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      For ‘KPOP,’ a Broadway Transfer Is More Like a Reinvention

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      The show’s creative team talks about revamping the immersive Off Broadway hit so that it moves “around the audience” at Circle in the Square Theater.Back in 2017, the musical “KPOP” had the kind of Off Broadway premiere that showbiz dreams are made of. The buzz around the production — which had the rare distinction of being about a specifically Asian pop-music style and having a largely Asian creative team — was so intense that desperate New Yorkers were pleading for tickets to its sold-out run at the small A.R.T./New York Theaters in Midtown Manhattan.Talk of a Broadway transfer started quickly thereafter, but, for a variety of reasons including the pandemic, it took five years for “KPOP” to finally make the jump. Now, at long last, the show is in previews, with an opening night set for Nov. 20.The musical Broadway audiences will see, however, is a very different beast from the one that opened in 2017: This is not so much a transfer as a reinvention.The original Ars Nova production, presented with Ma-Yi Theater Company and Woodshed Collective, was an immersive spectacle in which audience members followed a bunch of artists from room to room on two floors, and discovered how the Korean music industry relentlessly drills its stars (called idols) into poptastic precision.None of the 41 Broadway theaters could accommodate this sort of staging. But at least the one the show finally grabbed, Circle in the Square Theater, has a unique asset: It’s in the round.“I like to say it’s the world’s smallest arena — it’s a postage stamp of Madison Square Garden,” the director, Teddy Bergman, said. “For a show that traffics in pop, that collective energy and that collective effervescence felt like something we could capture like lightning in a bottle.”To preserve the sense that the audience is getting behind-the-scenes insights, the book writer, Jason Kim, altered the framing device: The show is now set up like a mockumentary about an upcoming American tour for a K-pop entertainment company’s roster — the boy band F8, the girl group RTMIS and the solo singer MwE.“At Ars Nova, the audience moved around and in this production we’re very much trying to move the piece around the audience,” Kim said. “I think the spirit of the show has been preserved, although it is a different format, and we are trying to engage the audience in very much a different way. We loved that the new theater casts an extra member, which is the audience.”The show is now set up like a mockumentary about a K-pop label’s roster, which includes the boy band F8, the girl group RTMIS and the solo singer MwEF8.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKevin Woo, center, in “KPOP,” now in previews at Circle in the Square Theater. There’s a “whole new appreciation and understanding and reception of this music in the States,” the show’s director said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnother reason for the transformation is the fact that the moment “KPOP” originally aimed to capture has changed dramatically. In 2017, most Americans had no knowledge of K-pop, save perhaps for the song “Gangnam Style,” by Psy. Nowadays, Korean acts like Stray Kids routinely top the U.S. music charts and in May a K-pop artist, AleXa, won NBC’s “American Song Contest” on behalf of Oklahoma, where she was raised.Over the past five years, Bergman said, “BTS happened and ushered in a whole new appreciation and understanding and reception of this music in the States.”He added: “We wanted to focus on what is the journey, the cost, the joy, the exhilaration, the sacrifice of these pathbreakers who are journeying into new territories and spreading this music. I didn’t have to come from a position of having to explain much, or really anything to the audience. It really freed us up to be able to dig deeper psychologically, emotionally.” (The show’s close relationship with South Korea means the deadly crowd surge in Seoul was deeply felt; the Broadway production made a curtain speech last weekend and had a moment of silence, and posted a statement on social media.)One beneficiary of this change in focus has been the character of MwE, played Off Broadway by Ashley Park and now portrayed by Luna, a South Korea-based actress and former member of the K-pop girl group f(x).“What I’m very excited about in this version is the examination of the female characters,” said Helen Park, who wrote the bilingual score with Max Vernon, and orchestrated and produced it for Broadway. “They all have different ambitions, different journeys, different histories, different characteristics. As an Asian woman, that’s something so special.”While MwE, only in her mid-20s, is already a battle-hardened music-industry vet, the new character of Brad is at the start of his idol career and struggling because he is being shunned by his F8 bandmates. Not only was he the last to join the band, but his being mixed race becomes a factor as well. The role had resonance for the actor playing him, Zachary Noah Piser, who has Chinese and Jewish roots: This spring he became the first Asian American actor to play the title role of “Dear Evan Hansen” full time on Broadway.“Brad’s whole situation is very kind of meta because it was very me — I was a newcomer to the Broadway production of ‘KPOP’ and he is the Asian white boy from Connecticut who gets plucked up and placed in this group,” Piser said in a video chat. Brad acts as an entry point into issues centering on identity — which were already present in the first version, but have since been retooled.“When we first started writing, the main idea behind the show was ‘How could K-pop cross over in America?’ — it’s what these Korean artists have to sacrifice in their authenticity in order to be palatable to an American market,” Vernon said on the phone. “Obviously K-pop crossed over, so we asked different questions, like, ‘What’s going on in these artists’ mental state behind the scenes? What kind of pressure is that exerting on their psyche, on their relationships with other people in their band?’”Luna, who got her start in K-pop before turning to musical theater in South Korea (starring in shows like “Legally Blonde,” for example), pointed out that “KPOP” nails the genre’s emphasis on rigorous training.“There are such detailed scenes that are really rooted in the reality of that world,” Luna said via an interpreter in a video conversation. “I feel that people who are actually K-pop singers or who are trainees will really relate. It also gives a sense of consolation for the immense amount of effort and hard work put into creating K-pop.”From left: Park, Kim, Weber, Bergman and Vernon.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesSUCH AN OVERHAUL of the show’s concept and characters also required a reshaping of the score, which The New York Times’s Ben Brantley described as being “as synthetically sweet and perversely addictive as the real thing” in his review. When asked about the balance between old and new songs, the creative team agreed that it was about half and half — “maybe more new than old,” Park said.She and Vernon also had to reflect the changes in the genre at large: The acts that were popular when they started working on the show, back in 2014, are different from the current ones, and fans were sure to notice dated references.