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      ‘The Notebook’ Musical to Land on Broadway in the Spring

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      The adaptation of the popular Nicholas Sparks romance novel, with music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson, had a well-reviewed run last year in Chicago.“The Notebook,” Nicholas Sparks’s best-selling 1996 novel about a star-crossed couple’s lifelong romance, which was adapted into a 2004 film starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling, will soon arrive in New York in another form: a Broadway musical.The production had a well-reviewed world premiere at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater last fall. Steven Oxman of The Chicago Sun-Times wrote that it represented “a significant leap in artistic quality over its sources, which it respects, while also providing a clear, resonant and unique voice of its own.” He had particular praise for the “poetic” songs, by the indie singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, and the “impressive” onstage rainstorm.Previews are scheduled to begin Feb. 6, and the opening is set for March 14 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, most recently home to “Life of Pi.”The story of the couple, Noah and Allie, is relayed in flashbacks that come to life as the older Noah reads from a notebook detailing their love story to the older Allie, who has dementia. (In a change from the book and the film, the story now begins in the 1960s instead of the 1940s.)In the Chicago production, Allie and Noah were each played by three different actors, who embodied them at various ages. The younger and older versions of the characters often share the stage, with the older couple watching as scenes from their past unfold. (Jordan Tyson and John Cardoza played the teenage Allie and Noah; Joy Woods and Ryan Vasquez depicted them in their late 20s; and Maryann Plunkett and John Beasley played the older versions.)Casting for Broadway has not yet been announced, but one casting change is certain: Beasley, who played the older incarnation of Noah, died in May at 79.The Chicago creative team will return for the Broadway run: Michael Greif (“Dear Evan Hansen,” “Rent”) and Schele Williams (“Aida,” “The Wiz”) will direct, with choreography by Katie Spelman (associate choreographer of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”). Bekah Brunstetter (“This Is Us”) wrote the book, with music and lyrics by Michaelson, a first-time theater composer. It will be produced by Kevin McCollum (“Six,” “The Devil Wears Prada”) and Kurt Deutsch, an executive at Warner Music Group.“The Notebook,” which was Sparks’s first published novel, consistently ranks among the most popular of his more than 20 books. Though the film adaptation — directed by Nick Cassavetes from a screenplay by Jeremy Leven and adapted by Jan Sardi from the novel — received mixed reviews, it became one of the highest-grossing romantic dramas of all time. More

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      ‘Spamalot’ Revival to Open on Broadway This Fall

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      The new production, directed by Josh Rhodes, had a brief run at the Kennedy Center in Washington in May. Casting has not yet been announced.Make way for shrubbery: “Spamalot” is returning to Broadway.The show, a Monty Python-inspired spoof of Arthurian legend, first opened on Broadway in 2005, won the Tony Award for best musical, ran for four years, and has been widely staged since then.This new production, which had a 10-day run in May at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, will be the musical’s first Broadway revival.Previews are scheduled to begin Oct. 31, and the opening is set for Nov. 16 at the St. James Theater. The executive producer will be Jeffrey Finn, who is the Kennedy Center’s vice president of theater producing and programming.“I have been a crazy fan of ‘Spamalot’ since I saw the opening in 2005,” Finn said. “I feel as though in 2023, audiences are really looking for a fun escape and an opportunity to laugh as much as possible, and I believe this show delivers all of that.”The casting for Broadway has not yet been announced; at the Kennedy Center the cast included Alex Brightman, James Monroe Iglehart, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, Rob McClure, Matthew Saldivar, Jimmy Smagula, Michael Urie and Nik Walker.The musical, based on the screenplay for “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” features a book and lyrics by Eric Idle, who was a member of the Monty Python comedy group. The music is by Idle and John Du Prez. Reviewing the original production, The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “resplendently silly” and a “fitful, eager celebration of inanity.”The revival is directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, who will be making his Broadway directing debut; he has worked on Broadway as a performer and choreographer. (Rhodes’s husband, Lee Wilkins, was a replacement swing in the original “Spamalot” company.)Rhodes described “Spamalot” as “a beautiful satire of Broadway, and of the class system,” and said he is excited to introduce Monty Python to a generation of theatergoers who may be unfamiliar with the group’s history and work. “In D.C., there was some sort of incredible energy from the audience that made us realize people were so hungry for this material,” he said. “There was a rowdiness that maybe wasn’t there before, and made it feel very special.”The “Spamalot” revival will be the first production developed by the Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage program to transfer to Broadway; Finn created the program in 2018, and it has evolved from presenting semi-staged concert versions of existing musicals to presenting fully staged, but short-run, productions. The Kennedy Center had a previous history of nurturing work that transferred to Broadway; the last Kennedy Center-produced transfer was a 2014 revival of “Side Show.”A few years ago a movie version of the musical was in the works, but Paramount Pictures, which held the rights to produce it, is no longer pursuing the project, and Idle suggested on Twitter earlier this year that that the film adaptation had been killed. More

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      ‘Let’s Call Her Patty’ Review: Rhea Perlman as an Uptown Matriarch

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      Rhea Perlman stars as a quintessential Upper West Sider in Zarina Shea’s snapshot of affluent, self-flagellating motherhoodShe shops at Zabar’s, does Pilates on Columbus Avenue and resides comfortably in a prewar high rise between West End and Riverside, where she gossips about private lives as though they were front-page news.That she could be any number of women, of some advanced years and moderate means, who live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is suggested by the taxonomic title “Let’s Call Her Patty,” a new play by Zarina Shea that opened on Tuesday night at the Claire Tow Theater, overlooking its subject’s natural habitat.Close your eyes to picture the type, and the production’s star, Rhea Perlman, may spring directly from a sidewalk crack, with her featherweight frame, babka-colored curls and voice like gravel and honey.Patty is introduced to the audience, chopping onions behind a long and luxe marble-topped kitchen island, by her niece Sammy (Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer). Scene-setting banter between the two demonstrates their shorthand intimacy, and Patty’s reflexive tendency to make other people’s business her own (and, more specifically, about her). That notably includes the triumphs but mostly troubles of Patty’s daughter Cecile (Arielle Goldman), an artist who struggles with body image and addiction.Patty’s maternal relationships with Cecile and Sammy are the play’s sources of conflict (Patty’s offstage husband, Hal, we’re told, is “fine”). When Cecile, who appears onstage only in brief interludes, falls out of touch, Patty considers it personal punishment, simultaneously convinced that she’s to blame for her daughter’s problems and defensive at her own accusation. Sammy, a font of patience as she is of exposition, gently suggests, “I think this is not about you.”Of course, she’s right. Patty is presented as a quintessential Jewish mother, but the qualities she exemplifies are not culturally exclusive; anyone who recognizes her narcissism from their family dynamics might appreciate a trigger warning. And yet, the play’s own narrow focus on Patty works to its detriment.The matriarch is little more than an amalgam of stereotypes; that there is truth to them is hardly a revelation. But the play does little to question or disrupt the preconceived notions it assumes New York audiences will have about “an Upper West Side lady” like Patty. Nor does Perlman mine much unseen depth from a character exclusively defined by circumstance.The production, from the director Margot Bordelon, confines Patty behind her cutting board, where she chops imaginary onions without shedding a tear for much of the play’s brief 70 minutes. If this is a character study, Patty’s pungent, messy center is largely withheld from view.Goldman’s Cecile occasionally drags a folding chair onstage to insert herself into her mother’s narrative, trembling like a frazzled live wire. Unfortunately, Cecile is kept at arm’s length from a story in which she seems to have the most compelling inner life. Sammy is likewise sketched mostly in relation to her aunt; that Sammy’s mother-in-law is near death is relevant only insofar as it keeps her from being with Patty.Patty’s co-op apartment, one of her primary distinguishing features, is suggested with chic austerity by Kristen Robinson’s set, reflecting a fixation on wealth that the play seems unsure whether it means to critique. Pivots in focus and time are punctuated with abrupt shifts in lighting (by Oliver Wason) and sound (Sinan Refik Zafar) that drum up tension and surprise the drama otherwise lacks.