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      in Theater

      ‘Prima Facie’ and ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ Win Big at the Olivier Awards

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      The Jodie Comer-starring legal drama won best new play at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys and an adaptation of ‘Totoro’ won six gongs — the most of any production.“Prima Facie,” a Broadway-bound play about a lawyer who represents men accused of assault, then is herself sexually assaulted, was the big winner on Sunday at the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The one-woman show, starring Jodie Comer and written by Suzie Miller, was named best new play during a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Comer was also named best actress for her performance at the West End’s Harold Pinter Theater.The awards come just days before “Prima Facie,” and Comer, transfer to New York. The show is scheduled to begin previews at the Golden Theater on Apr. 11.Its success at the Olivier Awards was perhaps unsurprising given that “Prima Facie” was a critical and commercial hit in London during its run last year. Matt Wolf, reviewing the play for The New York Times, said that Comer took a big risk making her West End debut in an “emotionally fraught solo play.” But, he added, “there’s no denying the visceral power of an evening that owes its sellout status to a theatrical neophyte who possesses the know-how of a seasoned pro.”“Prima Facie” beat stiff competition to the best new play title, including Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of “To Kill A Mockingbird” at the Gielgud Theater; “Patriots” at the Almeida — a timely look at President Vladimir V. Putin’s rise in Russia; and “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy” at the Royal Court, a tale of six young Black men in group therapy.Comer accepted her award, thanking “the sisterhood” who worked on the show, then giving a message to viewers online. “To any kids who haven’t been to drama school, who can’t afford to go to drama school, who’ve been rejected from drama school — don’t let anybody tell you that it is impossible,” she said.Although it won one of the night’s most coveted awards, “Prima Facie” was not the only big winner. “My Neighbour Totoro,” an adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 animated film, at the Barbican Theater in London, won six gongs — the most of any production — including best entertainment or comedy play, and the best director award for Phelim McDermott.The show, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, was a crowd-pleaser in London partly thanks to featuring several giant, fantastical puppets — including a furry Catbus that is part motor vehicle, part feline. Dominic Cavendish, reviewing the play in The Daily Telegraph, said those puppets were “worth the price of admission alone.”Other major winners included Paul Mescal, the Irish star, who was named best actor for his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Almeida Theater.Matt Wolf, in a review for The New York Times, wrote that “Mescal brings both swagger and sensitivity to the role, in the process stepping out of the long shadow cast over this part by its stage and screen originator, Marlon Brando.”The best new musical award went to “Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” a show at the National Theater in London about the intertwined lives of the residents of a housing complex. It triumphed over several higher-profile titles including “Tammy Faye,” about the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, featuring music by Elton John. More