“We were responding to Exo, 2NE1, Girls’ Generation, Psy, Big Bang, but K-pop music changes every three to four years so it would be like doing a show called ‘Pop’ and all the music sounds like Britney rather than Billie Eilish or whatever the great artists are that you’re listening to right now,” Vernon said on the phone. “Sometimes by the time musicals are on Broadway, it feels like they’re lagging 15 years behind the culture — we did not want that.”Similarly, the choreographer Jennifer Weber, who is also handling the Max Martin jukebox musical “& Juliet,” had to work within the specific parameters of K-pop dancing. Key elements are point moves, which are the visual answers to the songs’ hooks (one of the most famous remains Psy’s horse-riding gimmick in “Gangnam Style”).And because members of a group trade vocal lines at a quick pace, careful integration is needed to make the choreography work. “You have to almost break it down mathematically about who’s singing at what time,” Weber said on the phone. “You need to constantly be revealing who’s singing, so that person needs to pop out of the formation for their line — and that line could be as little as two bars.”Another way to assure that the show recreates the wondrous, kinetic excitement the best K-pop acts generate was to hire performers who had spent time in the trenches and could share their experience: In addition to Luna, the cast includes BoHyung, a former member of the girl group Spica; Min, formerly of Miss A; and Kevin Woo, once in U-KISS.“A lot of my questions in the first weeks were like, ‘How do you breathe? How do you execute this incredibly intricate choreography?’” Piser said. “The biggest response I got from the K-pop idols in our show was, ‘You’ve got to be patient, you’ve got to be good to yourself and you’ve got to trust the process.’”With “KPOP” now on Broadway, its creators are aware that the show is not just going up against other musicals but against actual K-pop artists — and this time again, the intimacy of Circle in the Square could come through.“We’re competing with Blackpink and BTS,” Bergman said, laughing, “but I don’t know where else you’re going to see BTS with 600 other people. Unless you’re Jeff Bezos or something.” More

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      Review: In ‘Almost Famous,’ the Heart of Rock ’n’ Roll Flatlines

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      Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film, set in the world of bands and groupies, does not survive its Broadway musical transplant.At its best, rock ’n’ roll is “a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb” — or so decrees Lester Bangs, a character in the new musical “Almost Famous.”Alas, the show, which opened on Broadway on Thursday, gets the wrong part of that formula right. Though celebrating the rock world of 1973, when the real Lester Bangs was the field’s most influential critic, “Almost Famous” is neither glorious nor righteous. It barely even has a form.That leaves dumb, and I’m sorry to say that despite the intelligence of the 2000 movie on which it’s based, and the track record of its creators, the stage musical misses every opportunity to be the sharp, smart entertainment it might have been. In retelling the story of a 15-year-old who gets sucked prematurely into the world of bands and groupies and roadies and drugs, it lands instead in a mystifying muddle, occasionally diverting but never affecting.It needn’t have been that way; the source material is rich. But perhaps because the story is semi-autobiographical, Cameron Crowe, who wrote and directed the movie, apparently saw little reason to rethink it for the stage. The 15-year-old, William Miller (Casey Likes), still sets out, under the tutelage of Bangs (Rob Colletti), to be a rock journalist. When Rolling Stone, thinking he is much older, assigns him to cover a middling band called Stillwater — a composite of several groups Crowe actually toured with — William is torn between Bangs’s warning not to befriend his subjects and his own craving to be cool.But musical theater is a radically different beast from film, let alone life, and Crowe, working with the composer and co-lyricist, Tom Kitt, and the director Jeremy Herrin, does not seem to have accounted for that. The screenplay limited itself to William’s point of view, revealing the other main characters — especially Stillwater’s frontman, Russell Hammond, and his muse, Penny Lane — through the boy’s adoring eyes. William himself was characterized almost entirely by the act of watching, which was sufficient and even necessary to Crowe’s purposes.Solea Pfeiffer as Penny Lane, with Likes’s William. The Broadway show, our critic writes, reduces the story to little more than a love triangle linking William, Penny and Stillwater’s frontman, Russell Hammond.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA musical can’t work that way. If he’s going to sing — and if he’s the protagonist he has to — William must have something worth singing about. But Crowe and Kitt have given him only one real solo, the excellent “No Friends,” which is engaging because it grapples with a real conflict the boy faces. One is not enough, and though Likes, making his Broadway debut at 20, is appealing in the role and delivers when given the chance, there’s a hole at the center of the story that no amount of stage business can disguise.Not that Herrin doesn’t try. “Almost Famous” is one of the busiest book musicals I can recall, the stage so constantly and minutely activated (with choreography by Sarah O’Gleby) that it soon seems as flat and futile as an ant farm. Big moments, like Hammond’s acid-fueled dive from the roof of a house into a swimming pool, barely register; the settings by Derek McLane are resolutely unspectacular. And even in ordinary moments, filled with overdrawn caricatures slamming into one another, it’s often difficult to locate the important information amid all the empty industry.The same underwhelming overload hampers the music, which is obviously a bigger problem for a musical. Of the astounding 30 numbers listed in the program, only seven are what I’d call real theater songs. They are useful in establishing William’s overprotective mother (tartly played by Anika Larsen) and, in “Morocco,” the show’s best tune, Solea Pfeiffer’s dreamy but slippery Penny. “The Night-Time Sky’s Got Nothing on You,” a duet for her and Russell (Chris Wood), sounds, as it should, like an actual love song of the era, but for once with lyrics that trace a theatrical arc.Unfortunately, most of the rest of the songs are fragments, reprises or ensemble numbers so spliced with dialogue and served up in small bits as to nullify their expressive value. Some of them might be quite nice — Kitt’s melodies are never uninteresting — if they could just be sung through.But the show’s biggest musical problem comes from the fact that an unmanageably large proportion of its songs, perhaps a third, are covers. Originally made famous by the likes of the Allman Brothers Band, Deep Purple, Stevie Wonder and Led