Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      ‘The Refuge Plays’ Review: A Surreal Family Saga on the Homestead

      by

      A family in exile contends with its future, and its ghosts, in Nathan Alan Davis’s new Off Broadway play starring Nicole Ari Parker.The unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” retreats, after an alienating odyssey through the South and Harlem, to live in a secret cellar. Underground is both an escape from oppression and a sanctuary where he can see himself on his own terms.Ellison’s 1952 novel is like gospel to the eldest matriarch in “The Refuge Plays” by the playwright Nathan Alan Davis. “Gotta make your own world in this world,” says Early (Nicole Ari Parker), a great-grandmother homesteading with her family. She can still chop firewood and hunt squirrels with a hammer, but when we first meet Early in this keen but unwieldy family saga, opening Wednesday at the Laura Pels Theater, her daily life has evolved beyond the need for such primal skills.Four generations of Early’s family are living together in the present-day Illinois wilderness, sharing a cabin built years ago by Early and her husband, Crazy Eddie (Daniel J. Watts). The too-small sofa and ratty armchair draped with quilts and crochet (the persuasively salvaged set is by Arnulfo Maldonado) indicate a modest home where her relatives choose to live out of kinship rather than necessity.Early’s great-grandson, Ha-Ha (J.J. Wynder), is the purest product of this social experiment: a 17-year-old who is deferential, bookish and comically naïve about girls. (Many of Davis’s character names are freighted with exaggerated symbolism.) Ha-Ha’s mother, Joy (Ngozi Anyanwu), tried striking out on her own when she was younger, but eventually returned. And Joy’s mother, Gail (Jessica Frances Dukes), the wife of Early’s deceased son, Walking Man, is the functional head of the household, though not for long: The spirit of Walking Man (Jon Michael Hill), a routine and welcome visitor, has just foretold her imminent death.Davis’s grand ambitions for “The Refuge Plays” are indicated by its running time — three hours and 20 minutes, with two intermissions — and by a title that suggests its three parts may not exactly cohere. The action rewinds to the past, revealing what drove Early into the woods, why others followed and what binds them together. (“If you don’t need me, leave me,” Early tells Walking Man.) Each act operates in a different mode: Sitcom conventions play out in the first (with Early as the armchair curmudgeon); surreal and Shakespearean elements dominate the second (with ghosts who incite an Oedipal revenge plot); and the third imagines a meet-cute in exile.Daniel J. Watts and Parker play a young couple who meet-cute in exile in an earlier section of the show.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis Roundabout Theater Company production, directed by Patricia McGregor and presented in association with New York Theater Workshop (where McGregor is the artistic director), benefits tremendously from bold interpretations of Davis’s characters. McGregor accentuates the humor Davis weaves throughout, and even mines more from between the lines, giving the production a sustained momentum. But the pace lags when Davis’s airy lyricism occasionally tips toward the sentimental, as in the heavy-handed second act. Early, for example, insists she has cried a nearby river with her tears.Parker (“And Just Like That …”) has an innate gentility that would seem an odd match for Early’s wild fate, but there is frisson in the juxtaposition and Parker lends Early a poised ferocity. Her flinty exterior is a formidable match for Eddie, the World War II vet who becomes her husband. Slightly sideways and nursing his own wounds, he’s a philosophical jester (Watts can land punchlines with the whites of his eyes) and proof that civilization inflicts violence in many forms.“The Refuge Plays” is populated with gifted storytellers, whose language is sticky with associations (like “if all your worries was ice cream” that melted at death’s door), and who can clearly see the ills of the outside world from the safe distance of their own. They conceive their identities in relation to one another, reflecting an organic sense of human responsibility, yet rib and curse one another like the members of any family would.Davis, whose speculative 2016 drama, “Nat Turner in Jerusalem,” was also produced by New York Theater Workshop, takes a sweeping view of Black life while isolating his characters from the social contexts and systems that would otherwise shape them. Some, like Early and Eddie, have their memories to contend with, while Walking Man, who was born in the woods, encounters human injustice from an absurd angle (beneath a heifer he tries to slaughter with a switchblade).In an attempt to imagine alternative ways of being, the playwright has smashed existing artistic forms and created new ones along the way. The result is provocative but messy: While the three acts interlock, they don’t propel each other forward, and Davis’s surfeit of ideas ultimately comes at the expense of a dramatic throughline. But cumbersome as it is, “The Refuge Plays” suggests the potential for stories to exceed the world’s limitations. Ellison would have to agree.The Refuge PlaysThrough Nov. 12 at Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 3 hours 20 minutes. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      ‘Stereophonic’ Finds Drama in a ’70s Rock Recording Booth

