is barely hanging on.Kevin (Matthew Risch), an aspiring comic, has left New York for Texas in the early, planet-on-pause days of the pandemic. In May 2020, he is isolating in the attic of his childhood home. (The set is by Anna Louizos.) Pictures of his idol, Dolly Parton, hang on the wooden walls; downstairs, his parents watch Fox News. On the verge of being officially dumped by his hedge-fund-guy boyfriend back in Manhattan, Kevin is feeling fragile.But when he wakes to find Dolly (Tricia Paoluccio) in the room with him, he is less comforted than confused.“Hey, little buddy,” she says, with the beneficence of a Tennessee guardian angel making a surprise appearance. “I’ve been keeping my eye on everyone during the pandemic, and I could feel your need for some extra help.”This phantasmic Dolly is a charmer, and in her sparkles and stilettos and butterfly sleeves, she makes sense as the hero of a pandemic musical. (Costumes are by Bobby Pearce.) The real Parton spent the spring of 2020 donating to coronavirus research and reading bedtime stories to children online. The Dolly here is similarly generous, singing more than a dozen numbers: “Love Is Like a Butterfly,” “Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You” and other hits. (The music director is Eugene Gwozdz.)Paoluccio, who wrote the musical’s book with Bruce Vilanch and the show’s director-choreographer, Gabriel Barre, is a fun, fluid Dolly, bubbly and confiding. Because this Dolly exists in Kevin’s imagination, she doesn’t have to match the real one precisely, but she is close enough. One caveat: Paoluccio goes distractingly hard on Dolly’s sometime tendency to pronounce “s” like “sh.”It is Kevin’s story, though, and its telling needs more balancing and tightening. Unmoored from the life he’d been living and the home he’d made before the world abruptly got small, he is awash in self-pity — an unappealing quality when humor isn’t there to buoy it. The show also needs grounding in a reality outside the attic, to give it the emotional gravity it wants; the offstage voice of Kevin’s mother (Risch) could provide that if she were played straight rather than as a caricature.In its current state, “Here You Come Again” is unpolished, but Parton’s music makes it an easy good time. That, and Dolly’s company — even if we’re imagining her, too.Here You Come AgainThrough Aug. 27 at the Terris Theater, Chester, Conn.; goodspeed.org. Running time: 2 hours.On Cedar StreetThrough Sept. 2 at the Unicorn Theater, Stockbridge, Mass.; berkshiretheatregroup.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      ‘El Mago Pop’ Review: Antonio Díaz’s Magic Show Is Charming

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      In his Broadway debut, the illusionist Antonio Díaz does levitation and teleportation. But it’s simple tricks, with cards and balls, that really wow.Not so long ago, landing a helicopter on a Broadway stage was kind of a big deal. In “El Mago Pop,” the charming, thrilling, silly Broadway show by the Spanish illusionist Antonio Díaz, it is one of the more minor stunts. The stage is empty. Then it’s ornamented by a red and silver copter. Then it’s empty again, except for lights and sparks.Díaz grew up on the outskirts of Barcelona, Spain. Like most professional magicians, he discovered magic early and worked at it obsessively, a process he details in a long video sequence that begins the brief show. (Excluding the video and a padded curtain call, the live action runs perhaps an hour.) At 37, he claims to be the youngest illusionist to present a show on Broadway, but as with many of his effects, that’s a tricky thing to verify. Doug Henning seems to have been the same age.Díaz bops onto the stage of the Ethel Barrymore Theater in a white shirt, skinny black pants and a skinnier black tie, the outfit of an excitable 1960s mod. He is short and slight, with long, nimble fingers — watch those fingers when you can, the precision and economy are gorgeous — and a high, fast voice. In contrast with the heavy eyeliner and gothic fripperies of magic’s 2000s efflorescence, he seems indefatigably nice and bountifully cheerful as he bounces up and down in his sneakers, which seem to have helium lifts. He is a prestidigitator you could take home to mother.As if to underline that sweetness, each ticketholder receives a candy jar upon entering. The jars feature in a fairly modest mathematics-focused magic trick. Still the gesture is nice. This boy-next-door persona sometimes feels at odds with the director Mag Lari’s extravagant staging, a symphony of blinding lights and so very many open flames. A day later I am still picking confetti out of my clothes. But maybe that’s what happens when the boy next door comes to Broadway. And yet his skills are never in doubt.“I intend for you to see impossible things tonight,” Díaz says. Fairly often, he delivers.There is a recent trend in magic, popularized by performers like Derek DelGaudio and Helder Guimarães, to weave tricks into some larger narrative, often a personal history. Díaz gestures toward that, but he doesn’t actually share much of himself. The video suggests the story of a boy who dreams of achieving the incredible. And Díaz tells the audience that this brief stint on Broadway culminates those dreams, which nods to an emotional undercurrent. But there’s little narrative here, just the sense of a canny and dexterous performer checking off another box on a “Become an International Sensation” to-do list.Díaz’s rise, like his stage maneuvers, is presented as unfailingly smooth, with doubt, quirk and adversity scrubbed away. In place of narrative, there are cartoon video interludes — Díaz as a superhero, Díaz as an old man — and a relentlessly basic playlist