Zeppelin, these are performed diegetically, in whole or in part, in concert or backstage scenes.The use of covers made sense in the realistic format of the movie, where they add granular texture to William’s love affair with the world he was watching. But in the fundamentally surreal world of a musical, familiar pop tunes are like junk food, providing a ping of stimulation with no nutrition. Ending the first act with the company singing Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” — staged for our pleasure, not William’s — thus seems like a cheat and a sop.Foreground from left: Likes (kneeling), Brandon Contreras, Chris Wood and Drew Gehling in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA musical is not, ideally, a singalong. Nor is it a tone poem, in which it might be sufficient for songs simply to create a mood and please the ear. (At least the ones here do please the ear; they are for the most part well performed, if rarely with any special charisma.) Even the best of recent jukebox musicals have demonstrated the form’s inherent pitfalls in the process of overcoming them; the worst have demonstrated its bankruptcy. So why did the producers and the creative team of “Almost Famous” fall at least partway into the same traps?I can only conclude that they wanted to hedge their bets on material that as originally conceived seemed commercially dangerous. A quiet, personal look at the way a loud, popular medium inflates and then punctures private dreams may not have seemed very Broadway.And yet that’s exactly what coming to Broadway — a loud, popular medium if ever there was one — has done to “Almost Famous.” The workaround reduces the story to a far more conventional one, little more than a love triangle linking William, Penny and Russell. With no broader implications to give it gravitas, no real investigation of the way the rock revolution altered our concepts of celebrity, it floats away into the jukebox ether.If you believe that Lester Bangs’s precept applies equally to musicals — and it’s true that many fine ones are gloriously and righteously dumb — you might not mind that. But if you care about the form, you may wish “Almost Famous” had aimed (as its Stevie Wonder cover urges) for higher ground.Almost FamousAt the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; almostfamousthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      John David Washington Gets an Education in ‘The Piano Lesson’

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      The actor adds to his body of knowledge with a starry production of the August Wilson play and a once-in-a-lifetime moment with Robert De Niro on “Amsterdam.”You cannot show up more prepared than John David Washington, cannot outmaneuver him and cannot get ahead of him. If you think you have arrived on time for your lunch appointment with him, you will find he has already been waiting for you — he has, in fact, been sitting quietly at a table at Bubby’s for 15 minutes, in his perennially prompt, unapologetically eager manner. And now he is not just ready to eat; he is practically vibrating in his chair so he can tear through a bowl of matzo ball soup and get back to the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where he has been performing in “The Piano Lesson.”Washington is by no means a novice actor. At 38, he has already starred in films like Spike Lee’s true-crime drama “BlacKkKlansman” and Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending, time-twisting adventure “Tenet.”But he is a newcomer to the Broadway stage, and in “The Piano Lesson,” he is making his debut with a demanding and poignant August Wilson play, in a high-profile production featuring the husband-and-wife team of Samuel L. Jackson (who co-stars in it) and LaTanya Richardson Jackson (who directed it).Despite his lack of theater experience, Washington has drawn raves for his performance. In her review, the New York Times critic Maya Phillips wrote, “Washington, in a revelatory stage debut, is a blaze of energy lighting every scene he’s in.”To navigate a text and a discipline that are unfamiliar to him, Washington is approaching the task like a humble rookie, ready to receive the education that it might provide — along with any bumps or bruises that might come with it.Asked why he wanted to perform in “The Piano Lesson,” Washington said: “I did it for selfish reasons. This was like going back to school. This is a master class. I want to learn. I want to get beat up.”He added, “If I can survive, I’m going to be such a better actor than I was before I started this.”Washington with Samuel L. Jackson onstage. Jackson, a longtime family friend, said that when the young man decided to act, “we all told him, ‘You can’t just step up in there and think it’s going to happen.’”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn a Tuesday in October before the play had opened, Washington was bracing himself for the rehearsal later that afternoon. “We’re going in for notes and preparing to get slaughtered,” he said.If his language is full of vivid, brutal metaphors, it might be because Washington is a former football player — a relentless running back for the Morehouse College Maroon Tigers and later for the St. Louis Rams, as well as teams in the now-defunct N.F.L. Europe and U.F.L.He is also, of course, a son of Denzel Washington, the decorated actor and filmmaker. John David, who lives in New York, has spent a lifetime observing his father’s performances, whether as a child seeing him in “Richard III” at Shakespeare in the Park or as a grown man watching him in the Broadway production of “Fences,” the Wilson play that his father later starred in and directed for the screen.When Denzel Washington learned that John David was getting ready for the eight-shows-a-week rigor of Broadway, he heartily encouraged the proposition. “He said, ‘It’s a full-contact sport, John David,’” the younger Washington recalled.But when John David decided that he wanted to pursue acting, after a torn Achilles’ tendon halted his sports career, it was impressed upon him that he’d achieve success only through hard work and not by trading on his last name.Jackson, a longtime friend of the Washington family, said that he was one of several people who talked to the young man about the challenging path that awaited him. “We all told him, you can’t just step up in there and think it’s going to happen,” Jackson recalled. “You’ve got to go to class, you’ve got to put in the work. Being the dedicated athlete that he was, he attacked it in the same way that he attacked that, and he got all he could out of it.”Washington made his breakthrough on the HBO comedy series “Ballers” (2015-19), playing a hotheaded N.F.L. star. Another crucial opportunity came when Lee chose him to star as the police detective Ron Stallworth in “BlacKkKlansman,” released in 2018.As Washington saw it, Lee took a significant chance in elevating him from supporting roles to a lead player: “Spike was like, ‘You’re not a running back — you’re a quarterback. You need to call the offense and run the plays,’” Washington said.In 2020, he starred in “Tenet,” a complex thriller about characters who can move forward and backward in time. Despite Nolan’s pedigree, the film’s opening was repeatedly delayed