“Let’s Call Her Patty” gestures toward an oral tradition of storytelling that aims to preserve local, and often endangered, histories. Sammy’s narration acknowledges the Lenape tribe, who once lived on the land now occupied by New York City, and suggests that one day it will all be underwater. Dutifully recording for posterity the era of the affluent and self-flagellating mother seems to be as much an act of ambivalence as of love.Let’s Call Her PattyThrough Aug. 27 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Review: This ‘Summer Stock’ Cast Is Having a Blast

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      The Goodspeed Opera House takes on Charles Walters’s 1950 film with zest and humor.At this point we have been burned by many musical adaptations of beloved movies, and reactions have ranged from “Why did they even bother?” to “Dear God, please make it stop.” So it was with some trepidation that I traveled to the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut to check out its take on Charles Walters’s “Summer Stock,” from 1950.The movie’s plot in shorthand: Gene Kelly and Judy Garland put on a show in a barn, and then she sings “Get Happy” at the end. Naturally, that last exhortation pops up in the world-premiere stage version (twice, even) currently running in East Haddam, but it is easy to take to heart: The show may not be perfect, but its craftsmanship, zest and good humor — which are deceivingly hard to achieve without falling into bland cheerleading and forced joy — are perfectly dosed and on target.The book writer Cheri Steinkellner stuck to the movie’s spirit rather than its letter, though she wisely did not mess with the central conceit: A group of theater kids led by the director Joe Ross (Corbin Bleu, last seen on Broadway in the 2019 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate”) find themselves rehearsing a musical on the struggling farm of one Jane Falbury (Danielle Wade).A notable change is that in the director-choreographer Donna Feore’s production, the local businessman and Jane’s sort-of antagonist, Jasper Wingate, has become the stern Mrs. Wingate (Veanne Cox, in supreme form), who wants to take over our heroine’s land to create “the largest commercial farming operation in the Connecticut River Valley.” The Wingate heir is still an oaf named Orville (Will Roland, from “Be More Chill”), but this time around he has a secret — no, not that one. When Jane must find money to save her farm, Joe suggests using his show for a benefit.In the movie, Jane’s barn looks to be of an average New England size from the outside, but magically turns out to be capacious enough to accommodate big numbers. In contrast, the Goodspeed building is impressively large when you walk up to it, but the theater nestled within only has about 400 seats and a fairly small stage, lending “Summer Stock” a welcome intimacy and suggesting the gee-whiz enthusiasm the story requires.Steinkellner and Feore know when to update, when to leave well enough alone, and when to have it both ways. In the reprise of “Get Happy,” for example, the ensemble wears the same black suits and coral shirts as in the movie, though now we also get amusing explanations for how Jane ended up in a fedora and a tuxedo jacket, and how the painted background acquired its pink hue. Hint: The beefed-up character of Jane’s sister (Arianna Rosario) has a hand, or foot, in both.But what really makes this “Summer Stock” pop is its cast, which appears to be having a blast — another element that is too often missing. Bleu, who got his start portraying a young basketball star in the “High School Musical” franchise, has become a terrific interpreter of golden-age fare. His athleticism and deceptively casual nonchalance allow him to effortlessly lead energetic dance numbers like “Dig for Your Dinner,” and his voice has matured into a warm baritone that works wonders on “It Had to Be You” (one of the too many songs added to the show). As Jane, Wade can’t quite summon up the same firepower, but they still make a fine couple.Chewing up the barn with great gusto, Cox, Roland and J. Anthony Crane (playing the hammy, vain thespian Montgomery Leach) leave behind contrails of laughter every time they exit the stage. As Garland sang in another classic “let’s put on a show!” movie, “Girl Crazy”: Who could ask for anything more?Summer StockThrough Aug. 27 at the Goodspeed Opera House, East Haddam, Conn.; goodspeed.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Amour,’ Putting a Palme d’Or Winner Onstage

