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      ‘One Woman Show’ Review: Unlikable for Laughs

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      Liz Kingsman plays a messy attention-seeker grasping at relevance in a sharp satire of the trend of female comics playing chaotic train wrecks.Liz Kingsman’s stupendously silly spoof “One Woman Show” arrives in New York with enough buzz for an apiary. The rare solo comedy that moved from small theaters to the West End in London, it has received gushing reviews, topped year-end best-of lists and inspired more than one profile proclaiming its star the “queen of comedy.”That its jokes seem modest and a bit familiar shouldn’t discourage fans of sharply observed satire. The main target appears to be “Fleabag,” another solo launching pad, but more broadly it takes aim at the trend of female comics portraying sexually candid, flamboyantly chaotic train wrecks.Kingsman, whose alert, expressive eyes anchor an easy charisma, walks onstage before you realize she’s there. Cameras are on each side of her. She’s playing an anxiety-ridden actor putting a show together in the hopes of getting it on television. Shifting back and forth between off and onscreen, she stumbles through, technical mishaps piling up. When things break down, the tension between her and the unseen technical staff is delightfully passive aggressive.Her character is a mockery of the nakedly ingratiating artist who disguises herself as a boldly feminist risk-taker. The show she’s performing, called “Wildfowl,” takes you through an ordinary day, where she punches a busker, then yells at him that female characters don’t have to be likable anymore. In another moment, she says, calculatedly blasé: “I guess I’m just relatable.”Like Leo Reich in “Literally Who Cares?!,” another solo show from Britain that played Greenwich House Theater, Kingsman strings together knowing jargon (“Adulting,” “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff”) to poke fun at a sweaty attempt at relevance. Her ear for cliché can be hilarious, including a running joke about the overdone subject of discovering the downsides of the internet. “I know, I know,” she says, with comic conviction. “Everyone says social media is great.”The best parts of this show, staged by Adam Brace with the rhythm of a tight pop song, are the slyly underplayed moments of cultural criticism.The American tradition of the kind of woman she’s satirizing precedes “Fleabag” (see: Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer), and the next generation of comic performers have integrated spoofs into their work. In “Kate,” Kate Berlant also made fun of pretentious character work while leaning on a similar meta-theatrical framing device. And even a stand-up like Catherine Cohen builds self-awareness into her messy comic persona.These performers have a comic intensity that this show doesn’t aim for. In casual overalls, Kingsman is wry and off-handed even when buffoonish. Instead of pushing the desperation of her character, she plays it flatly. Some of this is its own sharp satire, since one of the jokes of the show is how one-dimensional supporting characters (the boss, the friend) only matter in service of the central star. But this is a light gibe. Kingsman’s instincts are affectionate and writerly. She isn’t out for blood so much as a witty delight.One Woman ShowThrough Aug. 11 at Greenwich House Theater; Manhattan. onewomanshownyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Sheldon Harnick, ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Lyricist, Dies at 99

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      His collaborations with the composer Jerry Bock also included “Fiorello!” — which, like “Fiddler,” was a Tony winner — and “She Loves Me.”Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist who teamed up with the composer Jerry Bock to write some of Broadway’s most memorable musicals, including the Tony Award winners “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Fiorello!,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 99. His death was announced by a spokesman, Sean Katz.Mr. Harnick’s lyrics could be broadly funny, slyly satirical, lushly romantic or poignantly moving. He gave voice to a broad range of characters, including starry-eyed young lovers, corrupt politicians, a quarreling Adam and Eve and, in “Fiddler on the Roof,” struggling Jews in early-20th-century Russia.When three unmarried sisters in “Fiddler” confront the village matchmaker, two of them hopeful and the third cynical, they all end up having second thoughts:Matchmaker, matchmaker, plan me no plansI’m in no rush, maybe I’ve learnedPlaying with matches a girl can get burned.So bring me no ring, groom me no groom,Find me no find, catch me no catch.Unless he’s a matchless match!When the leading man in “She Loves Me” is about to meet the woman with whom he’s been trading love letters for months, he practically sings himself into a nervous breakdown:I haven’t slept a wink, I only thinkOf our approaching tête-à-tête,Tonight at eight.I feel a combination of depression and elation;What a state!To waitTill eight.Maria Karnilova and Zero Mostel