by the pandemic and it was ultimately released at a time when audiences were hardly ready to return to theaters en masse.Washington’s father gave him advice about acting: “He said, ‘It’s a full-contact sport, John David.’” Tess Ayano for The New York TimesTwo years later, Washington has tried to remain sanguine about his “Tenet” experience. “I believe in God — I’m a heavy believer, so it was the way it was supposed to be,” he said. “But it really hurt that we couldn’t give it its proper rollout and world tour.”Even so, Washington said he was grateful for the trust Nolan had placed in him and for the chance to help execute Nolan’s intricate vision. “As taxing as it was, it damn near broke me, but I’d do it again and again,” Washington said.He was given another prominent big-screen position this fall when he starred alongside Christian Bale and Margot Robbie in “Amsterdam,” the antic period caper from the filmmaker David O. Russell.Bale found Washington soft-spoken and studious during rehearsals, but said his co-star suddenly came alive when they filmed a sequence in which their characters fled a murder scene.“I kept laughing because he was clearly enjoying showing me that no matter how fast I ran, he could always run faster,” Bale said. “I kept zigging and zagging, running circles up and down the street, and he wouldn’t ever let me get in front of him.”Bale added, “He’s quietly competitive, but I don’t think he likes that to be seen much.”“Amsterdam” was a critical and commercial flop, none of which mattered to Washington, who came away with one of his most treasured memories as an actor.“There was a take I did that was very emotional,” he said, “and afterwards, Robert De Niro came over and hugged me and kissed me on the cheek and he said, ‘Good job, son.’ I will never forget that. I can die now.”“The Piano Lesson,” for which Wilson won the second of his two Pulitzer Prizes, is part of the playwright’s Pittsburgh Cycle. There, in 1936, the domestic life of Berniece (Danielle Brooks) and her uncle Doaker (Jackson) is interrupted by the return of Berniece’s talkative and charismatic brother, Boy Willie (Washington), who has recently left prison.While Berniece treasures the family’s piano, which carries a tragic history and is decorated with carvings of relatives who had been enslaved, Boy Willie has other plans for it, believing he can buy his way to legitimacy with the money earned from selling it.Washington said that to him the play conveyed “the overwhelming feeling of American society’s proprietary entitlement over its history.” With a chuckle, he added that it told a relatable story about “every family gathering, how there’s always that one cousin or family who shows up and it’s like, oh, here we go.”Washington said that he started learning his lines for “The Piano Lesson” when he was in Indonesia earlier this year, filming “True Love,” a science fiction film written and directed by Gareth Edwards (“Godzilla,” “Rogue One”).In rehearsals this fall, Washington said that LaTanya Richardson Jackson advocated the utmost fidelity to Wilson’s text. “She always talks about how we’re here to amplify his words,” Washington said. “Don’t put too much sauce on there. Let the words charge all of your decision.”With Christian Bale and Margot Robbie in “Amsterdam.” Bale said Washington is “quietly competitive, but I don’t think he likes that to be seen much.”20th Century StudiosHe has endured a certain amount of affectionate hazing from his more seasoned co-stars. Washington recounted the time when Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Potts called him out for eating banana chips in rehearsal: “Sam was like,” — he uttered a Jackson-esque word that cannot be printed here — “Boy Willie don’t eat no banana chips. That’s the young generation. He eats pork rinds.”Washington said he had the quickness to retort, “No, see, Boy Willie’s ahead of his time.”The play holds a special value for Jackson, who played Boy Willie in its original 1987 production at Yale Repertory Theater. He said, however, that he did not feel particularly territorial about seeing the role passed onto Washington.“You can’t possess things that way,” he said. “And LaTanya told me not to talk to him about Boy Willie anyway — she didn’t want me putting my ideas in his head.”In their work on the play, Jackson said he had already seen Washington grow as an actor. “John David’s really quite introverted,” he explained. “The only time he puts himself out there is when he has an opportunity to inhabit another character and be someone that’s not him.”What “The Piano Lesson” has given Washington, Jackson said, is a confidence that he can take into future film or TV projects — the self-assurance of knowing “when you’re on a soundstage or on a set, and nobody’s laughing or applauding for you, how you feel about what you just did. You don’t have to go to the monitor to prove to yourself that you did it. You’ll know, OK, that felt right.”These are big-picture, existential questions that Washington may contemplate after “The Piano Lesson” ends. For now, he is content to grapple with the day-to-day demands of putting on the play and the pleasures of losing himself in a character who feels diametrically opposed to who he really is.As he recalled, “There’s a line where Sam says to me, ‘Will you just be quiet?’ There was a night I almost cracked up the way he said it, because I felt like he really meant it.”Washington seemed genuinely delighted by the notion that he could be so talkative it would annoy someone else. “I must have really been rolling that night,” he said. “I don’t do that in my real life.” More

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      An adaptation of “My Neighbour Totoro” enchants audiences at the Barbican. Across town at the Harold Pinter Theater, a revival of “Good” takes viewers to darker territory.LONDON — Who’d have thought an enormous mound of fur would be the most endearing sight on the London stage? I’m referring to the outsize woodland creature of the title in “My Neighbour Totoro,” who is eliciting gasps of surprise and delight at the Barbican Theater through Jan. 21.Making an entrance well into the first act, this piece of larger-than-life fluff — a puppet controlled from within by people we don’t see — brings an immediate sense of excitement to this adaptation of the beloved 1988 animated film of the same name, a banner work from Studio Ghibli of Japan. Reworked for the stage by Tom Morton-Smith, it has arrived as a Royal Shakespeare Company production; the play’s composer, Joe Hisaishi, gets an executive producer credit.The movie, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, overcame some sniffy early reviews and is now regarded as a classic for the studio, whose subsequent “Spirited Away” won the Oscar for animation in 2003. (A theatrical “Spirited Away” opened earlier this year in Japan.)The challenge with “My Neighbour Totoro” was to amplify a sweet but slender movie running less than 90 minutes whose enchanting visuals could seem a stretch for the stage. In fact, as directed by Phelim McDermott, who divides his career between theater and opera, this tale of two sisters displaced to rural Japan in the 1950s exerts its own distinct magic.You share the characters’ sense of expectation