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      An adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 movie at the Salzburg Festival eschews cinematic realism, instead taking a highly stylized approach.“How can I speak of love when I’m dead?” runs a powerful line in “Amour,” a stage adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 film that premiered on Sunday at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria.Love and death are, of course, the two great themes of art, but rarely have they been brought together so hauntingly as in Haneke’s film, a portrait of an elderly couple forced to confront the issue of when life is no longer worth living. Told in Haneke’s characteristically severe style, the film earned the Austrian director both a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar for best foreign language film.Karin Henkel, the adaptation’s director, eschews the film’s realism, opting instead for a highly stylized and self-consciously artificial staging that achieves its visceral impact through a combination of Brechtian estrangement techniques, emotionally naked performances and biographical monologues written by onstage extras.Henkel scored a triumph in Salzburg two summers ago with “Richard the Kid and the King,” a sweeping epic of Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty monarch that ran to four hours. The German director’s “Amour” — a co-production with the Münchner Kammerspiele theater, in Munich, where it will run in late October — is as affectingly tender as her earlier Salzburg outing was grimly savage.At the beginning of the production, the stage is dominated by a white tunnel, whose pristine, antiseptic interior is progressively sullied: Its walls written on with watery black paint, its floor stained by thick black ink that trickles onto the performers, and mounds of dry earth that fall in heaps from the ceiling. One of the characters reclines on a metal-frame hospital bed that begins to resemble a medieval torture device when operated by a zealous nurse.The tunnel, with its clinical associations, is eventually dismantled, revealing an unadorned stage strewn with an assortment of chairs, a piano, microphone stands and stage lights. Muriel Gerstner’s stage design is a constant negotiation between sterile everyday objects (harshly lit by Stephan Mariani) and elemental imagery of earth, water and flowers.Like the film, however, this reimagining of “Amour” is anchored by its two central performances. Unlike the film, which starred two aging French cinema greats, the stage version is ignited by a dose of counterintuitive casting.Jung is 69 and Bach, 38. In Haneke’s movie, the actors who played their characters were in their mid-80s. Matthias HornKatharina Bach, who is just 38, brings unexpected vitality and deep pathos to her portrayal of Anne, an elderly music teacher who is paralyzed by a stroke. (Emmanuelle Riva was in her mid-80s when she played the same role in Haneke’s movie.) Bach’s is a fitful and tormented performance, marked by intense physical and dramatic control. As Georges, Anne’s still-vigorous husband, André Jung, 69, brings an embittered and defiant spirit that is a thoughtful departure from Jean-Louis Trintignant’s pained and subtle performance in the film.The German-language stage adaptation, by Henkel and the dramaturg Tobias Schuster, hews closely to the French screenplay. At the same time, they employ strategies to defamiliarize the piece. The dialogue is heightened by frequent, often uncanny repetition. And many of the script’s stage directions are read out loud by two actors, Joyce Sanhá and Christian Löber, whose limber performances — as narrators, nurses and other characters — add to the production’s anxious, off-kilter energy.Henkel’s greatest gamble is including a twelve-person chorus of nonprofessional extras. Each of them is old, infirm or in mourning, and, although they don’t speak much onstage, they have written moving testimonies about living with health conditions, or losing loved ones to illness that are recited as monologues by the main cast. In the wrong directorial hands, this sort of intervention could easily have curdled into sentimentality. Here, however, the emotional charge of these testimonies is balanced by understatement and restraint. By a similar token, the production’s depiction and discussion of euthanasia, while sometimes shocking, resists moralizing.Hovering somewhere between the cast of extras and the main performers is the actress Nine Manthei, a little girl who acts as an ambiguous intermediary. Is she a protecting angel? The personification of Anne’s soul? Along with Bach’s skillful performance, Manthei’s poise and onstage presence suggests a double exposure of Anne as an old woman and a child.“Old age might be tragic, but it is not individual,” we hear Haneke’s voice say in an excerpt from an interview about “Amour” that plays during the production.More than a decade ago, Haneke employed his formal austerity and emotional restraint to immerse us in one elderly couple’s tragedy. But where film encourages realism, theater can embrace allegory and abstraction. With her sensitive, at times idiosyncratic, approach to this same material, Henkel uses her theatrical artistry to reach the universal.AmourThrough Aug. 10 at the Salzburg Festival, in Salzburg, Austria; salzburgerfestspiele.at. More