in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” for which Mr. Harnick and Jerry Bock wrote the score. The show, which opened in 1964, ran for more than 3,200 performances and became the longest-running musical in Broadway history.Bettmann/Getty ImagesMr. Harnick met Mr. Bock in the late 1950s, and the two quickly realized they could work together despite their different temperaments. “I tend to approach things skeptically and pessimistically,” Mr. Harnick told The New York Times in 1990. “Jerry Bock is a bubbling, ebullient personality.”The team would break up after a dozen years over a dispute involving their musical “The Rothschilds.” But the combination worked extremely well while it lasted.The late 1950s was a challenging time for newcomers to the musical stage. The decade’s hit Broadway musicals had included “Guys and Dolls,” “The King and I,” “Wonderful Town,” “My Fair Lady” and “Candide.” “In those days,” Mr. Harnick recalled in a 2004 interview, “lyricists were consciously trying to be more sophisticated and literate. Now we’re in the Andrew Lloyd Webber vein, trying to hit bigger, broader audiences.”Mr. Harnick and Mr. Bock got off to a weak start in 1958 with “The Body Beautiful,” set in the world of prizefighting; it closed after a brief run. But they bounced back decisively the next year with “Fiorello!,” a breezy portrait of one of New York City’s most colorful politicians.“Fiorello!,” which had a book by George Abbott and Jerome Weidman and was directed by Mr. Abbott, starred Tom Bosley as Fiorello H. La Guardia, the reformer who was mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945. Its score evoked a time when political corruption was rife.The song “Little Tin Box,” for example, suggests how a crooked party boss (Howard Da Silva) might have responded when a judge asked him how he has managed to buy a yacht, given his modest salary. The boss replies:I am positive Your Honor must be joking.Any working man can do what I have done.For a month or two I simply gave up smokingAnd I put my extra pennies one by oneInto a little tin boxA little tin boxThat a little tin key unlocks.There is nothing unorthodoxAbout a little tin box.“Fiorello!” ran for nearly 800 performances and won three Tony Awards, including the prize for best musical, which it shared with “The Sound of Music.” It was also one of the few musicals to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Jerry Bock, left, with Mr. Harnick in 1970. Their collaboration produced some of Broadway’s most memorable musicals.Barton Silverman/The New York TimesBut the Bock-Harnick team’s biggest success — and one of Broadway’s — was yet to come: “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened in 1964 and ran for more than 3,200 performances. It became the longest-running musical in Broadway history, a record that stood for a decade.Directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with a book by Joseph Stein based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, “Fiddler on the Roof” told the story of a Jewish community facing expulsion from a village in the czarist Russian empire, with a focus on Tevye (Zero Mostel), the village milkman, and his family.In addition to “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” the score included a number of songs that would soon be regarded as classics, including “Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset” and Tevye’s humorously wistful lament “If I Were a Rich Man” (“There would be one long staircase just going up/ And one even longer coming down/ And one more leading nowhere, just for show”).“Fiddler on the Roof” was more than a hit show; it was a phenomenon. It won nine Tony Awards, including one for its score. It was made into a hit movie in 1971, has been performed all over the world, and has had five Broadway revivals, most recently in 2015. (A Yiddish-language production was an Off Broadway hit in 2019 and played a return engagement in late 2022.)Mr. Harnick, left, and Hal Prince, the producer of “Fiddler on the Roof,” in 2015.Damon Winter/The New York TimesAmong the Bock-Harnick team’s other noteworthy efforts was “She Loves Me” (1963), based on the same Hungarian play that was the basis for the movies “The Shop Around the Corner,” “In the Good Old Summertime” and “You’ve Got Mail.” The story of two workers at a perfume shop in Budapest (Barbara Cook and Daniel Massey) who finally realize that they have been trading romantic letters and that they are meant for each other, “She Loves Me” had no showstopping songs and was not initially a big success, closing after 301 performances. But it has grown in popularity after a series of revivals — although Broadway productions in 1993 and 2016 were equally brief.Their other shows included “The Apple Tree” (1966), three musical playlets (including one about Adam and Eve) directed by Mike Nichols, and “The Rothschilds” (1970), based on Frederic Morton’s biography of the Jewish family that rose from the ghetto to become a financial powerhouse.It was a dispute over who would direct “The Rothschilds” that ended the Bock-Harnick partnership. The show’s original director, Derek Goldby, was replaced by Michael Kidd at the urging of Mr. Harnick and others who wanted someone with more musical-theater experience. Mr. Bock was irate.