as 10-year-old Satsuki and her 4-year-old sister, Mei, adjust to their new home in the countryside. Their father has moved the family from Tokyo to be nearer to the girls’ mother, who is hospitalized with an unspecified but serious illness.Nino Furuhata in “My Neighbour Totoro.”Manuel HarlanThe siblings’ imaginations soon run riot as they discover any number of creatures — including “soot sprites” resembling dancing particles of dust — that the adults around them can’t see. The show’s visual invention honors the animal kingdom, and the puppeteer Basil Twist and his hardworking team spring one enchantment after another on the audience. (The puppets are the glorious handiwork of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.) The emphasis throughout is on the characters’ surroundings befitting Miyazaki, a lifelong environmentalist: The woods are sites of enchantment and discovery, not places marked out by dread or fear, and Tom Pye’s flexible set shifts locations with ease.Any potential cutesiness is kept at bay. Ami Okumura Jones and Mei Mac, both adults, play the girls with a zestful appetite for experience that never turns cloying, and Dai Tabuchi is infinitely touching as their kindly father.You could argue that the ending feels rushed and unconvincing, as if the creators were overeager to deny the threat of mortality that takes center stage as the health of the girls’ mother (Haruka Abe) worsens. The darkening of the narrative then does an abrupt about-face in time for a pat feel-good finish that is the play’s only misstep. But by that point, the audience has long since given itself over to the giddy parade of puppets, from some sweetly entrancing butterflies that seem to dance in the air to the gleaming Catbus, an automotive creature that, after Totoro, is probably the best-remembered character of the film.The Royal Shakespeare Company hasn’t produced a show of such commercial potential since the musical “Matilda” over a decade ago — coming to Netflix in a film adaptation this holiday season. Like “Matilda,” “My Neighbour Totoro” is family entertainment that adults might like even more than children.The kindness, empathy and generosity of spirit that “My Neighbour Totoro” evokes are infectious. But it’s the capacity for evil that drives a West End revival of “Good,” a 1982 play by C.P. Taylor. (That Scottish playwright died the year before the play’s premiere by, yes, the Royal Shakespeare Company.) The current production, from the director Dominic Cooke, runs at the Harold Pinter Theater through Dec. 24.From left, Elliot Levey, David Tennant and Sharon Small in “Good” at the Harold Pinter Theater.Johan PerssonThe protagonist is a mild-seeming German academic, John Halder (David Tennant), whom we first encounter in Frankfurt, in 1933. Antisemitism is rising in Germany, but Halder seems more preoccupied with domestic issues. Early on, he reassures his close friend Maurice (Elliot Levey), a Jewish psychiatrist, that any worries about the gathering climate of fear can be put to one side: Targeting Jews, he says, “is not practical,” given their importance to Germany’s economy and society, so there’s little cause for alarm. In any case, Halder is too busy navigating an extramarital affair and a mother with dementia to pay much heed to history’s horrific onward march.The author’s cunning across two brisk hours is to chart an apparently decent man’s decline into moral depravity: What begins as casual indifference ends up as active participation. The sight of Halder, in full SS uniform, standing at the ready at Auschwitz is followed by a climactic visual coup de théâtre that comes as a genuine shock.The production is forbiddingly spare and unfolds on a minimal monochrome set, from Vicki Mortimer, that eerily evokes a mausoleum. Tom Gibbons’s invaluable sound design brings out the full horror of Kristallnacht, with shattering windows, heard but not seen, contrasting with the clinking glasses we heard earlier in the show, at a time when civility seemed possible.Cooke, the director, has pared the cast back to three actors, with Levey and the female lead, Sharon Small, deftly playing multiple roles. The decision to conjoin some parts heightens an awareness of Halder’s tenuous purchase on reality, as if his wayward thoughts were tumbling from his mother to his wife to his lover, with Small taking all those parts and a further, altogether different one as well.This “Good” wouldn’t be anywhere near as good as it is without Tennant, a TV name (“Doctor Who”) and stage regular whose likability puts you in Halder’s corner at the start. Speaking in his natural Scottish accent, Tennant initially gives off the air of a genial bookworm with whom you might discuss Goethe over a drink. But by the time he is staring the audience down in full Nazi regalia, you’re reeling from a portrait of psychosis whose shivery power is hard to shake.My Neighbour Totoro. Directed by Phelim McDermott. Barbican Theater, through Jan. 21.Good. Directed by Dominic Cooke. Harold Pinter Theater, through Dec. 24. More

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      How Her Ancestors Reignited Her Return to Theater

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      Quiara Alegría Hudes is back with a new work, an Off Broadway production of “My Broken Language,” adapted from her 2021 memoir.In 2018, the playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes announced that she would be taking a pause from the theater. The art form she loved so much had become a source of heartbreak: She was tired of the industry’s lack of cultural diversity, the disinterest those in power had in changing the status quo and the anxiety she felt leading up to opening night (the unexpected hiccups, the uncertainty of how a work would be received by critics and audience members).When it came to producing works by playwrights of color, she began to feel as if her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Water by the Spoonful,” about a Puerto Rican war veteran recently returned from Iraq, and “In the Heights,” her Tony-winning musical with Lin-Manuel Miranda, were exceptions more often than the rule. During the 2018-2019 season, for example, only three writers of color had their work produced on Broadway.In order to heal, Hudes went on an inner retreat. Turning to her memories, she sought out the people who taught her how to tend to her body and spirit. This soulful journey resulted in “My Broken Language,” an impressionistic coming-of-age memoir published in 2021 that detailed the shame she felt over being fluent in her Jewish father’s native English, but not her Puerto Rican mother’s Spanish. It was that same sense of incompleteness that led her to take a break from the theater.While recording the audiobook, Hudes noted her prose sometimes had the rhythm of a monologue. “It was the one-woman play,” she said. That realization, combined with her wanting to step up as a community leader, ignited her desire to return to theater — despite the heartbreak. “Let me get some real bodies and spirits on this,” she recalled thinking during our video chat. Now, Hudes’s stage adaptation of her book, also called “My Broken Language,” is running at Signature Theater through Nov. 27.From left, Samora la Perdida (seated), Zabryna Guevara, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Yani Marin and Marilyn Torres in “My Broken Language.