      by

      The playwright David Adjmi explores the in-studio creation process in a play with new songs by the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler.A decade ago, the playwright David Adjmi was listening to music on a flight to Boston when Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” came on. The tune was familiar — he used to overhear his brother play it in his room — but he really listened to it that day, and became mesmerized by Robert Plant’s scorching vocals.“I was like, ‘God, this must have been so crazy in the studio because it’s so electric and so Dionysian and all over the map, emotionally, and raw,’” Adjmi said. “I saw the studio, I saw the whole thing in my head. Then I started thinking about the theatrical opportunities for setting a play in a studio, and how to play with sound.”That seed of an idea turned into “Stereophonic,” which is now in previews at Playwrights Horizons and is his first New York production since “Marie Antoinette” in 2013.The play’s action takes place in a recording studio, and the actors play their own instruments and sing.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesAs Adjmi (“Elective Affinities,” “3C”) envisioned on that plane, the action unfolds in a recording studio, where a rock band’s protracted work on an album straddles a year from 1976-77. “It really is like the process and the play are blurring because these people are in a studio forever,” Adjmi, 50, said. “And we’ve been doing this — we almost talk about it like it’s a cult, because we just kept doing this over and over for years.” (In a 2020 interview, he mentioned talks for a Broadway run; they did not pan out.)Adjmi was taking a lunch break between rehearsals at the theater, sitting with the director Daniel Aukin (“Fool for Love”) and the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler, who wrote several songs for the play’s fictional quintet. The idea was enough for them to sign on, and Butler, who now leads Will Butler + Sister Squares, had to wait years for the script to be completed before he could begin the songs. “The music is all reverse-engineered,” he said. “It was like, ‘Here’s a space that people are arguing about — how do you fill it so that the details of what they’re arguing about is accurate?’ It’s a very puzzle-piece way to compose the music.”Since the band is meant to be entering stardom (its previous album is hitting a belated stride in the play), its material has to sound as if it could top the Billboard charts, which put extra pressure on Butler, 41. “What a stupid idea to have them play the song,” he said, as his collaborators cracked up. “You’re not supposed to have them play the song, you idiot!”At this point it should be emphasized that “Stereophonic” is a play with music rather than a musical, making it somewhat of an oddity in an American theatrical landscape that has not much milked the rock scene’s dramatic potential. Adjmi said he thinks that’s “because we are the originator of the Broadway musical and there’s a very kind of calcified idea of what musicals are and how music should feel in the theater.” He added, “And I have an allergy to a lot of it. Not all of it, but a lot of it, because I can’t relate.”Sarah Pidgeon and Tom Pecinka as one of the band’s couples, partners and rivals in love and songwriting.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesThe musicals he did praise are backstage classics — “A Chorus Line,” “Dreamgirls,” “42nd Street” — and, perhaps not coincidentally, “Stereophonic” is a behind-the-scenes look at the process of creation. Its unnamed band includes two couples. The steady, no-nonsense keyboard player and singer, Holly (Juliana Canfield, who played Kendall Roy’s assistant Jess on “Succession”), and the substance-abusing bassist, Reg (Will Brill), both British expats, are separated at the start of the show. The singer Diana (Sarah Pidgeon) and the guitarist-producer, Peter (Tom Pecinka), both Americans, are partners and rivals in love and songwriting. As for the British drummer, Simon (Chris Stack), he makes the most of his wife’s absence.All of this and a mid-70s California setting might evoke the rather popular band famous for “Rhiannon” and “Go Your Own Way,” but “Stereophonic” is not a play à clef about Fleetwood Mac. “There’s something about the mythos behind various bands that is in the culture,” Aukin said. “It’s almost using snippets from various bands’ histories and the histories of making some of these famous albums and using it as a sort of distant echo. We talked about many bands but we never talked about one.”In a phone interview, Canfield, 31, recalled that when she asked Adjmi for reference material, he recommended Keith Richards’s memoir, “Life,” and “Original Cast Album: Company,” the D.A. Pennebaker documentary about the fraught, stressful recording that preserved Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1970 musical for posterity.That film closely tracked the “Company” actors as they painstakingly performed take after take or made tiny pronunciation changes, while members of the producing team and Sondheim himself watched, gave notes and rolled their eyes. “Stereophonic” also plunges us into the middle of the action as David Zinn’s set features the mixing table in the foreground and the recording booth in the back. A pair of engineers (Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler, no relation to Will) take in both the personal clashes and the mix of inspiration and drudgery involved in art-making — all of which, of course, constantly feed off one another.In real life, arguments about adjusting levels or when to use a click track might make even a Steely Dan fan’s eyes glaze over. But the show does not sweep the grind of creation under the rug, especially as Peter evolves into an obsessive taskmaster. “God is in the details, but the details are boring in themselves,” Adjmi said. “So I took that as a challenge, like, ‘OK, let me see if I can turn this into something dramatically exciting.’ So much of it, the banality of the process, is part of what’s so beautiful about it, the granularity of it.”Adjmi said he sought to “reveal myself vis-à-vis these characters by creating real dimension and real nuance, and give actors really juicy roles.” The play opens on Oct. 29.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesFor the technical elements, Adjmi and Aukin consulted experts like their show’s sound designer, Ryan Rumery, and the longtime Steve Reich collaborator John Kilgore. Butler himself proved to be a ready source about interpersonal relationships among musicians. “My last band was with my brother and his wife and my new band is with my wife and her sister,” he said. “I’ve only ever been in bands with married people so I was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. This feels real.’”That naturalism is different stylistic territory for Adjmi, whose previous plays tended to be arch in a manner he described as “expressionist.” The new show has more of a fly-on-the-wall quality. “That was an experiment for me: Can I reveal myself vis-à-vis these characters by creating real dimension and real nuance, and give actors really juicy roles,” Adjmi said. “ I wanted to do something that would be more fun for them.”Perhaps, but his writing remains dense, with challenging, precisely timed overlaps in the dialogue. “I don’t think it’s an accident that the play is about music and about the cooperation of a group of people making it together, because the play itself, excluding the music, feels very scored,” Canfield said.As if that weren’t enough, the cast members who are in the band also have to play their own instruments and sing as well as convey the excesses that the 1970s were famous for. “I have a couple of scenes where I go from being really emotionally devastated and quite inebriated to walking into the music room and playing something very precise on the bass,” said Brill, whose credits include Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!” and Jack Serio’s “Uncle Vanya” in a loft. “To keep the emotional and interpersonal dynamics running, and keep the verisimilitude of a drunk person, while executing something technically perfectly is a real challenge. It’s a delightful challenge, too,” he continued.“I’ve only ever been in bands with married people so I was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. This feels real,’” Butler said.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesFor the production to work, the actors must feel like a believably tight unit. “We’re trying to make a band here — it’s not like, ‘Open your score to Page 6,’” Butler said. “We’re trying to figure out people’s strengths and weaknesses, because that’s what a band is. When they start playing music together, there is some connection.”Fortunately, the actors said, they all clicked. “When all of us get in the room together, the sounds of the voices blend incredibly well and there’s a real sense of camaraderie amongst us,” said Brill, 37, who played guitar in another fictional band a decade ago, in the David Chase film “Not Fade Away.” Canfield recalls that one day the show’s music director, Justin Craig, overheard her, Pecinka and Pidgeon bickering about their harmonies, and joked that they were now a real band because they were arguing about the music.As realistic as that episode must have felt, it pales when compared to the toughest credibility test the would-be rockers have had so far. Last month, Butler asked the “Stereophonic” band to open for him at his record-release gig in Brooklyn. Canfield, dreading what she called “an ego death” fiasco, balked, and Brill had to joke-taunt her into it.“He said ‘Yeah, Juliana, it’s going to be such a good story in 20 years, when we tell people that we almost opened for Will Butler’s band but we didn’t because we were scared that we would be bad,’” she said. “And I was like, OK, screw you, I guess we’re doing it.” Now that’s rock ’n’ roll. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘Merrily We Roll Along,’ Finally Found in the Dark