“Jerry felt that Derek had gotten a raw deal,” Mr. Harnick recalled in 1990. “For a while, the feelings between us were very bad.” He added that “things changed for the better” when “Fiorello!” was revived in 1985 at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut and he and Mr. Bock met there to work on it. (It was revived again off Broadway in 2016.)Nonetheless, they never wrote another show together. Mr. Bock died at 81 in 2010.From left, Mr. Prince, Mr. Bock, Mr. Harnick, Fred Ebb and John Kander in 2004, when the Bock-Harnick and Kander-Ebb songwriting teams announced that they were giving their archives to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.Yoni Brook/The New York TimesSheldon Mayer Harnick was born on April 30, 1924, in Chicago to Harry and Esther Harnick. His father was a dentist, his mother a homemaker. He took violin lessons as a child, attended music school as a teenager and earned money playing in amateur theatricals. After serving in the Army, he enrolled at the Northwestern University School of Music. He graduated in 1949.He began writing songs while in Carl Schurz High School in Chicago and became seriously interested in songwriting as a career after hearing a recording of Burton Lane and E.Y. Harburg’s hit 1947 musical, “Finian’s Rainbow.” At the urging of the actress Charlotte Rae, a fellow Northwestern student, he moved to New York in 1950.Mr. Harnick’s first song in a Broadway show was “The Boston Beguine,” which he wrote — music as well as lyrics — for the revue “Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952.” He wrote numbers for several other revues, including “Two’s Company” (1952), before teaming with Mr. Bock. (One of his compositions from those years, the darkly satirical and deceptively cheerful “The Merry Minuet,” was popularized by the folk music group the Kingston Trio.)Mr. Harnick’s first marriage, to Mary Boatner, was annulled. His second, to the comedian, writer and director Elaine May, ended in divorce. In 1965, he married Margery Gray, an actress whom he had met when she auditioned for his show “Tenderloin.” (She later became a photographer and an artist.) She survives him, as do a daughter, Beth Dorn; a son, Matthew Harnick; and four grandchildren.After his split with Mr. Bock, Mr. Harnick went on to collaborate with other composers. He worked with Mary Rodgers on a 1973 version of “Pinocchio” performed by the Bil Baird marionettes, and with her father, Richard Rodgers, on “Rex,” a musical about King Henry VIII of England that had a brief Broadway run in 1976, with Nicol Williamson in the title role. He also worked with Michel Legrand on two shows: an English-language stage version of the movie musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” produced off Broadway in 1979, and a new adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” staged in Stamford, Conn., in 1982. And he collaborated with Joe Raposo on “A Wonderful Life,” based on the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which has had a number of regional productions since 1986.Mr. Harnick in 2015. His lyrics could be broadly funny, slyly satirical, lushly romantic or poignantly moving. Chad Batka for The New York TimesMr. Harnick also became an accomplished opera translator, providing English librettos for classical works like Lehar’s “The Merry Widow,” Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” and Bizet’s “Carmen.”He wrote some original opera librettos as well, including “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines” (1975), with music by Jack Beeson, and “The Phantom Tollbooth” (1995), a collaboration with Norton Juster, the author of the children’s book on which it was based, and the composer Arnold Black. “Lady Bird: First Lady of the Land,” an opera about Lady Bird Johnson, for which he wrote the libretto and Henry Mollicone wrote the music, had its premiere in Texas in 2016 and has been performed in New York and elsewhere.In late 2015, shortly before the latest Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” opened, Mr. Harnick was in the studio making a demonstration record of songs from “Dragons,” an adaptation of a Russian play for which he wrote the book, music and lyrics, and which he had been working on for many years. In an interview with The Times, he said that he had no thoughts of retirement, and that he continued to attend every show on Broadway, as he had for many years. He added that he was working on a new show of his own.“I hope I live long enough to complete it,” he said. “I won’t tell you what idea I have, because you’ll steal it.”Robert Berkvist, a former New York Times arts editor, died in January. Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More

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      A Comic With Many Questions About Jews and Whiteness