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesOnstage, she is embodied by five people, including one of her frequent collaborators, Daphne Rubin-Vega, all of whom play different shades of the author. Hudes, now 45, had moments of not recognizing the person on the page. She made peace with it by realizing, “it was all the identities of mine, but it was also all the identities of all the women who raised me and who I love.” “My Broken Language,” in all its forms, is also partly a celebration of her ancestors, and how often unintentionally they inspired her to become a writer. “Our archive is in us and of us,” she wrote in the script for the play. On a practical level, in tune with changing what once made her turn away from the theater, Hudes wanted to ensure the production contributes to moving the industry forward in terms of representation in casting. In the script, she insists, “these are Philly Rican roles” for Latina actors.Born and raised in Philadelphia, Hudes comes from a long line of Puerto Rican women who excelled at building community and developing strong spiritual values. Her mother, Virginia Sanchez, who features prominently in the book and the play, is a renowned santera, who instilled love and respect for their Taína-Lukumí-Boricua legacy, as well as a fascination with words. One of Sanchez’s favorite possessions is a 19th-century Spanish dictionary that she uses to search for words people may have forgotten.“The book smells like our elders, it has its own soul,” Sanchez said over a video call, “it contains one of our identities.” In spite of her daughter’s “broken language,” Sanchez said she believes “Quiara always had a gift for words, she knows how to transform her experiences into a form of teaching.”Bill Heck and Liza Colón-Zayas in “Water by the Spoonful,” which had its New York premiere in 2013 at Second Stage Theater.Karli Cadel for The New York TimesLin-Manuel Miranda, center left, and Karen Olivo in the musical “In the Heights” at the Richard Rodgers Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIndeed, the playwright extracts wisdom from experiences she had growing up, such as seeing her mother possessed by a spirit. “To do that literally onstage would be vulgar,” Hudes explained. So she transformed her memories into words and then into physical movements that would make sense onstage with the help of the choreographer Ebony Williams. The goal is to create actions that evoke the feeling of being in between universes.The play also marks Hudes’s directorial debut. She describes the work of a director as one of “community care,” and compares it to a gardener choosing the seeds, planting them, and then nurturing them toward excellence. “Directing is the process,” she said.“Her rehearsal room feels like home,” said Samora la Perdida, who plays one of Hudes’ alter egos, describing “walls decorated with altars to our ancestors, tables with guava and cheese empanadas from her favorite spot in Washington Heights, a stereo blasting Frankie Ruiz.”Of Hudes, Rubin-Vega added, “She leads with openhearted professionalism.”Rethinking the meaning of community and how to affect it is what led Hudes to resume her theater work. After publishing her memoir, she discovered a new community in a world of readers who reacted emotionally to her stories and reminded her of her purpose.“Quiara is giving our community the opportunity to talk about the raw pain we’ve inherited, not only as women or immigrants but as people,” Sanchez said. “My daughter is a keeper of our lineage, a witness of our experience.”Although they work in different fields, Hudes said she believes she and her mother have overlapping journeys. “We break through the vines with our machetes, finding our own way, sharing strategies and celebrating triumphs,” Hudes added.“Quiara accepted her tongue for what it was in order to create a language of her own,” la Perdida said, “a language that shamelessly dances with both her Latina roots and Western canon influences. A language with the rhythms of Chopin and Juan Luis Guerra, inspired by the poetic prose of both Shakespeare and José Rivera.”After five years away, Hudes said she is enjoying the various pleasures that come with working in the theater again, like being in a room full of Latino artists, her community. She finds it to be utterly therapeutic. “I often crunch up in my seat, kind of like a ball, and then pop up, it’s so much fun to live all these old habits again,” she said. More

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      Review: ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ Gets Joan Didion’s Intention Just Right

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      A play based on the writer’s memoir about the death of her husband, in its first New York revival, goes small to powerful effect.The timeline of loss was mercilessly fast. On Dec. 30, 2003, Joan Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died mid-conversation at the dinner table in their apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. In late August 2005, their grown-up only child, Quintana, died, less suddenly.Even mid-devastation, Didion did what writers do: observe and chronicle. First came her crystalline memoir of grief for Dunne, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a best seller when it was published in October 2005, only weeks after their long-ailing daughter’s death. “Blue Nights,” Didion’s memoir of mourning Quintana, was that book’s counterpart, released in 2011.In between, with a rapidity that’s startling, Didion’s stage adaptation of “The Year of Magical Thinking” arrived on Broadway, in March 2007. A monologue directed by David Hare and produced by Scott Rudin, among others, it starred Vanessa Redgrave as Didion. This was a prestige cultural event: tasteful, literary, remote. Presumably, remote was not the goal.The scale of it was all out of whack — not the script, which Didion imbued with a soul-baring directness, but the production. The memoir’s starkly personal story, so intimate as a reading experience, was told now before a crowd of hundreds. We, the audience, were asked to accept one famous artist — the sturdy, statuesque Redgrave — as the stand-in for a highly recognizable other, the diminutive Didion, who was in her early 70s then, with a fragility about her. It was all too large. It did not capture the essence of the book.How thrilling, then, that the first New York revival of “The Year of Magical Thinking” does. Directed by Jonathan Silverstein, this Keen Company production goes small, and in doing so, gets the play sublimely right.Rejecting the distancing formality of a traditional theater setting, it is being performed around the city in living rooms and community spaces whose seating capacity ranges from 12 to 35. Its star is the esteemed Off Broadway actor Kathleen Chalfant, in what may be her best-matched role since Vivian Bearing in “Wit,” more than 20 years ago.The performance I saw took place in a private townhouse on the Upper East Side, about a dozen blocks from where Didion lived. Chalfant seated herself in front of a stone fireplace and slipped into the story of Didion’s discombobulated year, which started on a cozy evening, when, as was their habit, Didion and Dunne had a fire in their fireplace.“Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night,” Chalfant-as-Didion said with a lightness of touch calibrated just right for the room, where we sat on comfortable chairs drawn in a circle, seemingly secure from the menace of the world.Didion and Dunne weren’t safe that night, of course, and neither are we in the long run. As she warns, “Life changes in the instant.” Her play means to gird us for when we, too, find ourselves plunged into grief for someone whose death we cannot bring ourselves to absorb.“The details will be different, but it will happen to you,” she says. “That’s what I’m here to tell you.”The play is a report back from an emotional abyss, yet for all its intensity, it isn’t grim or overwrought. It’s rigorously self-scrutinizing, dryly self-mocking, fairly stunned — somehow both unsentimental and consumed with love.Didion remembers her trauma-scrambled brain wanting to fend off an obituary for Dunne in The Los Angeles Times, because maybe on Pacific Time, he was still alive. She remembers “just playing along,” for quite a while, with the idea that he was dead.What she doesn’t remember — like precisely when the ambulance arrived at their apartment, or how long the E.M.T.s stayed — she fills in with research, because this is the kind of person she is: a woman with a razor-sharp intellect who armors herself with knowledge. Someone seemingly too firmly in control to become unmoored.Vivian Bearing, the dying professor in “Wit,” is that way, too, which is part of the brilliance of casting Chalfant here. She doesn’t physically resemble Didion, and she’s not attempting an impersonation. But her Didion has that same sharp cerebral quality and that same destabilized vulnerability, along with a subtle, charismatic warmth.Didion, who died in December, wanted so badly to protect her little family. She couldn’t, but she could alert the rest of us.“Life changes in the instant,” she says again. “The ordinary instant.”The Year of Magical ThinkingThrough Nov. 20 in various spaces around New York City (addresses will be shared with ticket holders on the morning of the performance); keencompany.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Parade’ Review: The Trial and Tragedy of Leo Frank

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      City Center’s gala production delves further into America’s history of violence and delivers the best-sung musical in many a New York season.Just six months after its universally beloved Encores! revival of “Into the Woods,” New York City Center returns with another timely, excellent production about collective responsibility and loss. Smartly directed by Michael Arden, City Center’s gala presentation of “Parade,” which opened on Tuesday night and runs through Sunday, delves further into America’s history of violence and delivers the best-sung musical in many a New York season.The book writer Alfred Uhry’s dramatization of the 1913 trial of Leo Frank, and his subsequent imprisonment and 1915 lynching, gave the composer Jason Robert Brown a canvas to paint a complex, nourishing score that captures the entire weight of that fraught history. (Both men won Tonys for their work on the show, which premiered on Broadway in 1998.) Here, a first-rate orchestra, conducted by Brown, and under the music direction of Tom Murray, brings its pomp and pageantry to terrifying life.At the heart of the show is the rich-voiced Ben Platt, successfully transferring his lauded anxious energy from “Dear Evan Hansen” to the role of Leo Frank, a Brooklyn-born Jewish pencil factory manager uneasy in his Atlanta surroundings. His sense of regional superiority is matched by the naïve comfort of his wife, Lucille (a luminous Micaela Diamond), as she plans for a picnic on the day of the town’s annual Confederate Memorial Day parade. Diamond’s expressive face, with large eyes as expressive as those of a silent screen siren, carries the burden of resilience as Leo is wrongly jailed for the murder of a 13-year-old girl who worked at the factory.In an antisemitic kangaroo court under Judge Roan’s (John Dossett) uncaring eye, the prosecutor Hugh Dorsey (a remarkable Paul Alexander Nolan) presents a flimsy case. Adding fuel to the flames are a fundamentalist newspaper publisher (Manoel Felciano) and a sensationalist reporter (the superb Jay Armstrong Johnson, shining as he sings the score’s most fast-paced number, “Real Big News,” made doubly hectic by Cree Grant’s spin-heavy choreography here, which is otherwise lovely).A fully staged “Parade” hasn’t been seen in New York in nearly 25 years, and this revival recalls an era of big casts, big stories and big talent, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDespite Governor Slaton’s (Sean Allan Krill) belated efforts, Leo’s fate is sealed by false testimonies coaxed out of the murdered girl’s co-workers (Ashlyn Maddox, Sophia Manicone, Sofie Poliakoff) and the factory’s janitor Jim Conley (a phenomenally voiced Alex Joseph Grayson). The cast, which also includes Gaten Matarazzo as a teenager out for vengeance, is uniformly splendid — as adept in the work’s solo outings as in the electric group numbers.But the problems with the book, which lacks some dramatic immediacy, remain. Ben Brantley mentioned the “overriding feeling of disdain, a chilly indignation” in his original review; and, as Vincent Canby wrote shortly afterward, the musical “plays as if it were still a collection of notes.” There is no confusing good and evil here; never any question as to what anyone is thinking or about to do, their personalities and fates as predetermined as those of characters in a children’s Bible. The show, in that respect, is aptly titled.Arden wisely counteracts this by filling the production with deft flourishes that compound American hatred across centuries: A salute by Confederate soldiers’ is slowed down so that their outstretched arms resemble a Sieg Heil salute; Roan and Dorsey’s fishing rods in one scene whip down like switches; revelers crack open Bud Lights in their final celebration.Dane Laffrey’s resourceful set — a raised wooden platform flanked, courtroom-style, by simple chairs — effectively evokes a minstrel stage, soapbox and gallows at once. And the stage under the platform is adorned with stars-and-stripes buntings that hang over mounds of crimson earth — as much the hallowed “old red hills” of Georgia as bloodstained dirt thrown onto a coffin — and a small screen emphasizing the show’s procedural nature by displaying each scene’s time, date, and location, which matches historical photographs projected onto the back wall.Then again, considering Uhry and Brown’s text and lyrics, subtlety need not be the name of the game these days. This country’s ongoing procession of racism, antisemitism and “law-and-order”-screeching politicians comes awfully close to the hate-filled climate of the work’s setting, shedding any pretense of respectability. Arden here fights fire with fire, and his direction is sincere and unambiguous. But no one is let off the hook. I imagine the audience members laughing at the condescending jokes about Southern idiocy in the first act had to at least sit with the second act’s taunting of selective liberal compassion, sung with liveliness by Courtnee Carter and Douglas Lyons.A fully staged “Parade” hasn’t been seen in New York in nearly 25 years, and this revival recalls an era of big casts, big stories and big talent — a time when musicals actually felt like events. Platt and Diamond are fearless performers, and their duet “This Is Not Over Yet” is a powerhouse for the ages. Their commanding vocals are matched by a confident production that revives the best of the original while pointing at the possibility of growth, and hope.ParadeThrough Nov. 6 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Mike Birbiglia Can’t Get ‘Hadestown’ Out of His Head