      by

      Jonathan Groff, supported by Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, is thrillingly fierce in the first convincing revival of the cult flop Sondheim musical.To be a fan of the work of Stephen Sondheim, as Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, is “to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.” He meant not only that Sondheim’s songs are so often crushingly poignant but that the experience of loving them can feel unrequited. The shows they are in — he was reviewing the original production of “Merrily We Roll Along” — don’t always love you back.That was in 1981, when “Merrily,” with a problematic book by George Furth, suffered an ignominious Broadway debut of just 16 performances after 44 previews. No matter that Sondheim, responding to the story of a songwriter, had written his most conspicuously tuneful score to date, prompting pop recordings by Frank Sinatra (“Good Thing Going”) and Barbra Streisand (“Not a Day Goes By”). It was universally deemed a debacle.The debacle ended the working relationship between Sondheim and the director Harold Prince, whose five shows together in the 1970s — “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures” and “Sweeney Todd” — had redefined the American musical. With “Merrily,” they thought they were taking the form even further, with a complicated backward chronology and a cast of mostly inexperienced actors who played 40-ish adults at the start and grew into themselves at the end.After the show’s death by a thousand pans, Sondheim, saying he’d rather make video games, threatened to leave the theater entirely. Luckily, that didn’t happen — and “Merrily,” too, refused to give up, instead undergoing a seemingly endless series of unsatisfactory “improvements” that only seemed to confirm the hopelessness of making it matter.But with the opening of its first Broadway revival, after 42 years in the wilderness and the death of Sondheim in 2021, “Merrily” is no longer lost. Maria Friedman’s unsparing direction and a thrillingly fierce central performance by Jonathan Groff have given the show the hard shell it lacked. Now heartbreaking in the poignant sense only, “Merrily” has been found in the dark.When we meet him after the uplift of the gleaming overture, Groff, as the composer Franklin Shepard, is alone in an empty and unappealing liminal space. (The deliberately ugly sets, perhaps uglier than necessary, are by Soutra Gilmour.) He is wearing, and will throughout the show, a solemn undertaker’s outfit — black pants, black tie, white shirt. Even as everyone else changes with the times, in vivid costumes (also by Gilmour) that mark each notch on the timeline from 1976 to 1957, Frank always remains what he was: a one-man show. “Merrily” is the funeral he throws for his own ideals.Groff, right, with Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe as friends whose relationship sours in the Sondheim-Furth musical, which is getting its first Broadway revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe contrast between the pleasures that music can provide and the damage obvious in Frank’s demeanor immediately frames what follows as a solo psychodrama. Yes, Charley Kringas, who writes the words, and their friend Mary Flynn, a novelist turned theater critic, are there throughout, trying to encourage his better angels and corral his worse ones. But despite high-wattage, laser-focused performances by Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, they have no effect on him; they are clearly Frank’s pawns, willing or otherwise.How he destroys Mary, and nearly Charley as well, not without their assistance, is revealed as the musical’s formerly absent spine. In the first scene, a 1976 party for “Darkness Before Dawn,” a hack hit movie Frank has produced now that he no longer writes music, Mary is dispatched with barely a blink, or drunkenly dispatches herself.In the next scene, as Charley enumerates Frank’s misplaced priorities in a 1973 television interview — Radcliffe handles the song “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” superbly — Groff’s coldblooded rage is terrifying. Collateral damage along the way includes Frank’s first wife, Beth (Katie Rose Clarke); his second, Gussie (Krystal Joy Brown); his probable third, Meg (Talia Simone Robinson); his producer, Joe (Reg Rogers); and even his adorable young son. Who but a monster would betray such a punim?“Merrily” is thus no longer, as it seemed in 1981, the story of the gradual, almost inevitable dimming of youth’s sweet illusions but rather the story of their falsity in the first place. Frank is only devoted to Mary and Charley when he doesn’t have access to anyone more useful. To think he turned into that monster is a mistake: He always was one, as Sondheim clearly understood. “That’s what everyone does,” Mary sings once the three-way friendship has collapsed. “Blames the way it is/on the way it was/On the way it never ever was.”Friedman has thrown in her lot with the coruscating insight of the songs, making a tactical decision — successful but not without consequences — to deprioritize everything else, including the score’s brassy élan. “Merrily” Kremlinologists will want to know that the version onstage at the Hudson Theater, though slightly bigger than the Off Broadway version that opened at New York Theater Workshop in December 2022, is still somewhat underscaled for Broadway. It has a cast of 19 instead of 17 and an orchestra of 13 instead of nine.In Maria Friedman’s unsparing production, our critic writes, the trajectories for the secondary characters at last make some sense.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt takes more than even those larger numbers to deliver the Golden Age thrill that is, after all, the show’s milieu. (The original orchestra had 20 players.) Other than the costumes, the minimal design is more practical than inspiring; the sound of the band (playing new orchestrations by Sondheim’s longtime collaborator Jonathan Tunick) is especially unbalanced. The choreography by Tim Jackson too often seems charades-like. Some of the solo singing could be more effective, technically and thus emotionally.And then there is, as always, the book. Friedman has apparently made her peace with Furth’s final Frankensteined version; though its pieces are coarsely sutured and don’t quite line up, at least the thing walks. If in seeking to sweeten the main story it still leans too heavily on thin satire for laughs — morning news shows, Hollywood sycophancy — the trajectories for the secondary characters, especially Beth and Gussie, who are now more than cannon fodder, at last make some sense.In this production, though, it wouldn’t matter much if they didn’t. Radcliffe’s wit and modesty, combined with Mendez’s zing and luster, provide perfect settings for what is now (as it has never been previously) the inarguably central performance. Groff, always a compelling actor, here steps up to an unmissable one. With his immense charisma turned in on itself, he seems to sweat emotion: ambition, disappointment and, most frighteningly, a terrible frozen disgust.I don’t know whether that’s what Furth intended, but Sondheim is brutally clear about the insidiousness of great talent. In Frank, it eats everything it can find, eventually including itself. “Who says ‘Lonely at the top’?” he sings amid the end-stage cynicism of his loveless Bel Air party. “I say, ‘Let it never stop.’”What a strange and daring thing for the great and greatly missed Sondheim to dramatize, and for Friedman to forefront. I’d call it heartbreaking if the result weren’t finally such a palpable hit.Merrily We Roll AlongThrough March 24 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; merrilyonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Well-Made, and Massively Weird: A New Theater Season in Berlin