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      Alex Edelman thrives on doubt in “Just for Us” on Broadway. It’s the result of years of revision and notes from Seinfeld, Birbiglia and the late Adam Brace.When Jerry Seinfeld talked to the comic Alex Edelman after seeing him perform “Just for Us,” his solo show that began previews on Broadway this week, he gave him one note: Don’t acknowledge the audience’s response to a joke onstage.Edelman, 34, took it, even though he has the kind of sensitive, hyperactive mind that can’t help but look past the fourth wall. In an interview recently at Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side, he kept peeking at my list of questions, inquiring why I was writing down “L’s” (I wasn’t) and periodically asking me how he was doing (very well). He seemed to answer questions while simultaneously imagining how they were playing, even in emotional moments like discussing his longtime friend, collaborator and director Adam Brace, who tragically died in April at 43 after a stroke.Brace had been critical at every stage of Edelman’s show from its inception in 2018 through hundreds of performances, and after almost all of them the British director gave him notes. “He looked after the flow of the show,” Edelman said, which is why the comic paused in our conversation as he considered a joke he had worked on at the Comedy Cellar the night before, his eyes watering as he said how much he missed having Brace as a sounding board. He then imagined how getting choked up would come off, writing the sentence out loud (“and his eyes fill up”) before quipping: “Don’t overdo it.”During the pandemic, “Just for Us,” a thoughtful, punchline-dense comedy, skipped past downtown hit into the rarefied air of cultural phenomenon. I knew it made the zeitgeist when friends not especially interested in comedy approached me wanting to talk about it. The autobiographical show benefits from a killer elevator pitch: Orthodox Jewish comic gets accidentally invited to a white supremacist meeting in Queens, attends and has a meet-cute flirtation with a racist.When “Just for Us” ran in Washington, D.C., it became the second-highest-grossing show in Woolly Mammoth Theater’s 43-year history. Asked about this success by phone, its artistic director, Maria Manuela Goyanes, recalled telling Jewish staff members: “Y’all show up.”But unlike current Broadway shows that explore antisemitism like “Parade” or “Leopoldstadt,” Edelman isn’t looking back at the past but toward the identity politics of the moment. One reason “Just for Us” has resonated with audiences is that it’s one of the few new shows to dig into the relationship between Jews and whiteness. “Growing up I always wanted to be white,” Edelman says in the show. This gets a laugh because he presents as white, but not all groups see him that way, which he called “almost a founding tension” of the show.After one performance, an audience member told Edelman he always thought Jews were white until he saw the show. Someone behind him responded that they always thought Jews weren’t white. Edelman looked pleased by this exchange. “It’s the induction of doubt,” he explained to me, adding that he told them: “You’re both right.”Edelman at the Comedy Cellar, where he continues to work out jokes.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesHis instinct is to question, not answer, to air strong opinions but not settle into them too securely. When Kanye West comes up in our conversation, Edelman described a Jewish friend who resented the expectation that he should be outraged by the rapper’s trafficking in Jewish stereotypes, describing it as “taking our turn on the victim wheel.” In our talk, Edelman articulated this position with passion but didn’t go so far as to agree. His point is that his show aims to “have the conversation about Jews in their place on that spectrum of whiteness without having a conversation about victimhood.”Growing up in Boston, the child of a professor of biomedical engineering and a real estate lawyer, Edelman, who has a slight build and floppy hair, has been doing stand-up since he was a teenager. (He has had long-term romantic relationships with the female comics Katherine Ryan and more recently, Hannah Einbinder, though they broke up a month ago.) He describes his early influences as “not great,” explaining that “if I’m being honest, I saw a lot of racist comedy, self-congratulatory and smug.” He described discovering his voice when he went to London during college, and recalled one key turning point when the British comic Josie Long took him aside and said, “What you’re doing is getting laughs but it’s not who you are.”Even more important, at 23, he met Brace at Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s birthday party. They talked comedy and Brace later asked him if he could give him notes. Brace was especially alert to the dramaturgy of a show, insisting on cutting jokes that worked if they weren’t worth the lost momentum. If Edelman riffed too much, Brace told him: You’re on the jazz tonight. Their running conversations continued over the next decade.In early June, I accompanied Edelman to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to watch old recordings of Broadway performances by artists like Billy Crystal (who also gave him a note after a show) and Eric Bogosian. When a man at the desk told him that he could see “The Producers” only