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      ‘The Half-God of Rainfall’ Review: Basketball Under the Heavens

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      Borrowing its powers from Greek and Yoruba mythologies, Inua Ellams’s play tells the story of a demigod who becomes an N.B.A. superstar.Turning verse into action is tricky, especially with ideas as lofty as the ones in Inua Ellams’s epic poem “The Half-God of Rainfall,” now appearing in theatrical guise at New York Theater Workshop.The poem is a melodious, sky-high tale of a basketball superstar born as a result of a celestial contest between the Greek and Yoruba gods of thunder, Zeus and Sango. But the stage adaptation, which opened on Monday, runs into some flaws that, while not fatal, strand this Nigerian writer’s work in the mortal realm.A storm of plot and themes is squeezed into an intermission-less 90 minutes: After defeating Sango (Jason Bowen) in a race, Zeus (Michael Laurence) has his pick of Sango’s subjects. To Hera’s (Kelley Curran) defeated disdain, Zeus rapes Modúpé (Jennifer Mogbock), a Nigerian woman, and soon the mixed-race half-god Demi (Mister Fitzgerald) is born.Neighborhood boys ostracize Demi, who can turn the soil to swamp with his tears. But he gradually comes into his powers and makes his way to the Golden State Warriors, learning about other demigods who had to suppress their own supernatural talents on the court. Demi’s growing celebrity eventually lands him face to face with Zeus, providing a chance to avenge his mother.As the deities Elegba and Osún (Lizan Mitchell and Patrice Johnson Chevannes, fantastic as always) narrate Demi’s ascent to sports stardom, they intersperse meditations on the gendered violence that permeates Greek mythology, and later, on the imperialist violence the West perpetrated to obscure African traditions.Ellams’s scope is staggering, and he mostly pulls it off. Each line, heavy with information and emotion, is shot back and forth by the able actors, who turn Ellams’s vibrant, poetic flow into a nonstop athletic match.But there are few scenes of interactions between characters — instead presentational, narration-driven exposition makes up the bulk of the play. And Taibi Magar’s direction displays an uncertain grasp over whether the piece should play naturally or at a distance: There’s the work’s traditional methods of self-aware, oral storytelling — having the cast address the audience, and change into Linda Cho’s athleisure costumes onstage — and the production’s sumptuous, almost immersive elements, courtesy of Stacey Derosier’s lighting, Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound and especially Tal Yarden’s gorgeous projections.Though Orlando Pabotoy’s fluid movement direction, along with Beatrice Capote’s Orisha choreography, strikes a powerful balance between the seamless and more Brechtian styles, the production finds itself stuck between them.I was reminded of Ellams’s “Icarus,” a short piece presented during the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival in 2021. It transformed the parable into the heartbreaking tale of a young Nigerian refugee who, detained at an Italian entry point, takes to the sky. Recited by just two performers, the work, in its simplicity, soared. The poignancy and concision left me wanting a one-by-one re-envisioning of Greek mythology through a contemporary African diasporic lens.Ellams certainly has it in him to assemble a universe of distinctive characters connected by their shared humanity, as he proved in his globe-trotting play “Barber Shop Chronicles.” But here, his ideas, vast and evocative as they are on the page, overwhelm the story onstage, and the sheer amount of talking at the audience becomes draining. Ninety minutes becomes too long for one solidly conveyed story; too short for an entire pantheon of players.His interest in and approach to mixing and remixing Western and African traditions is fascinating, however. This is a writer whose intuitive understanding of the common threads of tradition, globalization and human instinct could very well create a new mythological tapestry for our interwoven times.The Half-God of RainfallThrough Aug. 20 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Liz Kingsman’s ‘One Woman Show’ Lands in N.Y.C.