      by

      Recent premieres in the city ranged from a spare take on the recent Broadway hit “Prima Facie” to a dose of sheer artistic lunacy.It may be less polished and more rough-hewed than in New York, London or Paris, but Berlin’s theater scene is uniquely diverse, unpredictable and boundary-pushing. Buoyed by lavish public subsidies and boasting a fleet of remarkable actors and daring directors, it is also uncommonly accessible, thanks to low ticket prices and the growing popularity of English surtitles.This season, Berlin’s five main repertory theaters will present a total of 87 premieres, 29 of them at the Deutsches Theater, a storied playhouse that opened in 1883. Its new artistic director, Iris Laufenberg, opened her tenure by programing the German-language premiere of Suzie Miller’s “Prima Facie,” a recent hit on Broadway and the West End that won Tony and Olivier Awards, including for its star, Jodie Comer.The Hungarian director Andras Domotor stages the one-woman play as a chamber drama, with minimal props, stark fluorescent lighting and lots of empty space for his star, Mercy Dorcas Otieno. While the staging embraces a degree of abstraction rarely seen in commercial theater in London or New York, the show is also a vehicle for a prodigious and fearless actress.Otieno, who was born in Kenya, delivers a sweaty and emotionally naked performance as a lawyer who defends men accused of sexual assault, and then finds herself the plaintiff in such a case after she is raped by a colleague. She carries this intense 100-minute-long show on her capable shoulders and commands our attention long after the absorbing drama of the play’s first half gives way to clunky speechifying toward the end of the evening.A more compelling and disquieting exploration of sexual assault and trauma is “In Memory of Doris Bither,” written and directed by Yana Thönnes and running at the Schaubühne. The play is based on the true story behind the 1982 film “The Entity,” a hit horror flick that starred Barbara Hershey as a woman who claimed she was sexually assaulted by a malevolent spirit occupying her house in Los Angeles. In 1974, Bither, a single mother living with her four children, was at the center of a sensational investigation into paranormal activity that Hollywood later served up for entertainment.Performed in a mix of German and English (with surtitles in both languages), “In Memory of Doris Bither” does not so much recreate the alleged haunting as examine how the case — and the success of “The Entity” — reverberates. On Katharina Pia Schütz’s sparse set, the interior of a sterile suburban home, a wash of pink wallpaper, carpeting and curtains, the actors Ruth Rosenfeld, Kate Strong and Heinrich Horwitz obsessively sift through memories and try to make sense of Bither’s torment. The play’s horror, it becomes clear, is not supernatural but psychological.My only complaint about this absorbing and uncanny show is that it ended abruptly after 70 intense minutes. Then again, the play’s unfinished quality, its lack of resolution, may be intentional: Bither, who died in 1999, claimed the haunting was real until the very end.Heinrich Horwitz, Ruth Rosenfeld, and Kate Strong in “In Memory of Doris Bither” at Schaubühne.Philip FroweinAt the start of this busy theater season, new plays by two leading German-language writers were elevated by young, dynamic directors who crafted fluid and stylish productions for texts that were rather uneven.The novelist and playwright Rainald Goetz shot to prominence 40 years ago with the novel “Insane,” a nightmarish odyssey through a madhouse. Ever since, he has been a bad boy of the German literary scene, known for a sprawling literary blog and a novel about ’90s techno culture. His latest, “Baracke,” is a poetic, rambling and infuriatingly undramatic play about German history, family violence and the impossibility of finding love.For the work’s world premiere at the Deutsches Theater, the young Swiss director Claudia Bossard has served up a stylistically varied, epoch-spanning staging that provides a gloss on Goetz’s epic grouse while sometimes subverting it. Nine intrepid actors courageously follow their director into battle, even if the stakes of Goetz’s stream-of-consciousness text aren’t always clear.Over at the Berliner Ensemble, there was more focused critique in the prolific German-Swiss writer Sybille Berg’s “Things Can Only Get Better” (“Es kann doch nur noch besser werden”) a dystopian parable about A.I. and the Metaverse taking over our lives. It’s somewhere between a screed, a cautionary tale and a blackly comic satire.Perra Inmunda, Amelie Willberg and Meo Wulf in “Things Can Only Get Better.”JR Berliner EnsembleThe director Max Lindemann floods the stage with digital projections, while actors with illuminated smartphones glued to their hands cavort jerkily on a rotating platform. The characters receive an endless succession of Amazon packages, praise the “great men who have made our lives so easy: Bill, Jeff and, naturally, Elon” and brag about using ChatGPT to write plays. Everything Berg says does seem worrying, but her targets are a bit obvious and the dialogue is often glib.Like with “Baracke,” the production comes to the rescue, with movement, light, outlandish costumes and eclectic music by the Swiss D.J. Olan! It’s another step in the right direction for the Berliner Ensemble, the playhouse that has recently cast off its conservative reputation and emerged as one of the Germany’s most interesting theaters.It has become de rigeur to bemoan the loss of Berlin’s gleefully anarchic and experimental side, most clearly represented, perhaps, by the recent transformation of a famous former squat into the slick photography exhibition center Fotografiska. But Berlin can still be relied on to deliver some sheer artistic lunacy.“Baracke” at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.Thomas Aurin“Toter Salon” is a monthly series of short performances written and directed by Lydia Haider and performed in an intimate venue at the Volksbühne theater. During the most recent installment, “Blut,” Haider stood in front of a coffin and officiated a gleefully blasphemous mass, which was frequently drowned out by the droning and often earsplitting score, by the Austrian electronic music artist Jung An Tagen.In her satanic priest garb, Haider also approached the spectators with an ice bucket full of white wine spritzer, which she drizzled into the mouths of willing audience members. For those unwilling to get down on their knees to receive her communion, there were Bloody Marys in plastic shot glasses. Sloppy, underdeveloped and massively weird, the hourlong performance was an endurance test.Yet suffering though the plumes of cigarette smoke, cheap booze and earsplitting music, I was oddly pleased that Berlin’s theater scene could accommodate both this level of experimental insanity and a well-made play like “Prima Facie.” Berlin may have lost much of its famed wildness, but at least when it comes to theater, there’s something for everyone. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Holidays,’ a Madonna Musical, Pays Tribute to the Star

