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      ‘The Unbelieving’ Review: Life After Faith

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      In a probing new play from the Civilians, based on interviews from the book “Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind,” current and former members of the clergy grapple with the reality of losing their religion.For Adam, not his real name, change started with curiosity and critical thinking. A Church of Christ minister and a creationist, he came to realize that his worldview was sheltered, so he set out to educate himself.“In nine months, I read over 60 books, listened to hundreds of hours of lectures and debates, watched 25 documentaries and movies,” he says. “Went through eight online courses on philosophy, evolution.”It didn’t occur to him that what he found would shake his faith. He thought, he tells a researcher, that God “can handle any questions I’ve got.”“Well, he didn’t measure up!” says Adam (David Aaron Baker), his voice rising with emotion that’s more wounded than angry. His belief in God has left him, and that threatens his job, his family, his friendships — every corner of his life. So when he speaks to the researcher, he insists on the protection of a pseudonym. He cannot afford for word to get out.“The Unbelieving,” a probing, interview-based new play from the Civilians, is about people like Adam: current and former members of the clergy who have lost their religion, even if they still publicly practice it.Written by Marin Gazzaniga and based on interviews conducted for Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola’s 2013 book, “Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind,” this smart and slender play listens to its characters without judgment. Not trying to hit its audience over the head with lessons, it is conducive to empathy.Like Linda (Nina Hellman), the researcher, Steve Cosson’s production at 59E59 Theaters is quiet, inquisitive and welcoming. Designed by Andrew Boyce and Se Hyun Oh, the setting for Linda’s interviews is as anonymous as can be: a hotel meeting room with beige walls and vertical blinds, drawn. (The lighting, by Lucrecia Briceño, heightens the atmosphere.)Linda interviews, among others, a Mormon bishop (Dan Domingues), an Orthodox rabbi (Richard Topol), a former Roman Catholic nun (Sonnie Brown) and a former imam (Joshua David Robinson), who allows himself a little smile when he boasts that he won “trophies at Quranic reading competitions” growing up.These are contemplative people, and they were sincere in their devotion once. Now each describes what is, to varying degrees, a crisis. Not a crisis of faith; they’re beyond that. Rather, it’s a crisis about faith: how to go on without it — practically, emotionally, socially.In documenting that dilemma, “The Unbelieving” becomes not only an examination of the power of religion in American culture. It’s also an even-keeled meditation on the link between conformity and community — the enormous fear of being cast out and the frantic desire to continue belonging, even if that means living dishonestly.Take Johnny (Jeff Biehl), an Apostolic Pentecostal pastor who works for his closest friend as a building inspector. His friend, Johnny says, is “a flaming Charismatic Pentecostal,” so Johnny has not confided in him about his own loss of faith.“Everyone knows me as a minister,” Johnny says. “So everybody who sees that he has hired me, they’re like, ‘You have got a jewel. This is a man of God.’ If all of a sudden I become the atheist, as far as they know, I’m going to forge reports and lie about inspections, and cheat people out of money.”To leave his church would be to risk his livelihood, his relationships, his reputation. Then there’s what the shift in his beliefs has already taken from him: the comforting prospect of spending the afterlife with people he loves.“It means,” he says, “that this pact that my grandmother and I made 20 years ago doesn’t mean anything: that we would do everything we could to both be in heaven together.”There’s a lot of anguish in “The Unbelieving.” As it turns out, there’s a lot of courage, too.The UnbelievingThrough Nov. 19 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More

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      Review: Star-Crossed Lovers in Need of a Divine Assist

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      Andrew Rincón’s play about reigniting passions in the heavens and the bedroom is a jumble of genres at 59E59 Theaters.Tired of digesting all the world’s heartbreak, Cupid calls it quits in Andrew Rincón’s “I Wanna F*ck Like Romeo and Juliet.” The play, a New Light Theater Project production having its premiere at 59E59 Theaters, is experiencing a similar existential crisis. Despite appealing performances, smooth direction by Jesse Jou, and some touching moments, this cosmic look at the pains of love aims wobbly arrows at too many marks.Seeing his friend Cupid (Jacqueline Guillén), the goddess of love, so distraught, Saint Valentine (Greg Cuellar) tries to remind her of affection’s earthly charms by taking her to Hackensack, N.J., where a young couple in the