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      The comedian talks about her slightly goofy, slightly surreal style, and why New York has proved to be “the hardest translation” yet.When it came time to create a trailer for her one-woman show — which is titled, of all things, “One Woman Show” and is playing at the Greenwich House Theater — Liz Kingsman researched what other productions had done. One video especially made her laugh.“It was for one of the Shakespeare histories and it was just close-ups of a man fondling his cuffs and touching his tie,” Kingsman said on a recent afternoon. “You’re like, ‘Is that Kit Harington?’ And then a bit of hair. It’s teasing Kit Harington, and in the end it is Kit Harington.”She decided to deploy the same gimmick for her own promotional trailer, complete with none other that Harington himself (though that “Game of Thrones” star, to be clear, is not in Kingsman’s show). “I’m not famous, so a trailer where it teases me…,” Kingsman said. “No one’s ever heard of me, so who cares?”A similar slightly goofy, slightly surreal style is at work in the Olivier Award-nominated “One Woman Show,” in which Kingsman sends up both a specific subgenre and its stars — boldly confessional, sexually frank, endearingly messy young women — for a “sharply observed satire,” as Jason Zinoman put it in his review for The New York Times.“Liz’s comedy has a sense of authorship that not lots of other comedians are lucky enough to have,” the comedian Alex Edelman said on the phone. (His Broadway solo, “Just for Us,” and “One Woman Show” were directed by Adam Brace, who died in May.) “She’s both totally committed to the character and totally committed to the laceration of the character.”And she has found an audience: Since a one-off outing of the concept in 2019, “One Woman Show” has traveled to the West End and at the Sydney Opera House. Now Kingsman is ready to move on, and says the New York run, which ends on Aug. 11, will be the production’s last.Jason Zinoman called Kingsman’s show a “sharp satire” about a messy attention-seeker grasping at relevance.Joan MarcusAfter growing up in Sydney, Australia, she attended Durham University in England. There she formed the sketch-comedy trio Massive Dad with Tessa Coates and Stevie Martin, and they performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2014 and 2015. Kingsman went solo, firming up a drolly understated sensibility. Most notably, she has spent three seasons as the eye-rolling, unflappable British assistant-turned-lobbyist Rose Pilkington in the French series “Parlement,” a witty cross between “Veep” and “The Thick of It.” (It’s available on Topic in the United States.) “No one I know has ever seen the show so it feels like I’ve made the job up,” she said, laughing.Kingsman, who declined to give her exact age but said “I remain 12 years old,” arrived for the interview with her cockapoo, Emmett, and marveled at the access he enjoyed in New York. “You can go shopping with your dog here,” she said. “Like, you can take them into clothes shops, and you can’t do that in London. That’s really revolutionizing things.”The pair sat down for some hummus and a doggy biscuit at a West Village restaurant near Kingsman’s rented home away from home. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you move to Britain?My mom is British, one of the “Ten Pound Poms”: They needed an immigration boost in Australia so they handed out 10-pounds tickets to British people. When it came to [university], I just went to England — I wanted to go and live in an old building and read books in a little nook somewhere. I quickly learned that it is cold and damp [laughs]. But there is a brilliant industry in London and once I started working, it was very hard to leave.How does humor travel?I’ve definitely found New York to be the hardest translation of the show because I think an American audience believes things that are meant to be ironic at the top. When my character says “Women’s voices aren’t getting heard in theater,” a U.K. audience knows that’s me doing a joke about a woman who would say that very sincerely onstage. But an American audience has been clapping at that line. I don’t know what to do with that because I can’t be, “No, that’s ironic!” I don’t want to generalize too much, but my experience is that there has been a tendency to sort of buy into it a little bit more here.What makes you laugh?I find very serious theater amusing. I saw “Sweeney Todd.” I really enjoyed it, but there’s a sort of big moment where a character dies and the next line was “Oh, no.” The actor had to deliver it with gravitas and I was like, “How are you going to do that? Somebody’s died: ‘Oh no.’ ” I just started laughing at a very serious-themed play. I can’t help it, I just find it funny.The lady does not prefer dungarees: “It was never a specific reference but people started saying that my costume was a reference to one episode of one TV show. And I was like, ‘ecch.’” OK McCausland for The New York TimesOK, but what kind of comedy do you find funny?Commitment to something incredibly stupid makes me laugh — really stupid stuff taken very seriously. There’s a clip from “Parks and Recreation” when [Leslie Knope] is on her campaign run and she has to give a speech in the middle of an ice rink. I’ve watched the clip so many times. It’s quite physical and I love slapstick. The scene generally is very funny, but I also like the idea of how much fun those actors would have had that day. It makes me want to be in a show like that more than anything.I love that you’re wearing dungarees in “One Woman Show,” although apparently it’s a nod to one Phoebe Waller-Bridge wore in “Fleabag”?It’s not, actually. All the one-woman shows I saw, they wear overalls or dungarees because there’s a little bit of “girl next door” about it. If you ever go to any of those festivals like Edinburgh or Brighton, it’s just a sea of women wearing overalls, dungarees or boiler suits. I couldn’t do the show in a boiler suit so I was like, “It’s got to be dungarees.” It was never a specific reference but people started saying that my costume was a reference to one episode of one TV show. And I was like, “ecch.” Also, if I wanted to parody a costume, I’d do a better parody.American female comedians don’t appear to be into dungarees to the same extent.It’s just an unflattering outfit, basically.I think they’re cool! Like something the tomboy George would wear in an Enid Blyton book.But don’t you think there’s a slight kink about that? It’s very hard to describe. Maybe it’s very specific to the U.K. In the script it’s written that she’s wearing messy braids that have been made to look deliberately a little bit messy. She basically has to look casual, like she’s thrown it on but thought has gone into it. It’s all character: It’s what this woman would wear — I would not wear that outfit. Now I will never wear dungarees ever again. And I’m never doing a French braid ever again after August 11! More

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      Review: Young Bros and Maidens Harmonize in ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’

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      This peculiar early Shakespeare comedy gets updated with 10 songs for a youthful alfresco production.“Let’s rock!” is something I’m pretty sure no character in Shakespeare ever said. But on a sandy stage under a jaunty tent, with a green hillside as a welcoming backdrop, it seemed an apt way to begin “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”It is, after all, a young man’s play, both in its authorship (Shakespeare was about 30) and story (four callow bros fall madly in love with four sharp maidens). And this production, directed by Amanda Dehnert for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, intensifies the youth-crush factor with 10 emo songs. Neither fully true to the strange original nor completely remade as a viable musical, it swings between those poles in ways that are both tiresome and charming.Let’s start with the charming: The catchy songs, by Dehnert and the Chicago-based composer André Pluess, tap the sappy heart of summer and are danceable to boot. (You may be the audience member asked at one point to prove it.) Whether folky or funky, and despite lyrics that sound little like Shakespeare — “she’s a nice girl, always thinking twice girl” — they match the story emotionally, with titles like “The Infinite Ones” (as youth always sees itself) and “Change to Black” (as youth at some point must do).That the songs don’t match the story structurally is probably an insuperable problem. “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” with or without the British “u,” is a very youthful, disjointed text, its thin thread of plot repeatedly cut by