      by

      “Holidays,” the first musical to include the pop icon’s songs, arrives just days before her “Celebration” tour starts. But matching the star’s talents is a challenge.Two lovers belting “Open Your Heart.” A misunderstood woman exhorting a roaring audience to “Express Yourself.” A gay wedding extravaganza set to “Like A Prayer.”No, this isn’t a preview of the stage antics in Madonna’s highly anticipated “Celebration” tour, which starts Saturday in London, at the O2 Arena. In Paris, the French stage director Nathan Guichet has started the party early with “Holidays,” a plucky new musical inspired by the global pop icon.It’s a wonder no Madonna jukebox musical has made it to the stage until now. Her back catalog brims with highly theatrical songs, and if “Holidays” is any indication, it doesn’t take a big-budget, bells-and-whistles production to get admirers of the pop icon to buy tickets.This two-hour show, which is set to run at the Alhambra theater through Jan. 28, features just four performers and one (very pink) set.Guichet has woven 15 Madonna songs into a fictional script performed in French. It is centered on four childhood friends, with somewhat contrived results: A number of twists and turns clearly exist to shoehorn songs into the show. (A character somehow lands in San Pedro, the island mentioned in “La Isla Bonita,” solely to cue Madonna’s 1986 track.) Yet by the end of a recent performance, Parisians were on their feet, fully hung up on Madonna nostalgia.Madonna performing during her Blond Ambition tour, in Rotterdam in 1990. “Holidays” tries to capture the star’s many talents.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesThe French capital is an unlikely setting for the first Madonna musical. Still, the newfound popularity of American-style musicals in France means there is a hunger for new titles, while producing costs are lower than on Broadway. “Holidays” came together in a year or so with a budget hovering around $1 million, according to its lead producer, Stéphane Pontacq. (For comparison, Broadway’s “Jagged Little Pill,” a jukebox musical inspired by the music of Alanis Morissette, was capitalized for up to $14 million in 2019.)Guichet, who has directed and produced original productions including a ”reimagining of “The Snow Queen,” said in an email that he was inspired by an interview Madonna gave to The Daily Star newspaper in 2012. “I’d sanction my songs to be made into a musical,” she said at the time. “But I wouldn’t do it myself, I don’t think that would interest me.”“Holidays” premiered just as global curiosity surrounds Madonna, who turned 65 in August. In June, she postponed “Celebration,” her 12th world tour, because of what her manager called a “serious bacterial infection.” The U.S. leg of the tour has now been rescheduled to start in December, following a series of concerts in Europe.There is little doubt that “Celebration” will be a lavish affair: Delivering a show to remember is what Madonna does, and has been doing consistently for four decades. Part of the challenge, when staging a tribute like “Holidays,” is trying to match her many talents.It is clear from the singing numbers in “Holidays,” all set to recorded music, that Madonna’s history of gutsy performances has challenge the performers to go above and beyond. The four women who carry the show all have moments of brilliance, and work hard to make the often dubious script shine.In it, a young heiress who is about to get married, Louise, gathers three friends she hasn’t seen in well over a decade. Their passion for Madonna united the quartet as teenagers, and every year, on Aug. 16, Madonna’s birthday, they would come to mark that special “holiday.”They reconvene as adults in Louise’s childhood home in a French village, which features a full-on Madonna altar: an eccentric pink bedroom suite designed for the girls by Louise’s doting father, covered in portraits of their idol.It takes a while for the four characters to gel. Louise, played by Juliette Behar, starts off as a manic pixie blonde, a “Material Girl” proxy with an over-excited delivery. Of her three friends, one, Valentina (Fanny Delaigue), has become a mysterious, provocative star in the United States, not unlike Madonna herself; another, Nikki, is a travel blogger with a history of family abuse. The fourth, Suzanne, is the proverbial underdog, who stayed in their local town and is stuck in underpaid jobs.The production weaves together Madonna songs into a fictional story centered on four childhood friends.NeibaPhotoThroughout, the main thing the four women have in common is Madonna. What “Holidays” gets right is what the star represents for many women: A sense of freedom and empowerment, the belief that they could break free of existing norms. It quickly becomes clear that Louise and her future husband don’t see eye to eye, and her friends encourage her to think beyond what is expected of her. Similarly, in a nod to Madonna’s longstanding L.G.B.T.Q. activism, a gay romance links two of the four friends, and blossoms movingly with the song “Secret.”“Holidays” isn’t a Madonna-backed venture. Promotional material for the production names her as infrequently as possible and the playbill’s plot summary only refers to the “famous pop star” who inspired the main characters. Luckily for the producers, it doesn’t take much to telegraph the mystery star’s identity. The poster art for “Holidays” closely mirrors one of Madonna’s best-known portraits, with her head tilted back and eyes closed on the cover of her 1986 album “True Blue.”Still, as fan tributes go, “Holidays” is a welcome reminder that Madonna’s catalog has rare staying power — and offers space for others to make their mark onstage. As Suzanne, Ana Ka brings serious vocal chops to the table, and lends heart to a character that could easily feel miserabilist.And the charismatic Nevedya, a budding musical star in France who recently headlined a production inspired by Josephine Baker, takes the role of Nikki and runs with it. A consummate dancer and singer, she brought striking arm flourishes and even a death drop to a “Vogue” number that otherwise felt a little timid, and in her hands, “Papa Don’t Preach” became a powerful plea to a father attempting to clip her wings.Madonna herself will be in Paris with “Celebration” in November. Until then, “Holidays” is an entertainingly upbeat stand-in. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and Its Insight Into Grief, Family and Gender