middle of a breakup might provide the challenge she needs to get back in the spirit.That couple, Alejandro (a sturdy Juan Arturo) and Benny (Ashton Muñiz, a soothing presence with comedic chops), have decided to separate after six years together, but Valentine thinks the relationship is worth saving. Cupid and Valentine each pick one to take on a journey of self-discovery, with the goal of guiding them back to each other. These pilgrimages, however, lead to hastily mentioned histories of internalized shame and sexual abuse that overburden the play’s final 20 minutes.Rincón dabbles in the poetic, mixing the mortals’ sometimes self-help-sounding domestic discourse with grandiose statements of love everlasting from the divine duo, who are prone to endless arguments. (That said, it is Alejandro who speaks the childish title phrase, a romanticization of Shakespeare’s text not meant to read as satire.) The clash highlights the play’s confusion as to whether it wants to be a comedy about meddling powers, or a drama about a couple whose breakup undergoes divine intervention. Brittany Vasta’s two-level set, nicely split between the heavens and the bedroom, makes a stronger case for this duality.The same can’t be said for the script, which is untidy in its overuse of Spanglish. Aside from a great joke when a character is shocked to discover the love goddess is a Latina (“Did you really think Cupid could be anything but?”), the Spanish in the text, liberally sprinkled throughout, lacks cohesion because its significance hasn’t been established. When it is used to convey meaningful points, I wondered if non-speakers would be able to follow along, or what Hispanic viewers were supposed to gain. It’s maddening when another tongue is used as a crutch, a substitute for personality that winds up exoticizing the language it sets out to exalt, or “normalize.” If a sentiment lacks power when expressed without a show of bilingualism, it does not gain it through translation.At times it seems as if the play could have revolved around Betti (Elizabeth Ramos), a romantically inexperienced dental hygienist Benny befriends and starts dating, somewhat platonically. Ramos’s smallness during her first scene gives way to an explosive physical performance as Betti comes into her own and experiences first love (with Cupid, no less). Through sheer allure, the actress turns a character largely superfluous to the already jumbled story into the production’s most valuable, displaying the irresistibility of earnest hope in a work that too often dips into its bathos.I Wanna F*ck Like Romeo and JulietThrough Nov. 5 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Ben Platt on the Unfortunate Timeliness of His ‘Parade’ Revival

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      When Ben Platt was a kid, listening to show tunes in the family car, he developed a fondness for “This Is Not Over Yet,” an optimistic and upbeat Jason Robert Brown song from the short-lived musical “Parade.”It was only years later, as Platt grew up, that he encountered the rest of the show, and realized what it was actually about — the 20th-century lynching of a Jewish Southerner, fueled by antisemitism.Now Platt is starring in a seven-performance revival of the 1998 musical at New York City Center, and says the timing is sadly perfect, given the antisemitism once again coursing through the nation’s culture. “It’s felt urgent,” he said, “in a way that is shocking to all of us.”The musical, which won Tony Awards both for Brown’s score and Alfred Uhry’s book, tells the story of Leo Frank, an Atlanta factory manager who was convicted in 1913 of murdering a 13-year-old girl. A public outcry over whether Frank was actually guilty prompted the Georgia governor to commute Frank’s death sentence, at which point Frank was lynched by a mob.Laura Dreyfuss with Ben Platt as Evan in “Dear Evan Hansen.” “It was my ultimate dream come true, to originate something,” he said in an interview, “and it inspired me to start looking inward and writing my own music.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe City Center revival, directed by Michael Arden, begins performances Tuesday and runs through Sunday; there is already talk of a possible Broadway transfer, but no firm plans.Platt, 29, vaulted to fame, and won a Tony, playing the title character in the 2016 musical “Dear Evan Hansen.” In the years since, he has been working onscreen, starring in “The Politician” for Netflix and a film adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen,” as well as the forthcoming “The People We Hate at the Wedding” for Amazon Prime Video and a movie called “Theater Camp,” which he wrote with a group of friends. He also created a new lane for himself as a performer: writing songs, recording albums and touring.In an interview, he talked about “Parade,” the ups and downs of “Dear Evan Hansen” (the stage version was a hit; the film adaptation was panned), and his decision to drop off Twitter. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Tell me why you wanted to do “Parade.”This was a character I related to. I recognized this guy. And I realized how much modern application there is for it. It’s a lot harder to distance from than I was hoping it would be. This show is all about not only antisemitism, but the failure of the country to protect lots of marginalized groups, and we’re all feeling that really intensely right now.How do you connect to your character?The very obvious thing is that we’re both Jewish. He’s also, similar to other characters that I’ve played, not the best at expressing his emotions. Leo learns during his journey that vulnerability does not mean you’re any less strong, and I definitely relate to that journey. Being wrongly convicted of murder, I fortunately cannot relate to. I hope I never learn that.What does this show tell us about antisemitism?I don’t necessarily want to dictate what people feel when they come away from the show. There’s a lot of gray in the show. It doesn’t make any decisions for you. Hopefully, most of all, it shows how hatred is learned. With every character, you see how they got to where they are.“Hopefully, most of all,” Platt said of the show, “it shows how hatred is learned. With every character, you see how they got to where they are.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWhat’s it like being back onstage after five years away?It’s just the best. I spent my whole life doing it, pretty much nonstop, from 6 years old to 24. It just feels like a homecoming.I never fully understand why actors want to do these short-run shows. You put in all this time for a few nights.Two reasons. One is the unselfish reason, which is it’s just a story worth telling, especially right now. The selfish reason is that I carry ulterior hopes that maybe we’ll have a longer opportunity in the future.You spent so many years working on “Dear Evan Hansen.” How are you feeling about that experience?I’m feeling really grateful for it. It was my ultimate dream come true, to originate something, and it inspired me to start looking inward and writing my own music. It will always be a piece of me. I feel a simultaneous constant pride and desire to keep it in my heart at all times, but also a real readiness and excitement at having moved forward and embracing my adulthood and playing characters that live in different worlds than that. I got to live in that world for a very long time, and it was not the easiest world to live in. So I look at it fondly but I’m also happy to be moving ahead.Your boyfriend is your successor in the role, Noah Galvin. Is that weird?I don’t think about him in that way, because I knew him for three or four years before we even had that experience. There’s this lore that that’s how we met, but it’s not. But it’s nice to have that detail of him understanding deeply what that experience was. And I feel very lucky to be with him — he’s changed my perspective, and made things, in a very positive way, feel a bit smaller and more manageable.You’ve been working on a film version of “Merrily We Roll Along,” to be shot over 20 years. What’s that like?There are so many variables. The only way I’ve found to approach it is that you have to treat [each shoot] like short films, let it go, and move on and live your life, and as the next one rolls around, find your way back into it. If I constantly have it in the back of my head, it just feels so unimaginable to get to the end, that I get scared about it in a way that’s not productive. So I’m just taking each of the little gifts along the way and hoping we make it to the end of the road.Platt in “Dear Evan Hansen.” After the film version of the musical was criticized, he left Twitter. “I wasn’t getting anything positive,” he said, “and it’s been really nice to be away.”Erika Doss/Universal PicturesOne of your closest friends, Beanie Feldstein, who is also starring with you in “Merrily,” had a bumpy ride with “Funny Girl” on Broadway. I wonder what you make of how her experience went.I know more than anything, she just wants everybody to move on. So I’ll just say that I love her and I admire her strength.You had your own rough ride with the film version of “Dear Evan Hansen.”It was definitely a disappointing experience, and difficult, and it definitely opened my eyes to the internet and how horrific it can be. You’d think, after doing “Dear Evan Hansen” onstage for four years, I would have already known that. I try my best to focus on people who tell me it was moving to them and they really felt seen by it. It is very easy for the good to get drowned out by the bad.I don’t know if this is connected, but I noticed that you’re no longer on Twitter. What’s that about?I find that Twitter is almost exclusively for tearing people down. I wasn’t getting anything positive, and it’s been really nice to be away.Since “Evan Hansen” you’ve become a pop performer, recording and touring.It’s a whole different animal because it’s been the only avenue in which to express my perspective. I find that in everything else — film and TV and especially theater — as much as you’re giving of yourself, you’re also doing your best to disappear, to serve somebody else’s mission or tell somebody else’s story. I love that experience, being a cog in a larger wheel. But I also think that being afforded the opportunity to do the opposite is a very liberating and freeing experience. One makes me really appreciate the other.Do you see yourself back on Broadway?I would love to, yes. I’m very much so hoping, whether it’s this or something else, to get back there as soon as I can. More