with the approval of its director, Susan Stroman, and she was in London, Edelman looked down at his phone, shot off a text and within a minute had her approval. The man at the desk looked surprised, then added that he also needed the approval of Robin Wagner, the show’s set designer, and he had died the previous week. After a pregnant pause, Edelman deadpanned: “That’s beyond my ability.”When asked about how he seems to know everyone, Edelman said these were all people he approached because he was genuinely curious about them. “The thing everyone says but maybe doesn’t internalize is: You just have to show up,” he explained, before adding that there is privilege in knowing you are able to do so.The previous month, when in Boston, he knocked on the door of the 94-year-old comedy legend Tom Lehrer, whom he did not know, just to talk. “I told him I was a comedian,” Edelman reported. “And he said, ‘What problem do you need solving?’”In a more critical example of showing up, Edelman approached Mike Birbiglia in 2019. “We had an older brother, younger brother relationship,” Birbiglia said by phone. “He’d ask to pick my brain and I’d say I’m very busy.”This time, however, when Edelman described “Just for Us,” Birbiglia heard a surprising, relatable story that had more potential. He told Edelman to keep working on it. After producing one performance, Birbiglia, who is not Jewish, encouraged him to strengthen its spine. With a chuckle, he recalled that one note was to make it more Jewish.Edelman returned to London and he and Brace rebuilt the show as controversy raged in the Labour Party there over its leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attitudes toward Jews, which Edelman said informed the writing. After opening Off Broadway in 2021 to rave reviews, “Just for Us” became a hit.With Brace gone, Edelman said he had leaned on Birbiglia more, both for notes and emotional support. When I asked Birbiglia what Edelman was good at besides comedy, he said with a small snort: “Newspaper interviews.” Later that night, he texted me that “one of Alex’s remarkable talents is he’s willing to continue to rewrite and experiment on a show that had already reviewed well” at festivals like the Edinburgh Fringe. “That’s a very rare quality,” the text continued, “and I think it bodes well for whatever he chooses to do next.”That has been on Edelman’s mind. He had planned to make his follow-up about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a subject he has been fascinated by since he was a kid, but doing so without Brace seemed daunting.And yet, there was something about the cantankerous impossibility of this dispute that clearly appeals to him. One of the first things Edelman told me in our interview was: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”He thought it was from the playwright George Bernard Shaw, but reconsidered, brow furrowed, then looked it up on his phone and realized it was from the poet William Butler Yeats. “I have so much doubt,” he said, “which is why I have so much patience for both sides of the argument.” More

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      ‘Once Upon a One More Time’ Review: Liberation Set to Britney Spears

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      The Britney Spears jukebox musical, about fairy tale princesses fighting for their emancipation, comes up short as a narrative of feminist awakening.The Britney Spears jukebox musical “Once Upon a One More Time” is not a bio-show recounting the singer’s life. Rather, it retrofits two dozen of her songs — including “Oops! … I Did It Again,” “Womanizer,” “Toxic,” “Gimme More” and, of course, “ … Baby One More Time” — to tell the story of a fair-haired princess who, realizing she has been played by a handsome rogue and controlled by an omnipresent father figure, rises up and fights for her emancipation.Hmm, maybe the (fully authorized) apple does not fall far from the tree.But this big, splashy show, which is quite entertaining at times, is hampered by a shambolic jumble of sisterhood 101 messaging and defanged fantasy revisionism. Rewriting classic yarns with a pop-feminist spin has become big business, with Disney updating its operating system one property at a time, and princesses and fairy tales calcifying into common tropes of empowerment pep on Broadway — think “Frozen,” “Aladdin,” “Bad Cinderella” or, for an artistically successful example, “Head Over Heels.”“Once Upon a One More Time” banks on a familiar figure, Cinderella (Briga Heelan), who here is starting to feel vaguely antsy about her life. She and her fellow storybook heroines — Snow White (Aisha Jackson), Princess Pea (Morgan Whitley), Rapunzel (Gabrielle Beckford), Sleeping Beauty (Ashley Chiu) and Little Mermaid (Lauren Zakrin) — are bossed around by an imperious Narrator (Adam Godley, for whom this must feel like a vacation after “The Lehman Trilogy”). He is basically a domineering stage manager acting on behalf of the patriarchy.Although Cinderella is supposed to be content in the happy-ever-after, her loneliness just might be killing her. But shush, pretty lady, push these thoughts out of your lovely head: As her prince (Justin Guarini) soothingly informs her, “You’re paid to be pretty, and I’m paid to be charming.”