      by

      For one critic, every encounter with this Shakespeare play deepens her understanding of its insights into grief, family and gender.A few weeks ago two friends and I were talking about our obsessions. One had been sleepless all week, playing the new Zelda video game with few breaks. The other revealed that she was deep into Taylor Swift. I said I had so many fandoms that I didn’t know if I could name a favorite.My Swiftie friend quickly set me straight. “We already know your main fandom,” she said. “Hamlet.”It’s true. If you look at my bookshelves, the art on my walls, even the art on my skin, you’ll find anime references and mythological figures, lines from Eliot and Chekhov and illustrations from Borges and Gorey stories. But none of these interests enjoys a prominence as great as the one afforded “Hamlet” in my home — and on my body, where the majority of my tattoos, by far, are inspired by the play.My friends know well that I’ve seen numerous productions of the work, recite Hamlet’s monologues to myself, even put Kenneth Branagh or Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” on in the background as I clean my apartment. For me, the text’s themes — about death, duality, gender, family — deepen each time I read, see or hear “Hamlet,” and as I grow older, new insights are revealed about the characters and the language.I first read “Hamlet” in high school, as an artsy poetry-writing teenager who found death a fascinating, albeit abstract, concept. I imagined the young prince — witty, privileged yet tortured, and forever trapped in his own head — as kin. He was less a lofty figure of English literature than the emo kid I crushed on, abandoning his math homework to read Dante’s “Inferno” as angsty pop punk played in the background.When I watched Michael Almereyda’s 2000 “Hamlet” film soon after, it did little to disabuse me of this notion. Taking place in New York City, with Ethan Hawke playing a hipster film student who’s heir to the “Denmark Corporation,” this “Hamlet” was contemporary, rife with irony. Watching Hamlet offer the great existential query of “to be or not to be” while strolling the “action movie” aisles of a Blockbuster store, I learned that even tragedy can contain a hearty dose of comedy.When I reread the play for a class on Shakespeare’s tragedies a few years later, I became fixated on one line in particular: “The rest is silence.” With these four words, Hamlet’s last ones in the play, the prince is acknowledging his final breath, but also perhaps breaking the fourth wall, announcing the end of the play like Prospero at the end of “The Tempest.” Or maybe Hamlet is offering us the line in consolation: After five acts of musing on death, he can assure us that death is simple, and it’s quiet. This line is now tattooed on my right arm.In Branagh’s 1996 “Hamlet” film, an unabridged adaptation that paired inspired direction with refined performances and respect for the text, Branagh wheezes out the words, his eyes glassy and staring into the distance. “Silence” lands after a pause, as though he’s listening to the deafening silence of all of humanity that’s preceded him.Clockwise from top left: Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in the 1948 film, Ethan Hawke in the 2000 film, Kenneth Branagh in his 1996 film, Ato Blankson-Wood (with Solea Pfeiffer as Ophelia) in the 2023 Shakespeare in the Park production, Ruth Negga in the 2020 production at St. Ann’s Workshop, and Billy Eugene Jones, left, and Marcel Spears in 2022 Public Theater production of “Fat Ham.”From Olivier’s fervent philosophizing Dane in the 1948 film to David Tennant’s lithe, boyish interpretation in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production, there’s a reason that Prince Hamlet remains one of the most coveted roles an actor, especially a young man of a certain age and celebrity, can take on. “Hamlet” is, after all, a man’s play.In Hawke’s “Hamlet” and Mel Gibson’s visceral, sensually charged 1990 “Hamlet” I first realized how often directors use the female characters as stand-ins for fatalistic, taboo love. (Which is why I also savor gender-crossed Hamlets, whether in the form of the theater pioneer Sarah Bernhardt in 1899 or Ruth Negga in 2020.) Queen Gertrude is either stupid, selfish or promiscuous, blinded by her untamed lust. Many productions opt for a physical staging of Act III, Scene 4, when Hamlet accosts his mother in her bedchamber. Hawke’s Hamlet grabs his mother in a black robe, then presses her against a set of closet doors. Gibson’s deranged Hamlet also fights and clutches at Gertrude, as did Andrew Scott’s in the 2017 London production by Robert Icke. Thomas Ostermeier’s wild “Hamlet” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last year emphasized Gertrude’s sexuality to an extreme, having her slink and shimmy as though overwhelmed with sexual energy. The text implies that a woman too free with her affections digs her own grave.That includes, of course, Hamlet’s eternally damned love interest, Ophelia (memorialized on my right forearm with a skull and pansy). I used to dismiss her as a frail female stereotype, and have craved a production or adaptation that could give this character agency — any kind of agency — within the space of her grieving, her madness and her death.Kenny Leon’s otherwise underwhelming “Hamlet” at the Delacorte this summer did just that. Solea Pfeiffer played an Ophelia who matched Hamlet in wit and sass, who spoke with a knowingness and rage that lifted the character from her 17th-century home into the present.This duality in Ophelia — between sincerity and performance, raving madness and clear, articulated rage — is welcome. It’s a duality that many directors literalize in their productions overall, some using mirrors as nods to Hamlet’s constant reflections at the expense of action, others turning to hint at the divide between presentation and truth.But as much as “Hamlet” can serve as a character study, for me the story extends far beyond a production’s conceptualization of a lost prince with a splintered ego. This is a story that begins and ends with grief.I have a tattoo for Hamlet and his dear, departed father — a jeweled sword piercing a cracked skull in a crown. Having lost my dad almost a decade ago, I’m familiar with the feeling of being haunted by a father who may not be a literal king but perhaps just a patriarch taking the same cheap shots from the afterlife, like Pap in James Ijames’s “Fat Ham.” In the play, a Black, queer take on “Hamlet” in conversation with Shakespeare’s original text, Hamlet is not just tied to his father through a sense of filial obligation but also through guilt, regret, shame. In Pap I saw my own father’s flaws — the spite, the prejudice, the toxic masculinity. It made me wonder how much of Hamlet’s grief is for his father, and how much for the stability his father symbolized.Lately I’ve been listening with more regularity to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue, that great conference with death that feels as germane to the English language — our rhetoric, our poetry, our elocution, our linguistic imagination — as soil to the Earth. In the span of about a week this summer, I lost a grandmother, and a dear friend shared that his cancer had returned. Having buried both her parents in the past two years, my mother has been talking more about funeral arrangements and where our family would like to spend our post-mortem days. I, on the other hand, take less stock in the expensive ceremonies and planning around death. I don’t plan to make a show of my finale; like Hamlet, I wonder what it will even mean — in that everlasting sleep, who knows what dreams will come?I didn’t fall in love with “Hamlet” because of its action and intrigue; I love the play because it lets me reconnect with the spaces where death has brushed my life. “Hamlet” helps me sit with my own existential fears, all packaged in words of wit and elegance. Because I’m convinced now that if you let Shakespeare in, his voice becomes the one bellowing from the backstage of your life. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond? Yes, There’s a Connection.