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      Review: Off Broadway, Jim Parsons Meets the Small Bang Theory

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      In a revival of the 2002 musical “A Man of No Importance,” the star of “The Big Bang Theory” achieves something more delicate.You couldn’t have predicted from “Ragtime,” which ran on Broadway for two years in the late 1990s, that its authors would follow up with something as vastly different as “A Man of No Importance.” Yet that’s what Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, who wrote the songs, and Terrence McNally, who wrote the book, did in 2002. Their second musical is as quiet, delicate and Irish as its predecessor is loud, meaty and American. Instead of bleating big themes, it ekes feeling from repression in telling the story of a character who does the same.He is Alfie Byrne, a Dublin bus conductor and closeted gay man who in 1964 finds some measure of fulfillment — or at least companionship — among St. Imelda’s Players, the awful amateur theatrical group whose shows he directs in the social hall of his parish church. With Oscar Wilde as his spirit guide, he makes his small-scale art into a life that’s more beautiful than the one the real world gave him.Likewise the lovely revival that opened on Sunday at Classic Stage Company, starring Jim Parsons and directed by John Doyle. Trimmer than the very fine original production at Lincoln Center Theater, and staged on a minimal set (also by Doyle) consisting of a few chairs, mirrors and statuary Marys, it’s a good fit for material that was always modest. Twenty years on, it’s also a good fit for a moment in which closet stories are beginning to lose their currency.In that sense it’s an advantage that Parsons, at 49, is younger by nearly a decade than both Roger Rees, who played Alfie in 2002, and Albert Finney, who originated the role in the 1994 film on which the musical is based. With his confident voice, unlined face and television polish, he never seems hopeless or, viewed from our time, too old for a new start. And after 12 seasons of “The Big Bang Theory,” he knows not only what marks to hit but exactly how to hit them.A.J. Shively, left, as Robbie Fay and Parsons as Alfie Byrne in the musical “A Man Of No Importance” at the Classic Stage Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs such, Alfie’s problem is not so much “the love that dare not speak its name” as the personality that won’t shut up. He’s a classic, bossy theatrical misfit, accepted (if only he believed it) at least as much for his oddness as despite it. On the bus each day, he reads poetry to delighted riders, and tries to bring culture even to the handsome young driver he calls, after Wilde’s reckless lover, Bosie — as if the name Robbie Fay weren’t sufficient.At home, though, Alfie locks his bedroom door against the curious eyes of his older sister, Lily, who somehow has not guessed his secret. Lily (Mare Winningham) hopes to marry their neighbor, the butcher Carney (Thom Sesma), but will not do so until her brother is settled. So when Alfie takes an interest in Adele Rice, a new passenger on his bus, Lily tries to push them together, not understanding that Alfie’s interest is purely artistic. He wants Adele (Shereen Ahmed) to play the lead in his new St. Imelda’s production, Wilde’s highly inappropriate “Salome,” with its forbidden lust and “immodest dancing.”The film tells this story straightforwardly if ploddingly, as if it were a bus route. We know from the start that Carney, being a butcher and also a ham, will undermine “Salome,” in which he can only play a minor role. And we know that Adele is not the virginal princess Alfie imagines, nor Robbie fated to be the kissable Jokanaan. The musical paradoxically produces a more streamlined and unpredictable experience by giving it a more ornate frame: McNally’s book imagines Alfie’s story as a production put on by his St. Imelda Players.This allows Flaherty and Ahrens to customize song forms to suit each moment and explore genres that fit the milieu — cue the fiddle and uilleann pipes. Though this occasionally produces some stage Irish mush, it also produces some first-rate musical storytelling in numbers like “Books,” in which Lily and Carney sniff at Alfie’s suspicious habits, and “The Streets of Dublin,” in which Robbie (A.J. Shively) drags Alfie out for a high-spirited night on the town.In allowing for shorter scenes and simpler transitions. McNally’s frame is a perfect match for Doyle’s essentialist aesthetic, in which the first question asked seems to be: How little do we need? (Call it his Small Bang Theory.) As in his 2013 “Passion,” he has shrunk the cast by about a quarter (in this case, from 17 to 13) and the running time similarly. As in his Tony-winning revival of “The Color Purple,” he abjures almost all specific signs of setting. And as in so much of what he directs, particularly his