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      in Music

      Review: Philip Glass and the Meaning of Life

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      The director Phelim McDermott, who has acted like a visual translator of Glass’s music, pays tribute to the composer in their show “Tao of Glass.”Once, when the theater-maker Phelim McDermott was a child, he missed out on the show of his dreams.It was an “Aladdin”-like play called “Billy’s Wonderful Kettle” in Manchester, England, and the 7-year-old McDermott was so excited the night before, he got a stomachache that kept him from going. He often thought about that show in the years that followed. In his mind, it was a thing of magic — the best piece of theater he never saw.“I’ve spent my whole life trying to make a show as good as ‘Billy’s Wonderful Kettle,’” McDermott says in “Tao of Glass,” his fragmentary, fantastical and often moving tribute to the composer Philip Glass and the power of art to flow through our lives, as he describes it, like a river.If McDermott hasn’t matched the idealistic image he has of “Kettle,” he certainly has made an earnest effort with Improbable, the inventive theater company he co-founded in 1996. Some of his most inspired creations have been stagings of Glass’s operas — especially the ritualistic set pieces of “Satyagraha” and the juggling spectacle of “Akhnaten.”McDermott truly gets Glass’s music, and so can act as a kind of visual translator. That, we learn in “Tao of Glass,” which opened at NYU Skirball in New York on Thursday, comes from an affection that runs deep, and far into the past.Here, for the first time, McDermott and Glass have built something together from scratch — written, co-directed (with Kirsty Housley) and performed by McDermott, with an original score by Glass. On its most basic level, the production is “the story of a show that never happened,” McDermott says, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen.” But eventually, “Tao” becomes the story of its own creation.The show is metatheatrical from the start. As the lights go down, McDermott is in the aisle, carrying a Skirball tote bag on his shoulder, pretending to look for his seat in the dark. Then a spotlight shines on him, and he looks out at the audience in shocked horror, playing out a bad dream many have. The comedic moment past, he begins, “This is my favorite bit.”McDermott is an effortlessly endearing, self-deprecating host, so passionate when speaking about Glass’s music that he’s reminiscent of the Man in Chair from “The Drowsy Chaperone,” a narrator with an infectious delight for his favorite Broadway cast album.Over a series of nonlinear, discursive vignettes, McDermott illustrates a vision of reality, laid out by the psychologist Arnold Mindell, on three levels: Consensus Reality, Dreamland and Essence. The goal is to experience what Mindell calls “Deep Democracy,” the state of all three levels activated at once. And that provides something of an outline for how “Tao” is presented, down to the concentric rings that hang above or sit on the stage in Fly Davis’s design.McDermott, left, with Wright and Janet Etuk operating a bunraku puppet in the show, which blends memory with Eastern philosophy and a new score by Glass.Tristram KentonOn the first level, Consensus Reality, “Tao” has the appearance of a workaday one-man show, with McDermott sharing memories and fondly miming Glass conducting with his hair at the keyboard during early performances. In the second half, McDermott is joined by three puppeteers as the scenes becomes dreamier, drifting for what feels like too long before returning to the initial focus on music — the Essence, “the Tao which cannot be said.”Your tolerance for this might depend on your relationship with Glass’s music. If you think of it as an extension of his Eastern-inspired meditative practice, everything here is of a piece: McDermott’s obsessions with Lao Tzu, the I Ching and the Rig Veda weave naturally with the slowly transforming, churning arpeggios that are Glass’s trademark. If not, the digressions into states of being could come off as a bit silly.Among the stories McDermott shares are memories of the nights he drove his family mad while he played “Glassworks” on repeat; of using that album in his first professional theater gig; of the time he met Sendak, “a grumpy, gay Oscar the Grouch”; of losing his cool over the destruction of a beloved, ahem, glass table. Interspersed are interludes about Eastern philosophy, flotation tanks and the practice of pretending to be in a coma.With an aesthetic that is whimsical but not twee, McDermott and his fellow performers — David Emmings, Avye Leventis and Sarah Wright — conjure a shadow play of “In the Night Kitchen,” a fantasia that transforms briefly into a silhouette of Glass at the keyboard, and bring to life additional characters with, for example, surprisingly human sheets of tissue paper and bunraku puppetry.There is a version of “Tao” — call it the best piece of theater we never saw — that would have featured Glass playing piano alongside the action onstage. But early in development, the idea was shot down by his manager; Glass just didn’t have the time.But his score is a substantial, crucial contribution. This is late Glass — far from the echt Minimalist sound of “Glassworks,” McDermott’s obsession — performed by a quartet of the percussionist Chris Vatalaro (the show’s music director), the clarinetist Jack McNeill, the violinist Laura Lutzke and the pianist Katherine Tinker.There is experimentation with found-object percussion, and recent Glass touches including colorful texture, expressive shifts in harmony and soundtrack-like tone painting. McDermott’s childhood memories are matched by naïvely excited music; the flotation tank, by a soporific étude; the simulated coma, by a melody so shapeless yet alluring that it could have been written by Satie.Glass does appear briefly, in the form of a Steinway Spirio piano — an instrument that can record sound and touch then reproduce it, like an advanced player piano. He tells McDermott that this way, he can be with him onstage “like a ghost.”It was a reminder that while Glass, 86, is still with us — he was in the theater on Thursday, and bowed with the performers — he won’t always be. But his art will remain, and it’s through his music that McDermott reaches the Essence level. Culture, McDermott suggests, is the route to our deepest selves.With a running time of two and a half hours, “Tao” doesn’t make that point quickly. By the end, though, McDermott’s scattered thoughts satisfyingly cohere like kintsugi, the Japanese art of rejoining broken pottery pieces with golden lacquer, which he describes near the beginning. Some of his memories reveal a clear, clean image; others are imperfect shards that don’t seem to fit. But together, they create something new, and beautiful.Tao of GlassThrough April 8 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. More

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      in Television

      Michael R. Jackson on the Soap Opera Origins of ‘White Girl in Danger’