      by

      Nicole Scherzinger was exhausted. It was a week since Jamie Lloyd’s new production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” had begun performances, and Scherzinger was playing the lead role of Norma Desmond — the forgotten star of the silent screen whose attempt at a comeback doesn’t end well.In Lloyd’s stripped-down, psychologically focused production at the Savoy Theater, Norma’s unraveling psyche is the heart of a story that is less about the loss of stardom than the emotional fallout of being passed over while in possession of all your gifts. At the end of the show the previous night, Scherzinger stood alone onstage, covered in blood and dazed, appearing to hardly register the audience’s wild applause.“It’s grueling,” she said last week while curled up on a chair in the depths of the Savoy. “But for many years I have been saying I am using a fraction of my potential, and now I feel I have really tapped into that.”The glamorous Scherzinger, 45, might initially seem like an odd fit for the role of Norma, immortalized by Gloria Swanson in the 1950 Billy Wilder film on which the musical is based. Scherzinger rose to fame as the lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, a girl group formed in the early 2000s. And though she played Grizabella in a revival of Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” in the West End in 2014, her post-Dolls career has encompassed two solo albums and long stretches as a judge on “The X Factor” and “The Masked Singer.”When asked to star in “Sunset Boulevard,” Scherzinger said, “I wasn’t sure if the idea was flattering or insulting.” But she soon “fell madly in love” after reading the lines and listening to the music. Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesScherzinger herself was taken aback when Lloyd, the acclaimed experimental director added, asked to meet and suggested the part some 18 months ago. “There are many roles I wanted to play in musical theater, but this is not one of them!” she said over the course of an hourlong interview. “I wasn’t sure if the idea was flattering or insulting. But Jamie said to me, don’t watch the movie; read the lines, listen to the music. And I fell madly in love with it.”In a telephone conversation, Lloyd said he first thought about directing a revival of “Sunset Boulevard” during the pandemic, and “immediately thought Nicole should be in it.”Norma Desmond, had come to be seen as a role for an older actress. But he wanted a woman “who is in her prime, really brilliant, but has been discarded, just as we talk even now about women over 40 not having the opportunities they should have,” he said. “I felt there was a connection for Nicole, who had extraordinary international fame, but then didn’t have the opportunity to live up to her potential.”Talking about her career, Scherzinger said that although she had been a shy and awkward child, she had “always had a hunger and a drive.” Born in Honolulu to a Filipino father and a Hawaiian Ukrainian mother, she was raised in a religious and sheltered environment in Louisville, Ky., by her mother and a German American stepfather, whose last name she took.Although her parents were blue-collar workers with little money to attend concerts or the theater, she grew up singing and loving music (her mother’s family had a musical group called Sons and Daughters of Hawaii). She attended a performing arts high school, acted professionally in Louisville, and studied theater (“Stanislavski and Shakespeare and all that”) and voice in college.After leaving college early to join an acoustic rock band, Scherzinger auditioned for “Popstars,” a reality series that offered the winning contestants a place in a musical group and a recording contract. Her winning group, Eden’s Crush, was modestly successful, and “it got me out of Louisville,” she said about her move to Los Angeles.Clockwise from top left, Scherzinger with the Pussycat Dolls in 2007, as Grizabella in “Cats” in 2014, rehearsing for “Sunset Boulevard” this year, and judging “The X Factor” with Sharon Osbourne and Simon Cowell in 2017.MJ Kim/Getty Images; David M. Benett/Getty Images; Summers/Thames/Syco, via Shutterstock; Marc BrennerIn 2003, she auditioned for the Pussycat Dolls, a former burlesque act reimagined as a sexy singing and dancing girl group. Scherzinger became the lead singer and a household name, with the Dolls selling millions of records on the back of hits like “Don’t Cha” and “Buttons.”She was famous, but for a woman who “grew up singing in church,” she struggled with the group’s skimpy clothing and sexualized image, and spent over a decade obsessively exercising and battling bulimia. “I wish I could go back and enjoy it, realize this isn’t going to be forever,” she said. “Maybe that’s what Norma feels: It was her youth, she worked so hard, and she can’t get that back.”The Pussycat Dolls disbanded in 2010, and Scherzinger pursued a solo career with modest success. It was during this time that she performed “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” (from Lloyd Webber’s “Evita”) as part of a TV special celebrating Lloyd Webber, who, along with the director Trevor Nunn, asked her to join the cast of the 2014 revival of “Cats” on the West End. Scherzinger described the experience as transformative (every night “I got to shed my old self and be reborn again”), even though she didn’t stay with the production when the show moved to Broadway. She decided to join “The X Factor” instead, and Lloyd Webber was open about his annoyance.In a telephone interview, the composer said that he had been disappointed because he believed in her talent and “would have loved to have seen her show Broadway what she could do.” But they remained friends, he added, and was delighted when Lloyd suggested Scherzinger play Norma. “I believe she is one of the most gifted singer-actresses I have seen perform my work,” he said. “It’s a tough role, but Nicole is fearless musically and dramatically. I am a total fan.”