cycle of Stephen Sondheim musicals, he has reduced the band by having some actors play instruments; new orchestrations by Bruce Coughlin mean you never feel cheated.Few shows benefit from all these deprivations at once, and “A Man of No Importance” does suffer slightly in its final third as it begins to reveal too much skeleton. Even if you know the story you may wonder which character an actor is now playing, or whether you’re in the church or the pub. You may also feel the lack of choreography, especially with the fine dancer Shively in the cast.But for the most part, this being a show about the possibilities of even the most minimal stage, a minimal stage makes an apt enough setting, and the style enhances more than it squelches. Doyle even manages the equivalent of a hat trick, when an actor plays a tambourine that, in turn, plays a plate.At their best, Doyle’s small triumphs of restraint and husbandry add up to something large. “The Cuddles Mary Gave,” a song whose title seems to promise sickly sweetness, becomes powerfully specific as performed across the grain, without sentimentality, by William Youmans. Nor have I heard a sound so mournful as the one produced in the show’s saddest moment by the accordion: a wheeze of despair.And with actors of such ample imagination — including Winningham, so vinegary as Lily, and Ahmed so exquisitely reticent as Adele — the circumstances informing trenchant performances need not be visible to the audience. They need only be palpable. The rest is up to us.In other words, Doyle won’t hand us emotion dead on a plate, or even on a tambourine. That approach has earned him lots of fans and detractors since his New York breakthrough with “Sweeney Todd” in 2005; they are often the same people. It’s fitting that as he steps down after six years as Classic Stage’s artistic director, he does so with such a rich example of what he brings to the table — or, rather, takes away from it. I hope he keeps doing so. To adapt a great Sondheim lyric: Give us less to see.A Man of No ImportanceThrough Dec. 18 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      The ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Creative Team on Assembling Their Quirky Puzzle

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      The toilets wouldn’t stop flushing. The playwright David Lindsay-Abaire was trying to talk about his collaboration with the composer Jeanine Tesori and the director Jessica Stone on their musical, “Kimberly Akimbo,” and in the background, the janitorial staff members of the Booth Theater were cleaning the bathrooms.“I said to Jeanine,” he said, trying to keep a straight face as another toilet flushed, “I wish we could write a musical the way that I write a play, where there’s not a team of other people involved.”Another flush.Tesori stood up, muttering, “I have to close that door myself.” Which prompted Stone to bend over in laughter.“Thank you,” Stone said, as Tesori returned to her seat in the basement lounge of the Broadway theater.“It is on theme,” Lindsay-Abaire said. “Nothing better.”“Isn’t that enough?” Tesori responded. “Doesn’t that say everything?”For the creative team behind “Kimberly Akimbo,” the chaotic energy of this morning fit the musical itself, whose concept seems — on the page, at least — too off-kilter for a shiny Broadway marquee.Victoria Clark, center, as Kimberly with Alli Mauzey, foreground left, and Steven Boyer, foreground right, who play her parents.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA musical dramedy set in New Jersey, “Kimberly Akimbo” tells the story of a teenager named Kimberly (played by Victoria Clark) who has a disease akin to progeria, which causes her to age at a hyperspeed. At 16, she looks 72.It’s far from a tragedy, though, thanks in part to the quirky characters: Kimberly’s pregnant mother is a hypochondriac; her best friend, Seth, loves anagrams and plays the tuba; and her aunt is trying to persuade her to commit some white-collar crimes. Through it all, even though people with her condition have an average life expectancy of 16 years, Kimberly learns to be young and unafraid after years of taking on adult responsibilities.“I love stories that weave together pain, and hilarity and absurdity. And that, to me, is David and Jeanine, and their work and their sensibility,” said Stone, 52, who has been attached to the musical since 2019. “It’s exhilarating.”When the show premiered Off Broadway last winter at Atlantic Theater Company, Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called it a “funny and moving new musical.” Led by the producer David Stone (no relation to the director), the show sold out its run, and a Broadway transfer was quickly announced. (As the producer of musicals like “Next to Normal” and “If/Then,” Stone is no stranger to an out-of-the-box concept.) Now “Kimberly Akimbo” is in previews, and scheduled to open on Nov. 10.Tesori, 60, and Lindsay-Abaire, 52, first worked together on “Shrek the Musical” in 2008, and for the past seven years, transforming Lindsay-Abaire’s 2001 play “Kimberly Akimbo” into a musical was their passion project. The focus and intimacy of that partnership, he said, made the musical “the easiest thing I’ve ever written.”He compares writing a musical to working on a puzzle. (He loves puzzles and word games; the show’s title is an anagram.) “It is like dumping a bunch of puzzle pieces onto the table,” he said. “It’s hard when you say, ‘Hey, 20 people, come on in and let’s do this puzzle together.’ But if it’s just the two of you — ‘I have this corner’; ‘I’m working on the edges; let’s get to the middle’ — then it comes into focus. And seldom does that happen with a musical.”Stone, Tesori and Lindsay-Abaire gathered to discuss their process on the first day of previews. These are edited excerpts from the discussion.Clark and Justin Cooley, who are reprising their roles on Broadway. “The two of them give each other really beautiful gifts,” the show’s director said of the actors.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDavid, what were the instincts that led you to write “Kimberly Akimbo” 20 years ago?DAVID LINDSAY-ABAIRE I was writing what I hoped would be a great part for an actress that I loved and adored: Marylouise Burke [who starred in the play Off Broadway in 2001]. I wrote a part for her because she and now Vicki [Victoria Clark] have such an amazing young spirit about them, even though they’re actresses of a certain age. And so I wanted to write an amazing part for a great actor. But I also wanted to explore mortality and what it means to truly live in the moment. What I probably didn’t know at the time was that I was also writing about my family in many ways, and things that I was afraid of and angry about.How do you mean?LINDSAY-ABAIRE Uh oh …JEANINE TESORI I don’t know if you can open that door.LINDSAY-ABAIRE Look, I love my family very much. And they messed me up just enough for this play to be what it is. [Tesori pats Lindsay-Abaire’s arm, remarking, “Wow.”] I don’t feel messed up by them. But I feel messed up just enough to be the writer and be the person that I am.TESORI That’s what makes you a storyteller. Healthy enough to write, damaged enough to want to write.The play didn’t have monologues for Kimberly, but it did have monologues for her parents. Was creating the musical a way to create more interiority for her?LINDSAY-ABAIRE During “Shrek,” I said to Jeanine, “I would love to write a musical the way that I write a play, where it would just be us figuring it out for as long as we needed to figure it out.” And then Jeanine said, “Well, how about one of your plays? I think ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ could be a musical. It has a really deep, complicated inner life. Those characters want to sing to me, their emotions are deep. And I like how funny it is.”By making it a musical, we had a way into the characters that the play did not have. We could crack open Kimberly’s heart, and let her express all of those feelings and emotions and fears and desires and longings, that are only subtext in the play.TESORI I feel it in my body when something sings, I can’t put it into words. And these characters, they reminded me of people I grew up with, they reminded me of people in my family — and not always people who are center stage, especially in a musical.Jessica, how did you direct Victoria Clark, who is 63, and Justin Cooley, who plays her boyfriend, Seth, who’s now 19? They come across as being the same age.STONE: It actually is thrilling because you have two people on opposite ends of the spectrum. The skill that Vicki brings to the process of exploration can’t be created in Justin. I watch him being elevated by the discipline and skill, and her surgical approach to figuring out Kim and mapping out Kim’s world and behavior. He starts to sort of mimic that work ethic and he starts to explore and basically copy that approach.His complete honesty, tabula rasa, complete truthful, youthful, wide-eyed innocence and sweetness — it’s really hard to create that once you’ve lived, you know, 35 more years. So the fact that she’s in his orbit, this beautiful, innocent, youthful presence also washes over her. So the two of them give each other really beautiful gifts.Speaking of teenagers, there’s a duality to the show. It’s about youthfulness, but it’s also about mortality. As experienced artists, how do you keep that youthful tone intact?TESORI It’s part of being of a certain age, and what we have all experienced at this age. I’m older than these two. We share the same sensibility of humor. But there’s also this sense, like, we’ve been through some [expletive]. And our friends have been through some [expletive], and we’ve lost people. And if you’re lucky, you’re able to bring both of those things to an audience so they can recognize it. Because I think sometimes because musicals have artifice, they can seem artificial. And they’re not. They are the greatest art form.STONE We’re all parents. And we all have been close observers to adolescents. That adds a little bit to the glaze of authenticity, and a little understanding of the behavior, needs and pitfalls.LINDSAY-ABAIRE The first time in, I was really accessing my teenage years and stuff about my parents and my family, but really homing in on the Seth character who is very close to me in very many ways. I’m now the father of teenage boys, and I just had access to the parents in a way that I didn’t have when I wrote it. I understand much more acutely the fear of losing a child. The whole dynamics between parents and teenagers that I was sort of making up 20 years ago, now I know it deeply and personally. And I also got the chance to put all of my high school friends up onstage. Those four kids in the show choir were not in the play.