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      The musical’s creator and creative team discuss their influences, including “Days of Our Lives,” “Showgirls” and D’Angelo.Hearing Michael R. Jackson, the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright of “A Strange Loop,” speak about soap operas is like getting lost in a Wikipedia wormhole. With nary a pause, he rolls through the details of characters’ yearslong arcs, including every stolen identity, forbidden romance and vicious backstabbing — literal and figurative.He’s amassed decades of knowledge: He became hooked at 5 years old, when he started camping out in front of a “gigantic” wooden television set with his great-aunt. “I would watch ‘The Young and the Restless’ at 12:30, ‘Days of Our Lives’ at 1, ‘Another World’ at 2, ‘Santa Barbara’ at 3. And I would do that every day — Monday through Friday,” Jackson, 42, said in a recent interview. “The more I sat and watched with her, the more engrossed I got in these characters’ lives and the story lines. I sort of grew up obsessed with them.”So it’s not surprising that these shows, which he began recording on VHS when he was older, would eventually become a source of inspiration for Jackson: His new musical, “White Girl in Danger,” is rooted in soap opera themes and tropes. It’s now in previews in a joint production of Second Stage and Vineyard Theater, and is scheduled to open April 10 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater.Latoya Edwards, center, as Keesha, a character who is trying to transcend racial stereotypes and get a more prominent story line.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show takes place in Allwhite, a world defined by soap tropes and ruled by three white teen-girl stereotypes: Megan, Meagan and Maegan (pronounced MEG-an, Mee-gan and MAY-gan, FYI). Much of the show’s action takes place in and around Allwhite’s high school, where “the Megans” are preparing for a battle of the bands competition. Then there’s a Black girl named Keesha, who is trying to get her own story line and level up from being a forgettable Blackground character, forever stuck in slave narratives and police brutality stories. Meanwhile, the town’s residents are reeling from a mysterious spate of murders.In separate interviews, Jackson, along with the director, Lileana Blain-Cruz; the choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly; the set designer, Adam Rigg; and the costume designer, Montana Levi Blanco, spoke about the show’s many influences (including romance novels, Lifetime movies and Black girl groups) and how those influences were reimagined for the stage.Gothic melodramaJackson described “Days of Our Lives” as the soap opera that most shaped his understanding of and love for melodrama — specifically a 1993 episode in which the rich socialite Vivian Alamain (Louise Sorel) drugs her nemesis, Carly Manning (Crystal Chappell), and buries her alive. Jackson gushed about the scene, which begins with Vivian plucking the petals from a bouquet of roses, maniacally chanting “She loves me, she loves me not” atop Carly’s grave; he called Sorel’s “incredible” performance downright Shakespearean. “I was 12 years old and it was, to this day, one of the most seminal soap moments; it’s burned into me because I had never seen something so Gothic and terrifying happen,” Jackson said. “I was like ‘This is my form.’”There are many other iconic soap moments that are alluded to in “White Girl in Danger”: Adam Rigg designed a curtain inspired by a pink beaded rhinestone gown that Joan Collins, as Alexis Carrington Colby, wears in “Dynasty,” and looked back at a famous fight scene from the show between Alexis and Diahann Carroll’s Dominique Deveraux that leaves both characters — and the room they’re in — in tatters. Rigg used some of the background details of that scene — a vase, the peach and coral color palette of the room and furnishings — in the show’s set design.When it comes to characters and their roller-coaster arcs, Jackson’s favorites are Viki Lord (Erika Slezak), the “One Life to Live” matriarch with dissociative identity disorder whose alter egos emerge to dictate her romantic life, blackmail people, murder people and trap her enemies in secret rooms, and Kristen Blake (Eileen Davidson), the good-girl-turned-bad girl who also kidnaps and hides her enemies in secret rooms.Jackson’s love of these soaps runs deeper than the cloak-and-dagger plots and mustache-twirling villains. He even layered in musical references: The show’s opening number includes musical allusions to Peabo Bryson’s “One Life to Live” and the opening of “Another World,” sung by Gary Morris and Crystal Gayle.Three sides of Mark-Paul GosselaarMark-Paul Gosselaar, right, as the mischievous Zack Morris, with Mario Lopez as Slater, left, and Dustin Diamond as Screech, in “Saved by the Bell.”NBCThere are footprints of the late ’80s and early ’90s high school sitcom “Saved by the Bell” all over the musical, from Rigg’s kitschy Memphis-style design of the Allwhite school to Keesha’s colorblock windbreaker.And then there’s that show’s beloved Zack Morris, played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar. In “White Girl in Danger,” Jackson pulled from boyfriend tropes — not only Zack but also some of the other roles Gosselaar has played in his career — to mold a boyfriend character (known as Matthew Scott, Scott Matthew and Zack Paul Gosselaar, and played by one actor) opposite “the Megans.” Jackson cited as inspirations Gosselaar’s roles as a frat boy who sexually assaults a college freshman played by Candace Cameron in the TV movie “She Cried No” and as a loving, supportive brother in “For the Love of Nancy.”“This concept of three different boyfriends in one was born out of that, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar specifically, because he played all these parts really well,” Jackson said.Teen queen dreamsFrom left, Tara Reid, Rachael Leigh Cook and Rosario Dawson as small town musicians vying for a big break in the 2001 film “Josie and the Pussycats.”Universal Pictures, via Associated PressThe female clique atop the teen social hierarchy is a well-loved trope. For Kelly, the groups of alpha it-girls in movies like “Clueless,” “Jawbreaker” and “Heathers” greatly influenced how he choreographed “the Megans.”“The opening number, for me, is kind of like ‘Josie and the Pussycats,’” he said. “Everything they do is super cute and super meticulous.” There’s duality to their gestures, Kelly added, which can “flip from being really cute to being insidious.”Blain-Cruz mentioned “My So-Called Life,” and shows “about young women trying to navigate that in-between space of childhood and adulthood, but also claiming their own space.”“And those spaces generally tended to be occupied by white women or white girls,” Blain-Cruz said, noting that one of her favorite scenes to develop was a band rehearsal in which each of the girls’ performance styles recalls that of ’90s pop starlets.‘Hollywood, sex and murder’Gina Gershon, left, and Elizabeth Berkley in the 1995 film “Showgirls.”Murray Close/United ArtistsAffairs, dalliances and general sexcapades are hallmarks of soap operas, so “White Girl in Danger” follows suit with kooky seduction scenes, surprising bedfellows and sprays of bodily fluid. For the choreography of a scene featuring a sudden sexual reveal, Kelly enthusiastically references one of his favorite movies, the erotic 1995 drama “Showgirls.” He described it as “the wild and crazy cat-fight-love-festival that was between Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon.”For Jackson, it wasn’t just the sexy daytime and prime time dramas that left an impression, it was also the work of the romance writer Jackie Collins.“I was like 10 years old and my older cousin gave me a copy of ‘Chances,’” Jackson said. “I devoured it, because it was so dirty. It was like my form of pornography, because I lived in a pretty strict religious home,” he continued. “That took me into this world of Hollywood, Vegas, gangsters, sex and murder.”Black music in the BlackgroundThere’s no “White Girl in Danger” without the Black characters who try to escape the racist, stereotypical Black stories in the Blackground. Three of the show’s Blackground women — Florence, Caroline and Abilene — serve as a kind of Greek chorus. For their fashion and choreography, Blanco and Kelly channeled the Pointer Sisters, the Mary Jane Girls, the Dreams, the Ronettes, even the trio of singer-narrators in “Little Shop of Horrors.” Kelly said the Blackground women represent “the trope of the three women 30 feet from stardom on the outskirts of every story.”For Tarik, a Blackground character whose roles are exclusively getting killed and going to jail, Black music was also prominent influence. “Tarik is every Black male stereotype from ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ to its counterpart; he’s also D’Angelo. He’s also Ginuwine. He’s also Usher,” Kelly said, specifically calling out D’Angelo’s bare-chested video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” Though Tarik has his own deliberately underdressed jacket-open moment, Blanco’s costume design for him includes a “Fresh Prince”-style cap and Hammer pants. More