Díaz relies on: “Power of Love,” “Shut Up and Dance,” the “Star Wars” theme, multiple Coldplay numbers. (Díaz and Jesús Díaz are credited with the music selection; they are not related.) There is also, absurdly, an extended clip from “Forrest Gump.”Díaz’s best tricks were simple — achieved by practice, determination and flabbergasting dexterity.Emilio Madrid“El Mago Pop” alternates between large-scale illusions and smaller ones, performed in the aisles of the orchestra and shot by roaming cameramen. This means that if you are seated in the back of the theater or in the upper tiers, you will see the show mostly onscreen, which has a way of diminishing awe. Most of us have been spoiled by too many special effects, editing tricks and filters to trust the evidence of screens. For me, the close-up stunts performed in the opposite aisle felt far less astonishing than one that happened just a few feet away, in which a volunteer’s ring shot through the air and landed, rattling, inside a covered shot glass.Levitation is one of Díaz’s specialties. Teleportation is another. The teleportation tricks are probably his best. When assistants or ostensible audience members appear, in a blink, in a vitrine on the opposite side of the stage, it produces a giddy feeling of wonder.His audience interaction is less certain. For one trick, he selected a very young child, who looked uncomfortable, even terrified, to be brought onstage. The child didn’t speak, but when Díaz asked, “Do you like magic?” a vigorous shake of the head was given: No. That got a laugh, so Díaz repeated the question. The child squirmed. Was this worth it for a routine with a wristwatch?Díaz’s best routine was performed alone to a peppy Jacques Brel song. Breathlessly, Díaz manipulated a ball (a tribute to Cardini’s classic billiard ball routine), many cards, even his own right shoe. His hands would be empty. His mouth would be empty. You would swear to it on any available Bible. Then they would be full, cards raining to the floor. He sent a few cards whizzing through the air in a way that reminded me of Ricky Jay, the scholar and magician, who died in 2018. I may have teared up a little. This was Díaz’s simplest sequence and also his most beautiful. Who needs a helicopter when you can make magic like that?El Mago PopThrough Aug. 27 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; elmagopop.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘The Outsiders’ Heads to Broadway in March

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      A new musical adaptation of a popular novel by S.E. Hinton will begin performances in March.Get ready to rumble.“The Outsiders,” a new musical adaptation of the 1967 S.E. Hinton novel of teenage alienation, as well as the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola film starring Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze and Ralph Macchio, will begin performances on Broadway this spring. The cast has yet to be named.The musical is set in Tulsa, Okla., in the 1960s and follows an increasingly bloody conflict between rival gangs — the East Side have-nots, the Greasers, and the West Side haves, the Socs (short for “socials”). It will begin previews at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater on March 16, with an opening slated for April 11.“The Outsiders” was initially set for a world premiere at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in June 2020 before the pandemic delayed and then scuttled those plans. When the production finally began performances in California in February, it had a nearly three-hour run time, with a cast of 25 led by Brody Grant as Ponyboy Curtis, an orphaned 14-year-old who lives with his older brothers, Sodapop (Jason Schmidt) and Darrel (Ryan Vasquez), both of whom have left school to support him. (Sky Lakota-Lynch played his best friend, Johnny Cade.)Angelina Jolie was announced last week as a lead producer. Jolie, whose credits as a film producer include “Maleficent” and “Unbroken,” saw the world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego this year with her 15-year-old daughter, Vivienne, whom she said will serve as her assistant (the pair also attended a touring production of “Dear Evan Hansen” in Philadelphia last year).While some critics found the musical’s ambitious scale appealing, others thought the story was weighed down by too many characters and themes. “Awkward, yearning, fast on its feet, the show, like the adolescents it describes, is still trying on various identities,” Alexis Soloski wrote in a review for The New York Times, though she praised the “effortless yet thoughtfully diversified” casting of the Greasers, who, like the Socs, are white and male in both the book and the movie, as well as the “gorgeous, mournful music.” (The songs are by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, of Jamestown Revival, as well as Justin Levine, who won a Tony Award for his orchestrations for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”)Danya Taymor (“Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” “Pass Over”), who directed the La Jolla production, will return for the Broadway run, as will the rest of the creative team. The book is by Adam Rapp (“The Sound Inside”) and Levine, who also handled the arrangements and orchestrations, with choreography by Rick and Jeff Kuperman.In addition to Jolie, the show’s producers also include American Zoetrope, the San Francisco film production company founded by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas; as well as Sue Gilad and Larry Rogowsky (“Moulin Rouge!,” “Funny Girl”).Hinton’s novel, which was published when she was a teenager, has long been celebrated for its relatable protagonist and unpolished authenticity. But those same qualities have also put it on frequently challenged books lists for its portrayal of gang violence, underage smoking and drinking and strong language.“The Outsiders” joins two other Broadway productions that have announced dates for next year. “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s dark comedy about a family grappling with antisemitism in France, opens in January; and “The Notebook,” a musical adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’s best-selling romance novel, opens in March. More