“What do you mean, paid?” Cinderella replies. “I don’t get paid.”So he tries to put her off the scent by singing “Make Me,” as one does.At Scroll Club, the princesses read their own stories: From left, Aisha Jackson as Snow White, Morgan Whitley as Princess Pea, Ashley Chiu as Sleeping Beauty, Gabrielle Beckford as Rapunzel and Lauren Zakrin as Ariel.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesLuckily, Cinderella gets a fortuitous visit from the Notorious O.F.G. (Original Fairy Godmother, played by Brooke Dillman), who gives her the key to understanding her existential malaise: Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique.” (It’s a choice that will puzzle those who have moved on to more recent feminist waves; then again, Jon Hartmere’s book also includes a Howard Stern joke, so insert shrug emoji.)But before Cinderella has a chance to really dig in, the Stepmother (Jennifer Simard, last seen in “Company”) seizes the book. To retrieve it and ultimately become her own woman, our heroine enrolls her similarly shackled princess buddies from Scroll Club, where they read their own stories, for some consciousness raising.Much of the excitement here is generated by the choreography of Keone and Mari Madrid, who also directed the production (with an assist from David Leveaux, credited as the creative consultant). The couple, who created the Off Broadway hip-hop dance drama “Beyond Babel” in 2020, got their break in music videos, which may be why the large ensemble numbers shine brightest: tight formation extravaganzas that heavily rely on popping and locking, and incorporate elaborate hand movement. An occasional wink to Spears’s video oeuvre doesn’t hurt, either.And though the numbers for “ … Baby One More Time,” “Circus” and “Crazy” look fantastic, the one-size-fits-most staging can become repetitive, and is not as effective in those moments when a less in-your-face approach is needed.Adam Godley and Simard during a slowed-down “Toxic” number.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWorse, the songs often barely suit the story, even with some tweaked lyrics. Exceptions include Cinderella’s stepsisters (Ryann Redmond and Tess Soltau) commanding her to “Work Bitch.” The Max Martin jukebox musical “& Juliet,” which is playing a thousand feet away and features five Spears hits, integrates book and songs with less visible seams and more wit.Fully embracing arena-pop aesthetics (with flashy lighting by Kenneth Posner and scenic design by Anna Fleischle that relies on elements that can easily be dropped down or wheeled in and out), “Once Upon a One More Time” almost always falls back on supersizing. Half the numbers end with a subwoofer boom that will rattle your insides. And the jokes come in three flavors: broad, broader and annoying. A running gag, for example, has Snow White comically misspelling the simplest words, even though she is part of Scroll Club so one assumes that she can at least read.Two of the actors have embraced opposite ways of adjusting to this heightened reality. Simard delivers the single most original performance: She barely changes her expression, her face frozen in a heavily made-up mask of disdain, and her Stepmother feels as if Moira Rose from “Schitt’s Creek” and Norma Desmond had spawned a villainess crooning a slowed-down “Toxic.”Guarini banks on expansiveness as a prince generously sharing his charms, and displays a gift for slapstick, our critic writes.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesGuarini, on the other hand, banks on expansiveness as a prince generously sharing his charms with a bevy of women. He displays a gift for slapstick — watch the way he elastically climbs onto a platform two stairs at a time — and spares no effort, whether in solo songs or leading big numbers.It is actually surprising that his character has so many songs while most of the princesses are reduced to extras without distinctive personalities. (A gay couple even barges in during the “million princess march.”) Snow White rises above the fray, thanks to Jackson’s humor, vocal chops and high-energy charisma, and Whitley’s tart delivery helps sell Pea’s few lines, but Heelan’s Cinderella feels a little bland. Making matters worse, the sound localization is so bad that you can’t distinguish the women’s voices in their ensemble numbers. (The sound design is by Andrew Keister, costumes and hair by Loren Elstein.)Incongruously, Cin and Snow, as they like to call each other, share an intense duet, “Brightest Morning Star” (was “I’m a Slave 4 U” just too much?), but it’s a gratuitous throwaway with no follow-up. I guess nobody talks about what happens after Scroll Club.This timidity is but one example of the ways in which the show comes up short, both as a feminist text and as a tribute to Spears’s songbook — and, yes, her life. The last thing her fans might have expected from a Britney Spears musical is dutiful conventionality.Once Upon a One More TimeAt the Marquis Theater, Manhattan; onemoretimemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells to Reunite in ‘Gutenberg! The Musical!’