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      in Theater

      Alex Newell From ‘Shucked’ Sings Their Favorite Whitney Houston Song

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      After growing up listening to powerhouse voices, the actor brings their own back to Broadway.Amid the sweet, folksy ballads (and many, many corn jokes) of “Shucked,” the new Broadway musical opening April 4, comes a soulful, commanding number performed by Alex Newell that provides the show some unexpected heft — a song full of riffs and modulations and belted notes that seem to reach both ends of the actor’s expansive range.Roles that showcase the breadth and power of Newell’s voice are familiar territory: The actor made their Broadway debut in 2017 as the maternal goddess Asaka in the revival of “Once on This Island” (1990) and may be most recognizable for their time on “Glee,” from 2012 to 2015, as the transgender teenager Unique Adams. But their character in “Shucked” — Lulu, a whiskey entrepreneur — and that song, “Independently Owned,” offer the chance to inhabit something new: “The expectation of plus-size people is that they cannot be sexy; all my life, I’ve heard you’re either fat and jolly or fat and a bitch,” says Newell, 30. “So to have this dimension of this person, to just exude sex, is so much fun for me because it doesn’t happen often — especially on the Broadway stage.”“Shucked” is set in a small farming town with a thriving corn crop — until the stalks start dying, spurring a local woman (Lulu’s cousin and confidante, Maizy, played by Caroline Innerbichler) to leave home in search of a solution. Newell heard about the piece through a friend, who did an early reading before the pandemic. But they didn’t see the script, written by Robert Horn, until the show’s musical director and orchestrator, Jason Howland, texted Newell about the role. They were immediately drawn to the show’s humor — nearly every line is a pun or punchline or both, the laughs offset by a warm score from the country songwriting duo Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark.Newell grew up singing in church in Lynn, Mass., and listening to other big voices, Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Patti LaBelle, Jennifer Holliday among them. They had early aspirations of becoming a gospel artist, but performing in a choir proved challenging — “I mean, I never fit in. I was always loud.” After seeing a local production of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” when they were 11, Newell began thinking about a career in musical theater.When Fox held an open call for “Glee” hopefuls to audition online in 2011, Newell, then a sophomore in high school, submitted a self-taped clip performing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” from “Dreamgirls.” (Starring as Effie, a role in the musical originated by Holliday, has long been a goal.) Newell later started making pop music, including the queer anthems “Kill the Lights” and “All Cried Out,” and in 2020 eventually returned to TV as Mo, a gender-nonconforming D.J. on the musical series “Zoe’s Extraordinary Playlist.” But for now, Newell says, they’re content to stay onstage: “The endorphins that are released after you’ve sung and everyone is standing and screaming and that wall of sound is pushing right back at you: It’s beautiful.”Ahead of opening night, T asked Newell to sing and discuss their favorite song by one of their idols: Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” (1985). More

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      ‘Life of Pi’ Review: A Boy and a Tiger, Burning Brightly