clowns, dullards, puns, pomposities and noodling that goes nowhere. Misdelivered letters and absurd disguises contribute. By the time you get to the masque near the end, featuring impenetrable spoofs of the nine classical “worthies,” you may doubt young Shakespeare’s judgment of worthiness.And yet his ear for the painful paradoxes of love is already fully in evidence. The four young men of Navarre, who form a “Seinfeld”-like pact to abjure the company of women for three years, break it almost instantly when a delegation of four visiting gentlewomen arrives from France to resolve a diplomatic issue. (After many readings and viewings of the play, I still don’t know what that issue is.) In supple pentameter, Shakespeare explores the difference between the book learning the young men meant to engage in and the learning that emerges, despite their plans, from “the prompting eyes of beauty’s tutors.”From left, Mayadevi Ross, Emily Ota, Antoinette Robinson and Phoebe Lloyd in the play, with music and lyrics by Amanda Dehnert and André Pluess.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, theirs is a bumpy road to maturity. Spurred on by Berowne, “a man replete with mocks,” they double down on whimsy, dressing up for some reason as Russians to bamboozle their intendeds. (In Dehnert’s staging, the “Muscovites” are a rock group.) In response, the women, spurred on by Rosaline, whose eye “Jove’s lightning bears,” disguise themselves as one another to confuse and trump the men. But just as all of this gets sorted, with a quadruple marriage (or more) in sight, a last-minute death delays the nuptials and forestalls a normal resolution.“Our wooing doth not end like an old play,” Berowne says. “Jack hath not Jill” — which if true enough to life, is way too sudden for dramaturgy.The Hudson Valley Shakespeare production is not the first to struggle with such problems in musicalizing “Love’s Labor’s Lost.” But unlike the 1973 opera by Nicolas Nabokov, with a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, or the musical comedy presented by the Public Theater in 2013, with songs by Michael Friedman, Dehnert’s version does not use its songs to deepen character and propel the story.They are generally too short and atmospheric for that, most being sung between scenes instead of during them, and by members of the multitasking cast-slash-band (guitars, drums, accordion) who are observing the action, not experiencing it. The addition of songs, however beguiling, thus winds up emphasizing the play’s ungainliness by adding another unintegrated element and stretching the run time. A full-blown musical might have worked better, but at two hours and 40 minutes, it’s already too long for a summer romp.That’s a shame, because some of the singers — including Melissa Mahoney, who plays the “wench” Jaquenetta, and Luis Quintero, one of the dullards — have great voices. Others compare favorably only with the chorus of mosquitoes that always accompanies a Hudson Valley Shakespeare outing. But if discipline is not the top vocal note, rawness verging on excessiveness is a kind of authenticity in a show about raw, excessive youth.Authenticity is not sufficient when speaking the verse, though; it requires more finesse than some of the young actors yet possess. Getting your mouth around the overlapping and oddly shaped dialogue can be like eating an unpeeled pineapple.Luckily, Stephen Michael Spencer as Berowne and Antoinette Robinson as Rosaline are standouts, fully inhabiting the process of growing up and growing wise. At first almost adversaries — he impulsive and she haughty — they gradually move toward the middle as the invented trials of infatuation give way to the real ones of love. Both are also generally spared the over-emphatic jollity that Dehnert has evidently encouraged as a way of plowing through difficult passages of dialogue and forcing the weird jokes to bloom. It’s no fun when the people onstage are having more fun than you.Still, despite its lapses and longueurs, “Love’s Labor’s Lost” remains in this version a fascinating and feelingful taste of Shakespeare to come. And if in his later works he generally improved on many of the tricks pioneered here, that too is apt. Like those tricks, this musical, as it develops for future productions, may one day improve on its first, green outing.Love’s Labor’s LostThrough Aug. 27 at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More