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      The pair, who were the original co-stars of “The Book of Mormon,” will return to Broadway this fall in a two-man musical comedy.Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, whose careers were transformed when they co-starred as hapless missionaries in “The Book of Mormon,” will reunite this fall in a comedic two-hander, “Gutenberg! The Musical!,” that has been staged around the world but will now arrive on Broadway for the first time.“There is no bigger passion as an actor than being on a stage,” Gad, who has been working in film and television for the last decade, said in a joint telephone interview with Rannells. “It’s how I got my start, and I’ve missed it.”“Gutenberg” is a musical that satirizes musicals; it is about two aspiring musical theater writers who decide to write a musical about Johannes Gutenberg without knowing all that much either about him (he was a Renaissance inventor, best known for his contributions to the history of printing presses) or about musical theater. The show is set at a backers’ audition — a run-through staged for potential investors — but in this case, the artists have so little money they have to perform every role themselves.“‘Gutenberg’ is very much a love letter to musical theater,” Rannells said. “We’re playing these two characters who have very passionately written a show without a ton of historical information and without a lot of skill, but a lot of passion and a lot of heart and one shot to find some Broadway producers to help them put this show on.”The musical, written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, began its life in the comedy world, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, where King was the artistic director, and then was further developed at the New York Musical Festival. It had runs in London and Off Broadway starting in 2006, and has since been produced in Australia, France, Korea, Spain, and around the U.S.; Brown and King, who have been friends since childhood, went on to write the book for the musical adaptation of “Beetlejuice.”The Broadway run is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 15, to open Oct. 12, and to close Jan. 28 at the James Earl Jones Theater. The director will be Alex Timbers, who also directed the 2006 Off Broadway production; Timbers later won a Tony Award for directing “Moulin Rouge!,” and he has also worked in comedy, including as the director of “Oh, Hello” on Broadway.“I love this show, and it gets seen and performed all over the world, but isn’t really known in New York,” Timbers said. “It straddles the play and comedy worlds, and I feel like there’s an audience for that.”Timbers and Gad had been talking for some time about finding a way to collaborate; Gad said they had discussed the possibility of doing a production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” In 2020, Timbers suggested “Gutenberg,” and Gad loved the script, which he in turn shared with Rannells; the three did a first reading together in March of 2020, days before theaters were shut down for the coronavirus pandemic, and are now returning to the project.“Broadway is rebounding, and it is due for an even bigger rebound,” Gad said. “I was watching the Tony Awards, and I was blown away by how many productions I was so excited to go see on my next trip to New York, and to be a part of that — this incredible comeback that Broadway is long overdue post-pandemic — is a really exciting opportunity. And more than anything, I think that people miss laughing.”The lead producer of “Gutenberg” is the Ambassador Theater Group, a British company that has become increasingly active on Broadway; among the other producers is Bad Robot Live, which is a new division of a company co-founded by the filmmaker J.J. Abrams, and which has a partnership with the Ambassador Theater Group. More

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      36 Hours in Paris: Things to Do and See

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      4:30 p.m.
      Go from a royal garden to the mosque
      Cross to the city’s left bank via Sully Bridge, taking in views from the small triangular garden at the tip of the Île Saint-Louis, the quieter of the two islands on the Seine. From Oberkampf, this half-hour walk will take you to the Jardin des Plantes, a vast botanical park that started as a royal medicinal garden in the 17th century. Stroll through, with the National Museum of Natural History in the background, and visit the gardens’ four oversize greenhouses (€7). Exit via the west gates to find the Grand Mosque of Paris. Inaugurated in the wake of World War I, in part to commemorate the sacrifices of colonized Muslims who fought for France, it features a patio with a hand-sculpted cedar wood door adorned with Quran verses in calligraphy, built by highly skilled North African craftsmen (visit, €3). Pause for a glass of mint tea (€2) in the courtyard or get a good scrubbing or massage at the ornate, sizeable hammam (from €30, women only). More

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      ‘Rock & Roll Man’ Review: An Alan Freed Biography