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      Human ingenuity and animal grace course through this rich, inventive play about difficult choices and the stories we tell to make sense of them.The butterflies enter first, quivering gaily atop their sticks. Then a giraffe pokes her head in. A goat gambols. A hyena cackles. One zebra runs on. Then another. An orangutan swings through while her baby reposes on a branch nearby. Above, monkeys and meerkats chitter. In the first act of “Life of Pi,” a menagerie — menacing, delightful — entrenches itself on the stage of Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.With dazzling imagination and sublime control, the show’s cast and crew conjure a delirious, dynamic, highly pettable world. And oh, is it a wonder. Though the play is ostensibly about one boy’s fraught survival after a disaster, that story is somewhat thin. “Life of Pi” instead succeeds as a broader tribute to human ingenuity and animal grace.Directed by Max Webster and adapted by the playwright Lolita Chakrabarti from Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel, “Life of Pi” begins more somberly, in Mexico, in 1978. A grayed-out hospital room houses a sole patient, Pi Patel (Hiran Abeysekera). A Japanese cargo ship en route to Canada has sunk. Among its passengers were Pi and his family, who had set out from Pondicherry, India. And among its freight were the animals Pi’s zookeeper father tended. All aboard have drowned, except Pi, a traumatized 17-year-old who washed up in this fishing village after 227 days lost at sea.Visiting him this morning are Mr. Okamoto (Daisuke Tsuji), a representative from the Japanese Ministry of Transport, and Lulu Chen (Kirstin Louie), from the Canadian Embassy. These guests have been charged with learning what happened to Pi. For their benefit, he spins a fantastic tale — incredible in every sense — about sharing a lifeboat with animals, initially several then finally just one, Richard Parker, an enormous, sinuous, very hungry Bengal tiger.Between Richard Parker and Pi, adamant carnivore and lifelong vegetarian, there is a desperate struggle for dominance. Richard Parker needs to eat. Pi would prefer not to be eaten. But these two passengers eventually achieve a détente, even a kind of friendship, a hallucinatory acknowledgment of what is human within the animal and animal within the human. It is the example of Richard Parker — and his companionship, however imagined — that allows Pi to survive.“You’re the only reason I’m alive,” a despairing Pi says to his friend, midjourney. “It’s just you and me.”But “Life of Pi” is a much larger affair than this small-man-big-cat duo. The cast runs to 24 actors, many of them also puppeteers, with a small fleet of crew members to make the whole show seaworthy. (The play originated in Sheffield, England, before moving to the West End and then to the American Repertory Theater in Boston, so yes, it floats.) Martel’s novel — absorbing, florid — is a work of magical realism. Webster, the director, makes sure to deliver the magic and the realism both.The menagerie of puppet animals, designed by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, prowl and canter and leap with astonishing character and style, our critic writes.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesNodding to techniques pioneered by Robert Lepage and Improbable Theater, Webster encourages a beautiful synchrony of lighting (Tim Lutkin), video (Andrzej Goulding), sound (Carolyn Downing) and set (Tim Hatley, who also designed the costumes). Aided by the other production elements, the mise-en-scène constantly moves and shifts. The room becomes the boat. The boat recedes into the room. Sometimes both room and boat are there at once and a person might have to clap her hands across her mouth to stop herself from oohing, especially when the schools of fish surface or the stars begin to flicker. We are in the realm of fantasy here, of symbolism, but squint just a little and waves appear. Even from the mezzanine, I could feel — almost — a salt spray.And the puppetry! Between Milky White of “Into the Woods” and the dinosaur and mammoth of “The Skin of Our Teeth,” New York has not been starved of extraordinary stick and cloth creations. But the animals here, designed by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, with movement direction by Caldwell, prowl and canter and leap with astonishing character and style. And Richard Parker, animated by three puppeteers at any given time, is the show’s striped jewel. Chuffing, growling and panting as he stalks the boat’s perimeter, he is at once beguiling, gentlemanly and quite dangerous. Abeysekera — a petite hurricane of an actor with reeling limbs and a clarion voice — is excellent in an exhausting role.But Richard Parker (very briefly voiced by Brian Thomas Abraham) makes the more indelible impression. When he finally slunk onto dry land, I worried for him as I did not worry for Pi. He seemed so thin.The cast runs to 24 actors, many of them also puppeteers.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesToward the start of his tale, Pi promises his listeners that his story will make them believe in God. But while Martel’s novel has a deep and sometimes tendentious concern with religion and philosophy, Chakrabarti’s adaptation engages with these questions only glancingly.At its most abstract, this a play about how we come to terms with our own choices, even with our own survival, and the stories we might tell to make those choices and that survival make sense. Trauma requires language, Pi insists. If you don’t find words to compass it, he says, “it becomes a wordless darkness, and you will never defeat it.” Yet language tends to recede whenever the animals are onstage. Want wonder? Want divinity? Look to the tiger burning bright. And then look to the human hands that tend the flame.Eventually Pi offers an alternative version of what happened on that lifeboat, which Webster also stages. Stripped of animals, allegory and visual pleasure, this account is more plausible, though much darker. “Which is the better story?” Pi asks.Depends what he means by “better.” But of course it’s the one with the animals. Because faced with such horror, or even with the ordinary hardships of daily life, anyone would prefer the fantasy, especially when it is rendered with such richness and invention. (A different show might have questioned the morality of extracting such pleasure, such delight, from a tale of privation. Not this one.) Significantly, neither story redeems what Pi has suffered. But only one has a tiger in it.That roaring that you will hear at the show’s end? It’s the sound of a standing ovation.Life of PiAt the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, Manhattan; lifeofpibway.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      In This ‘Peter Pan,’ Something Always Goes Awry. That’s the Plan.