“I knew exactly this feeling of abandonment, the constant thread of loneliness, the insatiable need for affirmation,” Scherzinger said. “I finally have the courage not to worry.”Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesScherzinger said that “The X Factor” had given her the time and financial stability to pursue her own music, which she did while also taking on other projects, like voicing the character of Sina in “Moana,” and starring in a television version of “Dirty Dancing.” But she always believed, she said, that she would return to musical theater, particularly after performing in the television special “Annie Live!” in 2021.Now that she’s back onstage, how does it feel? She said that preparing to play Norma had been cathartic: “I felt I knew exactly this feeling of abandonment, the constant thread of loneliness, the insatiable need for affirmation, validation. Now, there is this epic, iconic score to throw all this into and create art from places of torment.”Lloyd said that Scherzinger was “constantly searching, questioning, finding details, deepening her understanding of the inner world of the character.” Her work ethic (asking questions, taking notes and sometimes working through breaks), he added, has been an inspiration to the entire cast. “You would never know, through this entire process, that she didn’t have an acting background.”Asked about future plans, Scherzinger said her dream was to write her own musical, loosely based on her life.“After all these years, I finally have the courage not to worry about what others think, to know I have something to say,” she said. “As Jamie always says, ‘You are brave, be braver.’” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Bite Me,’ Taking Aim at Familiar Teenage Tropes

      by

      Eliana Pipes’s new play is too pat to convincingly explore the societal imbalances resulting from race, class and gender.Good girls falling for bad boys is a cornerstone of high school dramas. Usually the story goes something like this: She sticks to the rules while he breaks them, and their meeting inspires a mutual coming-of-age.In “Bite Me,” by the playwright Eliana Pipes, the reasons a studious girl can’t afford to slip up while her crush has the privilege to slack off hum beneath their budding friendship like the drone of a fluorescent blub.The pair share custody of a neglected supply closet (the set is by Chika Shimizu), where Melody retreats to hide her tears from the queen bees and Nathan stores the petty contraband he swipes for fun, not because he needs money. As Nathan (David Garelik) makes clear, he has plenty of cash to pay for the homework he buys from Melody (Malika Samuel), a top student and an obvious outsider, who rides the bus for an hour each way to their suburban school from an unnamed city.This 90-minute two-person play, a co-production with Colt Coeur that recently opened at the WP Theater, is set in 2004 (as illustrated by Sarita Fellows’s fresh-from-the-mall costumes and Tosin Olufolabi’s alt-pop playlist). The fact that Melody is Black and Nathan is white does not immediately seem to influence their interactions as obviously as the conventional gender roles that have long governed the social and sexual politics of American teenagers: that every girl ought to be pretty and sweet, and guys should act tough and nonplused.Melody and Nathan each appear intent on conforming to such expectations, and, under the direction of Rebecca Martínez, the actors play convincing iterations of recognizable types (the minority overachiever primed to act out; the self-destructive slacker with a heart). But Pipes is also interested in how race, class and gender can play a role in determining who needs to hustle for the opportunities that others freely squander. (This is a theme in her work: Her play “Dream Hou$e,” produced by multiple regional theaters last year, is a surreal critique of gentrification.)The full extent of Melody’s isolation doesn’t become clear until their 10-year reunion, more than three-quarters through the play, when the revelation lends electricity only in retrospect to what otherwise seems, as the title “Bite Me” might suggest, like a trope-heavy, ill-fated infatuation.The fantasy of returning to the scene of one’s adolescent torment as a hot and successful adult is well-trodden, and Pipes’s use of it here is a bit too pat. Still, sometimes ridding closets of their ghosts is the only way to move forward.Bite MeThrough Oct. 22 at WP Theater, Manhattan; wptheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More