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      A bio-show about the radio D.J. Alan Freed, one of rock music’s early popularizers, dutifully plays the hits.The musical “Rock & Roll Man” starts with an attention-grabbing gambit: It is 1965, and J. Edgar Hoover is prosecuting the D.J. and promoter Alan Freed, then at death’s door. Hoover has accused Freed of destroying “the American way of life by inventing the genre of music which you named rock and roll.”A good clue that the scene takes place not in reality but in the mind of the ailing Freed (Constantine Maroulis, from “Rock of Ages” and “Jekyll & Hyde”) is that he is defended by Little Richard (Rodrick Covington) — who is quick to point out that his client did not actually invent rock.What Freed did do was play R&B singles on the radio shows he hosted in Cleveland and then New York, introducing so-called race records to white audiences. He then marketed the music as “rock and roll.”The bulk of this bio-show, which opened on Wednesday at New World Stages, consists of a flashback that unfurls infinitely more conventionally than the prologue.In the early 1950s, Freed discovers new sounds at a record store run by Leo Mintz (Joe Pantoliano), and he immediately falls in love with the raucous music bringing white and Black teenagers together. His growing success as a D.J. takes him to New York, where he starts associating with Morris Levy (Pantoliano again), the shady record label and nightclub owner.Gary Kupper, Larry Marshak and Rose Caiola’s book dutifully strings together a parade of hits by the likes of LaVern Baker (Valisia LeKae), Jerry Lee Lewis (Dominique Scott), Chuck Berry and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (both played by Matthew S. Morgan). But Randal Myler’s production never generates early rock’s chaotic, often suggestive energy. Freed may have imagined the trial, but it reflects a time when rock was seen as an attack on the sexual and racial order; the show, however, make it hard to understand why Freed and the artists he championed were seen as a threat to American values.Freed was an interesting fellow, and his life was plenty rock ’n’ roll. Unfortunately, the show mostly skims over the fact that in addition to hobnobbing with Levy — they both eventually went down for payola — Freed overindulged in booze and women. The storytelling is especially haphazard when dealing with his family life.Even worse is that since Freed himself did not sing, Maroulis — a former “American Idol” contestant who is the rare musical-theater performer able to convincingly rock — doesn’t get to do any of the hits and is instead stuck performing perfunctory originals written by Kupper. He gets to let loose a little on the title number, at the very end of the show, but by then it’s too little and way too late.Rock & Roll ManAt New World Stages, Manhattan; newworldstages.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      ‘Good Vibrations’ Review: The Saving Power of Punk

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      In a big-hearted musical about a 1970s Belfast record store owner and the punk movement he nurtured, music is the real hero.On a nighttime street in 1970s Belfast, Northern Ireland, a D.J. named Terri Hooley runs into a pair of local toughs — young men who’ve found their purpose in the gunfire and explosions of a sectarian conflict pitting Protestants against Catholics.That strife defines everything around Terri, but his life’s meaning comes from music: the Hank Williams songs of his childhood; the rock and reggae that became his soundtrack later on.“Do your feet a favor,” he tells the toughs. “Take them dancing, like you used to.”Is it bad to call a punk rock musical charming? I hope not, because “Good Vibrations” — a biomusical about the real Terri Hooley, who became the idealistic, stalwart champion of Belfast’s nascent punk scene — absolutely is. Directed by Des Kennedy for the Lyric Theater, Belfast, it portrays music as a defiantly joyous refuge from ugliness and danger. Far from romanticizing mayhem, it presents Northern Irish punk as a youthful life force in opposition to it.Adapted by Colin Carberry and Glenn Patterson from their 2012 film of the same name, “Good Vibrations” (not to be confused with the Broadway jukebox musical also of the same name, set to Beach Boys tunes) transports the movie’s righteous sense of pleasure and freedom to the stage at Irish Arts Center, in Manhattan.Glen Wallace stars as Terri, a stubborn dreamer with zero business sense who opens a record shop, Good Vibrations, in Belfast’s city center — and makes a deal with fighters on both sides that they will leave him alone. Soon he’s putting out records by local punk bands, because no one else will, and promoting them to the world. His marriage to the lovely Ruth Carr (Jayne Wisener) suffers for it; his passion is consumed by the shop and the punks.Terri’s bands — Rudi, the Outcasts, the Undertones — don’t snarl in their rebellion, though. They’re sunnier than that, and so is this show. It’s also a little chaotic, as befits Terri’s life, and not always as clear as it needs to be. It could be that its creators are inhibited by the ethical obligations of telling a story inspired by real people. Still, this is a tonic of a musical.Grace Smart’s set makes clever use of instrument cases, Gillian Lennox’s period costumes are impeccable and the use of music as underscore can be hauntingly gorgeous. (The musical director is Katie Richardson.) In a cast that does a lot of doubling, Marty Maguire is a protean standout as Terri’s socialist dad and several other characters.As much as “Good Vibrations” is about Terri, its ultimate hero might be music itself, in whose saving, salving power he believes unwaveringly.“This is missionary work,” Terri says, in his D.J. days.So it is. Preach.Good VibrationsThrough July 16 at Irish Art Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More