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      On a recent afternoon, the actor Greg Tannahill sat perched atop a London rooftop, one leg extended, one arm outthrust. A pair of carpenters would then whisk Tannahill from his rooftop and into a nursery. And then out of it. And then back in again. A window frame would come free. Tannahill, now jerked upside down, would mewl and scream and clamber down a wall. Once he finally righted himself, the flight harness would wrench him upside-down again.This breathless, silly sequence lasted less than a minute and ended when Tannahill, playing an actor cast as Peter Pan in an ill-starred kiddie production, finally stands up straight and delivers the line: “Thank heavens I didn’t wake the children.”The routine requires split-second precision and the seamless cooperation of actors, flight operators and stage managers. To make it work and to make it safe (there is an open flame on set!), the creators and crew members of “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” the spry, slapstick comedy that is scheduled to open at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theater on April 19, have spent dozens of hours (maybe hundreds of hours, counts differ) honing this one bit.“Peter Pan Goes Wrong” is the second Broadway production, following the Agatha Christie- adjacent “The Play That Goes Wrong,” in 2017, from the theater company Mischief. Founded by three former drama school roommates — Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields — Mischief specializes in farcical deconstructions of established genres. Each new play is putatively the work of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, a troupe of overambitious amateur thespians. Whenever the Cornley players take the stage, something inevitably goes awry. A lot of somethings. Mischief’s fascination is with the things (and people) that go bump in the night. People like Tannahill.Backstage at the Ethel Barrymore Theater: Richard Force, a carpenter, helping Tannahill into his harness.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“I’ve gained a bruise or two in rehearsal,” said Tannahill, once he had retired to his dressing room. “But you’ve got to break a few eggs to make a lovely omelet.” He then clarified that he hadn’t actually broken anything.‘Acclimate to the terror’I visited the Barrymore a week before the show’s first preview performance because I wanted to see the work that went into putting even one gag together. “Hours go into generating just 10 seconds,” Sayer told me.It was late afternoon, just before the dinner break, and the auditorium was littered with binders, monitors and makeshift desks. The atmosphere was one of controlled chaos, but no one seemed especially tense. (Many of the company’s members studied together at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.) Not even Tannahill, though he did ask, good-naturedly, for a moment to catch his breath before the carpenters swung him in again.“Just so I can acclimate to the terror that is that moment,” he said.That moment has been in the works for about 10 years, ever since “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” first opened at the Pleasance, a small theater in North London. Mischief had chosen a children’s show as the follow-up to “The Play That Goes Wrong” for two reasons. First, these shows have so many rules and conventions ripe for rupture. “You can’t really get more serious than a show that is intended for children,” said Henry Shields, as he and his collaborators speed-ate a dinner of pasta and salad. “The moral standard of these shows, it is extremely high.”The second reason was the flying rig. With characters suspended high above the stage floor, what could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot.When the show debuted, at the Pleasance, the company couldn’t afford luxury gear. The rented rig had no counterweight, so when they wanted to lift Tannahill, who originated the role of the actor playing Peter Pan, a crew member had to jump off a stepladder. To have Tannahill enter at the appropriate speed, a couple of actors would hold his feet, pull him back and let him go.Honing a sequence: Jonathan Sayer, one of the founders of the Mischief theater company, compared their process to stop-motion animation, because a new movement or gesture has to happen nearly every second.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“The low-tech version of the show was much more dangerous,” Shields said. “I mean, it was safe, we took care, but there were more bruises.”In this low-tech version, things actually did go wrong, unscripted things. At one point, a screw fell out and a door broke away, jamming the revolving stage just minutes before curtain. At another performance, a dummy version of Peter Pan fell to the floor prematurely. (“Don’t worry,” Tannahill ad-libbed. “That’s just the other dead Pan.”) One night, Sayer, playing one of the children, forgot to loosen a button on his costume. When his own rig jerked up, it choked him.“I remember being very out of breath and quite shaken and looking up expecting to see you all looking very concerned,” Sayer recalled. “Everyone had tears rolling down their faces with laughter.”The company now takes rehearsals and personal safety just a bit more seriously. “With age and experience comes much more care,” Sayer said. “When you’re 21, you say, ‘Let’s just go for it!’ Now, there’s a lot of poring through everything at an extreme level of detail to get it right and to make sure that we’re safe and well and happy.” (He and his collaborators are now seasoned men of 34.)Mischief managedFor a “Goes Wrong” play to work, the production has to chart an exact course between mayhem and control. Too much polish and it isn’t funny. “Especially on a big Broadway show, people are so hard-wired to be like, ‘Well, this is how it’s done. This is how we’ll make it clean, neat, tidy.’ You’re quite often trying to unpick those things. Like, ‘No, no, let that moment be messy. Let the shirttails hang out,’” Lewis said.But too little refinement and the jokes don’t fly. If the doors slam — and slam and slam — but the story isn’t told, the audience won’t laugh. With each new production, the director, Adam Meggido, includes at least one rehearsal in which everything goes right. “You need to be able to do the thing and to have total control over it before you can start to undercut it,” Sayer said. “You’ve got to make sure the story of ‘Peter Pan’ is being told before you start to rip it up a little bit.”Matthew Cavendish, who plays Max, in bunk beds that collapse, naturally.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesAnd then, second by second, joke by joke, the ripping begins, in a process that Sayer compared to stop-motion animation, because a new movement or gesture has to happen nearly every second. “Comedy is hard,” Shields said. “Jokes are hard. You have to be very precise.”Still, that precision has to allow for differences in the layout of each new theater and for the addition and subtraction of actors and understudies, who have to be afforded the space to play the roles in their own ways, even while hitting every line and mark. Besides, Lewis, Sayer and Shields have never met a joke that they didn’t believe they could eventually improve. Ten years on, they’re still tweaking, refining and adding new bits. “You’re never finished writing comedy,” Shields said, sounding slightly exhausted. (At one point he had described Mischief’s style as “a bottomless pit of comedy.”)The fine-tuning ends only during the technical rehearsals, when any further changes would give the designers, board operators and stage managers conniption fits. I found them a few days before that, during what Lewis described as “that fun, exhilarating part of the process where we’re trying to get those last few changes through.”Where the magic happensAn assistant stage manager led me across a confetti covered set to a narrow backstage area that magically held a half-dozen people. The carpenters stood behind a bank of monitors. One grasped the ropes that controlled Tannahill’s horizontal travel; the other his vertical axis. “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” has upgraded since its Pleasance days. The rig now came courtesy of Flying by Foy, the industry leader. (In a neat bit of symmetry, Peter Foy, of Flying by Foy, designed the rig for Mary Martin’s celebrated “Peter Pan.”) It would take both of them, three stage managers and an offsite flying manager to guarantee Tannahill a smooth journey. Which is to say, one in which every bump and inversion is intentional.Tannahill says he enjoys all the pranks, even being turned upside-down. “It’s quite therapeutic,” he said.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesTannahill claimed to enjoy all of it, even the moments in which he was turned upside-down. “It’s actually quite nice,” he said. “Gets the blood circulation going in a different direction. It’s quite therapeutic.”At rehearsal, he oriented himself precisely on a roof. At a cue from Tannahill, a raised hand, the operators swung him through the window. This was the carpenters’ 20th time with the sequence, maybe the 30th, and it ran without a hitch, though without the necessary force.“Can you slap him into the wall?” Sayers said to the carpenters. “He used to really thwack into the wall.” The sequence had to look out of control while the actual control remained perfect. If Tannahill seemed to be in real danger, the audience would feel too anxious to chuckle. But if he came in too slow, they wouldn’t laugh either.They tried it again. This time Tannahill did smack into the wall. The wrong wall. The sequence reset. “Because that happened in rehearsal, it was very controlled,” Tannahill later reassured me. “It didn’t give me a bruise straightaway.”The third time, the sequence, in fairy-tale fashion, went just right. When Tannahill flipped upside-down for the second time, the cast and crew cackled. How did it feel to have finally nailed the timing and the trajectory, to have his colleagues laugh at his discomfort?“It feels great,” Tannahill said. “It makes all the bruises worth it.” More