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      The comedian, 44, discussed his one-man Broadway show that opens this month, his love for Taylor Swift and why he doesn’t actually hate the Y.M.C.A.Mike Birbiglia has found that he can make a living off a personal crisis. Since 2008, Birbiglia, a longtime comedian and more recently an indie film director and star, has performed stand-up comedy shows on and off Broadway about his struggles with sleepwalking, his recovery from bladder cancer and his path toward fatherhood. But his latest, “The Old Man & the Pool,” a monologue about confronting his own mortality, might be among his most candid. (The show opens on Broadway Nov. 13 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center.)“I think I’m inclined toward autobiography because so much is based on passion,” Birbiglia, 44, said in a recent call from his home in Brooklyn. “I’m interested in paying tribute to the bizarre litany of things that have almost killed me.”The idea for the new show, which Birbiglia has been developing since 2018, sprang from an annual medical checkup in 2017, when his results on a breathing test were so weak that his doctor thought he might be experiencing a heart attack right there in the examination room. Birbiglia, whose father and grandfather had heart attacks at 56, was pushed to improve his health; the show details trips to the Y.M.C.A. pool as well as an encounter with an unclothed older man in the locker room when he was 7. “I’m in much better shape now,” said Birbiglia, who is also set to appear alongside Tom Hanks in the upcoming comedy-drama “A Man Called Otto,” in theaters Dec. 25. “I do cardio five days a week. I’m experimenting with the idea of riding a bike from my apartment in Brooklyn to Lincoln Center every day for work.”In an interview last month, Birbiglia discussed what turned him on to Taylor Swift, how reading poetry helps his joke writing, and why he doesn’t actually hate the Y.M.C.A. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel” Jerrod is a performer who’s not filtering what he’s saying to please you — he’s not holding back from what his truth is. A lot of art will stick with me a week after, but the things I most cherish stick with me a month after, years after. “Rothaniel” had that effect. It feels like “Hadestown” — I saw it a few years ago and still play the cast album all the time.2. Deep Dives This is something my wife, Jenny, and I like to do together — start from a certain point and then follow where it leads you, through various streaming and YouTube rabbit holes. One of my favorite finds is this three-part British documentary series called “Unknown Chaplin” that shows the outtakes of Charlie Chaplin’s movies. He did hundreds of takes of some of his shots! It’s one of those moments when there’s a massive upside to streaming — I don’t think I’d be able to find stuff like this if it weren’t for all the streaming services.3. “Little Astronaut” by J. Hope Stein This is a gorgeous book of poems by my wife about her experience being pregnant and having a child. Jen’s really gotten me into poetry — she’s introduced me to Paul Muldoon, Ada Limón, Paige Lewis. I learn so much from reading poetry that’s helpful when I’m writing films, standup and solo shows. There’s a real focus on the economy of words.4. “Kitbull” My daughter is 7 and not in the head space of wanting to engage with full-on Pixar feature films yet, but there are all these incredible shorts on Disney+. Some of our favorites are “Forky Asks a Question,” “Purl” and Rosana Sullivan’s “Kitbull,” about a kid and a pit bull becoming friends — if you don’t cry during “Kitbull,” I don’t think you’re a human being.5. Sarah Sherman on “S.N.L.” Sarah is an absolutely original voice in comedy. I worked alongside her at the Comedy Cellar, and even as a live performer she’s astonishingly alive and present and goes where the audience takes her. She has a series of guest segments with Colin Jost on “S.N.L.” that are all just excuses for her to roast him. She basically decontextualizes everything he says, then he’ll defend himself and she’ll put up a fake headline that says like “Hamptons Homeowner Colin Jost Mocks Comedian” with a picture of what’s supposed to be his mansion. They’re phenomenal.6. The Comedy Cellar For my money, the Comedy Cellar is the best club in the world. There’s the Olive Tree upstairs, which has phenomenal Middle Eastern food — great hummus and kebabs, a fantastic bar. Then downstairs is an intimate 150-seat club — the other night I was there, and Ray Romano dropped in. You have to make reservations weeks in advance, but it’s worth it.7. Improv is Life The principles of “Yes, and” apply to everything I do: directing movies, making solo shows and working with a director, collaborating with a designer, working on a family trip to Iceland. That spirit of things is what I find to be on a daily basis the most helpful piece of education I’ve ever had.8. rev’pod I talk a lot about my sleepwalking in my shows — I jumped through a second-story window many years ago — and people always ask what I do about the issue. At first my doctor said to sleep in a sleeping bag, and I did that for a while, but then I found this thing! The idea is for a cozier sleep; it’s kind of like a cocoon cloth experience. They recommend it for flying on an airplane to avoid germs. It’s not foolproof, but I find it to be a pretty good solution.9. No More Art Snobbery In my 40s, I’ve vowed not to be snobby about art that’s popular — there are certain things I’ve just missed out on because they were and I didn’t think they could be good. With early Taylor Swift, I was kind of like, “Oh, that’s pop music, that’s maybe not for me.” But her music is wildly personal and evocative and exciting in a way that even if she weren’t the massive pop star that she was, I think she’d have a massive cult following that she would tour from.10. Y.M.C.A. I make fun of it mercilessly in my show — there’s too much chlorine, a lot of cringey nudity in the locker rooms, the towels are too small. But a bunch of the New York Y.M.C.A. administrators ended up coming to the workshop shows a few years ago at Cherry Lane, and they were fans of it! I do a thing on my podcast called “Working It Out for a Cause,” and I’ve given to the Y.M.C.A. a handful of times. Part of it is because the more I researched the Y.M.C.A., the more I realized not only are they a rec facility, they do an extraordinary amount of community outreach and great nonprofit work. I’m very impressed by them; I make fun because I love. More