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      In ‘The Effect,’ Paapa Essiedu and Taylor Russell Delight

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      In a revival of Lucy Prebble’s play at the National Theater, in London, Paapa Essiedu and Taylor Russell are terrific as a couple who meet during a pharmaceutical trial.Are you in love, or are you merely experiencing a giddy dopamine rush? Are those two states even meaningfully different? Is there a true, innermost “you” that is distinguishable from your neurochemistry?These are some of the tricky questions explored by Lucy Prebble’s thought-provoking play, “The Effect,” first staged in 2012 and now revived in a slick new production directed by Jamie Lloyd at the National Theater, in London, running through Oct. 7.“The Effect” revolves around two young people, Tristan and Connie, who take part in a trial for a dopamine-based psychiatric drug with powerful antidepressant properties. Initially, they seem to have little in common — he’s a working class lad from East London; she’s a bougie psychology student from Canada — but as the trial progresses, a tender rapport develops.Throughout the study, the participants are monitored by two psychiatric doctors, Lorna and Toby, who debate their findings: Is the drug pulling their subjects together, or are their feelings organic? And if one of the trial participants was actually receiving a placebo the whole time, what then? Prebble keeps us guessing.Paapa Essiedu — best known for his role in the hit TV show, “I May Destroy You” — is a delight as Tristan, whose roguish charm wins over the audience within minutes. Taylor Russell’s Connie is equally engaging as she slides from steely indifference to caring devotion, almost in spite of herself.Throughout, the pair’s gradual transition from wary awkwardness to intense mutual magnetism is convincingly rendered, in large part thanks to the actors’ terrific onstage chemistry.Things get messy in the latter stages of the experiment, as both the doses and the emotional stakes increase, leading to a fraught and affecting denouement.The stiltedly ambivalent friendship between the two middle-aged doctors provides an intriguing subplot. We learn that Lorna (Michele Austin) and Toby (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) were once romantically involved, many years ago. Lorna is prone to bouts of depression, but refuses to take medication; Toby, on the other hand, is a true pharmaceutical believer.Austin plays Lorna with a dry, matter-of-fact fatalism that, though somewhat gloomy, is altogether more sympathetic than Toby’s myopic zealousness. Holdbrook-Smith approaches the role with a brooding aplomb, delivering his lines in a suave, sociopathic drawl.Michele Austin as Dr. Lorna James. Marc BrennerFor most of the production, the two doctors are seated at opposite ends of the stage — a long strip, designed by Soutra Gilmour and sandwiched between tiered banks of audience seating — while their two guinea pigs occupy the center. During Lorna and Toby’s conversations, they are illuminated by square, pure-white spotlights and the center stage is plunged into darkness. Most of the time, though, it is the doctors who sit in darkness, while we focus on the trial participants in the center. (The lighting design is by Jon Clark.) Lighting alone marks the scene changes, which, along with the audience’s perched vantage point, makes for a suitably clinical ambience.“The Effect” is healthily skeptical about scientifically deterministic approaches to emotional well-being, channeling a dissenting tradition that dates back to the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s; its moral sensibility recalls Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The play’s revival is particularly timely as a new generation of wellness gurus have, in recent years, latched onto the idea that much of human behavior can be explained away as neurotransmitters or hormones simply doing their thing.Prebble invites us to ponder the implications of such thinking. Connie is initially uncomfortable with the notion that two people can fall in love just like that (“It takes work,” she insists), and wary of her attraction to Tristan. He, in response, makes the case for mystery, and thus articulates the play’s key message: That a world in which all feeling is viewed as a matter of chemistry would be a bleak one indeed.The dialogue is deftly composed, and the ethical dilemmas teased out, rather than bludgeoned. This tautness of the writing, together with the strength of the actors’ performances, and its impressive visual aesthetic, elevates this play above the ordinary rung of sociopolitical parables.At its heart is a deep and fertile agnosticism about the true source of emotional connectedness — a bracing antidote to the specious certainties peddled by the self-help industry and Big Pharma. Sure, everything is contingent, but when something feels real, it feels real.At one point in the trial, Tristan declares: “I feel almost holy, like life’s paying attention to me.” Who are we to contradict him?The EffectThrough Oct. 7 at the National Theater, London; nationaltheatre.org.uk. More