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      Review: ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’ in London

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      The British experimental theater company Complicité turns the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s novel “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” into a thought-provoking, entertaining spectacle.Some books lend themselves to stage adaptation more than others, and the experimental theater company Complicité has a strong track record of turning awkward novels into plays. The British troupe, led by the director Simon McBurney, has already created acclaimed productions from Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” and Max Porter’s “Grief Is the Thing With Feathers.”Complicité’s latest show is a suitably idiosyncratic treatment of “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead,” the surreal eco-thriller by the Polish author and Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. It runs at the Barbican Theater in London through April 1, then tours Britain before playing at some major European venues and festivals, including the Ruhrtriennale in Germany, and the Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris.Tokarczuk’s novel revolves around a series of grisly murders in a remote village in southern Poland. The narrator-protagonist, Janina, a semiretired teacher and passionate animal lover in her 60s, takes a keen interest in the case, pestering the local police force with her unsolicited insights and pushing a bizarre theory that, since all the victims were avid hunters or poachers, the murders must have been carried out by animals as an act of revenge. Along the way she holds forth on animal cruelty, astrology and her love of the English poet William Blake.Complicité’s decision to foreground these freewheeling digressions is to be commended: This is not a conventional whodunit but, rather, a kind of fable. The production’s blend of philosophical purpose and irreverent humor rings true to the book’s spirit, and makes for an entertaining and thought-provoking spectacle.The spine of the play is a spotlit monologue by Janina, who dips in and out of the action as it unfolds around her. Amanda Hadingue — standing in for Kathryn Hunter, who has been unwell — brings a disarmingly self-effacing grace to the lead role, ensuring Janina retains the audience’s sympathy, even as she rails abrasively against the industrial slaughter of animals, the hypocrisy of organized religion and the unquestioning passivity of her fellow townspeople.Indeed, the entire production is delivered with a playful esprit that borders on the pantomimic: Self-important cops are played for laughs, as is the supercilious local priest; there are charming cameos from animals played by humans — a dog here, a fox there; and César Sarachu almost steals the show in a wonderfully droll performance as Janina’s endearingly hapless neighbor, Oddball.Interiority is the perennial challenge when adapting literary novels for stage or screen. A slick 2017 movie adaptation of “Drive Your Plow” called “Spoor,” by the Polish director Agnieszka Holland, rendered it as a straight-up nor thriller. It was well wrought but inevitably one-dimensional: Janina’s distinctive narrative voice, which treads a fine line between eccentric and downright cranky, is integral to the novel’s charm; the story feels flat without it. Complicité’s adaptation neatly sidesteps this problem by juxtaposing the inner and outer worlds in a way that feels lively and dynamic.From left: Maria, Uzoka, Sophie Steer, Kathryn Hunter, Amanda Hadingue and Tim McMullan. The company’s director is known for his exuberant use of audiovisual effects.Marc BrennerMcBurney, the director, is known for his exuberant use of audiovisual effects, and his team have conjured an impressive sensory texture here. A big screen at the rear of the stage displays eye-catching images that complement the action. Some are scene-setting, such as snowy landscapes evoking the bitterly cold Polish winter; others, such as a series of detailed drawings of horoscope charts, are thematic.Richard Skelton’s atmospheric score alternates between brooding suspense and doleful solemnity, though the sound designer Christopher Shutt is maybe a little too trigger-happy with the sudden loud noises: I feared for some of the older theatregoers, but it certainly kept the audience alert.Rae Smith’s costume design is understatedly on point: Janina pads around in a jarringly mismatched sports-casual ensemble that is precisely the kind of thing an unabashed eccentric might wear, and the local huntsmen look appropriately forbidding in their uniformly dark puffer jackets.Clocking in at 2 hours and 45 minutes, “Drive Your Plow” is a bit too long. A subplot about Janina’s unspecified chronic illness (“my ailments”) could perhaps have been significantly abridged, or even cut, to give the play a zippier feel. But its shortcomings are essentially those of the novel: its single-track didacticism; its neat pitting of romantic idealists against macho, insentient normies; and the fact that a decisive plot twist can be spotted a mile off.Complicité is no stranger to politics: “The Encounter,” adapted in 2016 from a novel by the Romanian-American author Petru Popescu, addressed environmental destruction in the Amazon; the company’s 2015 children’s play “Lionboy” touched on the ethically dubious machinations of Big Pharma. Crucially, the company’s dissident ethos extends to form as well as subject matter. “Drive Your Plow’s” parable of hubris offers considerable food for thought as we continue to hurtle toward climate disaster: Janina is a Cassandra figure for the 21st century, a voice of reason doomed to be met with indifference, condescension or ridicule. The political message is deadly earnest. Thankfully, Complicité serves it up with a dose of fun.Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the DeadThrough April 1 at the Barbican Theater in London, then touring in Europe through June 17; complicite.org. More

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      ‘According to the Chorus’ Review: Backstage Truths

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      In Arlene Hutton’s play at 59E59 Theaters, the members of a Broadway cast reveal their hopes and fears tucked away in a quick-change room.Even longtime theatergoers could learn a few fun tidbits from the new play “According to the Chorus.” That, for example, when members of a Broadway ensemble are in costume, they are not supposed to eat, smoke or hold a dog. Or that they often drive the dressers who help them in and out of said costumes bonkers — and vice versa.Spry and zippy — to a fault, as it skims rather than digs — Arlene Hutton’s backstage story, presented by New Light Theater Project (“I Wanna F*ck Like Romeo and Juliet,” “Imagining Madoff”), has found an appropriate home in the smallest venue at 59E59 Theaters. The show takes place in a Broadway quick-change room, a hive of activity in cramped quarters, and the audience is sitting inches away, adding to the sense of immersion in a tight-knit community.A former dresser herself, Hutton (“Last Train to Nibroc”) zeros in on the worker bees who keep shows going. And the unnamed musical in the play has been going for years when we catch up with it, in 1984. Based on the stage outfits we see, it looks like an old-fashioned tuner, à la “42nd Street” or “Dames at Sea.” It also sounds like quite a workout, which partly explains why during breaks the chorus tends to avoid climbing the several flights of stairs to the dressing rooms and instead head to the basement to hang out with the dressers.The latter are led by the crusty veterans Audrey (Karen Ziemba) and Brenda (Judith Hiller). They often treat the cast members with gruff impatience, and you get the feeling the pair have heard and seen it all. Audrey has been at her gig so long, she knows the answer to every backstage variation on the light bulb joke.One fast-paced scene after another reveals confidences and arguments, hopes and fears, and of course the eternal quandaries: How much should you tip your dresser? Is it a good idea to go on tour if you’re in a Broadway show? What’s best, zippers or Velcro?We watch this busy little microcosm through the eyes of newcomer KJ (Dana Brooke), who used to be a dresser at the more leisurely City Opera and leads a parallel life as an aspiring playwright. Good-natured and eager to please, KJ used to be in a relationship with a featured dancer, Peter (Brandon Jones), who eventually came out as gay.This gives KJ a personal connection to the AIDS epidemic as it ravages the ranks of the company and the staff. “I’ve been through six dance partners since we opened,” the saucy Linda (Joy Donze) says. “No, seven.”And of course, there are the usual theater worries: rumors that the show could close, the ever-present threat of an injury that can endanger a performer’s livelihood.The show, efficiently directed by Chris Goutman, tracks the women — the men are peripheral here — over the course of several months. Or at least it attempts to, because “According to the Chorus” ends up stretching itself too thin. With a cast of 12, Hutton does not have the time to flesh out her many characters, leaving us with tantalizing glimpses of lives half-told, personalities half-sketched. These women are finally spending some time in the spotlight, and it’s still not enough.According to the ChorusThrough April 15 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More