“If you can have a gaggle of teenagers skipping out of the show, and then this grumpy old man with tears in his eyes — that’s victory,” said Lindsay-Abaire, right.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesDo you imagine this as the kind of show that parents can take their teens to?STONE ​​My kids, 13 and 15, were here, and they loved it. Because I’m so invested in the parent side of the story, and in the mortality side of the story, and in the how-do-you-choose-to-live-your-remaining-days-on-this-planet side of the story, I forget about the delight, the tremendous luxury of hope and time, that teens have. And that enables so much in terms of imagination and promise. [My sons] think it’s hilarious. They love Deborah [Kimberly’s aunt, played by Bonnie Milligan], because they love a rule breaker. They also thought it was really moving. They were really intrigued by the relationship between Kim and Seth, not because it’s a traditional love story. But they really responded to that deep friendship.LINDSAY-ABAIRE Nothing has made me happier than seeing gaggles of teenagers really love the show. But at the same time, at the end of the Atlantic run, a grumpy old man was walking up the aisle and he looked at me and I thought he’s going to criticize the piece. And he said, “I just want you to know that I’m going to go out and live life more fully tomorrow.” My eyes welled up and then he was gone into the night. If you can have a gaggle of teenagers skipping out of the show, and then this grumpy old man with tears in his eyes — that’s victory.In the musical, Kimberly’s aunt sings an upbeat number about how to commit mail fraud. Jeanine, how did you write a catchy song about white collar crime?TESORI [laughs] It’s exposition, which is generally not great for a song. But then I thought, “Oh, if we make it really sort of furtive, and it’s got a little bit of a muted guitar thing, and it’s sort of like Peggy Lee, but maybe on a very, very off day …” It’s having it be fun, so that she can convince the teens to be part of it.LINDSAY-ABAIRE It’s a teaching song. We were talking about “The Rain in Spain” [from “My Fair Lady”], but it’s about check washing. It’s just messed up enough. More

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      ‘Hamlet’ Review: A Dirt-Eating Danish Prince, Born to Be Wild

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      Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “Hamlet,” presented as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival, unleashes more madness than what Shakespeare has already offered.“Hamlet” is a work of excesses: an endlessly philosophizing hero, a play within a play and enough casualties that by the end the stage looks like a horror film, scattered with corpses.And yet it is still possible to out-“Hamlet” “Hamlet,” to create a production with even more spilled blood, more graveyard dirt and more madness than what Shakespeare has already offered. For better or for worse, this is Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “Hamlet” for the Schaubühne Berlin, presented as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival: the Danish prince unleashed, like a rabid dog, onto the stage.At the start of the production, running in BAM’s Harvey Theater through Nov. 5, a few figures gather, Last Supper-style, at a long table with a white tablecloth. Their expressions are unclear: They’re not only behind a curtain, but also sitting far from us, upstage. Downstage is a plot of dirt, where a coffin is being lowered into the earth. They’re at a wedding table for Hamlet’s mother Gertrude’s marriage to his uncle Claudius. Hamlet (an unpredictable Lars Eidinger), crouched in a corner, begins his “to be or not to be” speech (yes, a whole two acts early), speaking into a camera he holds close to his face, which is projected large onto the curtain for us to see. (The video design is by Sébastien Dupouey.) A gravedigger fights a coffin — the coffin of the late King Hamlet, who died under mysterious circumstances — into the ground in a long sequence of daffy physical comedy set to a swelling barrage of percussion, strings and guitar. Gertrude, in a white cropped shirt and white slacks, wears a long white veil and belly dances seductively for her brother-in-law-turned-husband.In other words, the performance has begun.Thomas Bading as Claudius and Jenny König as Gertrude kissing at their wedding table, with Eidinger’s Hamlet capturing the moment, which is projected onto a curtain.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis German-language production with supertitles (the German translation is by Marius von Mayenburg) was first staged in 2008 and has toured internationally since then. It takes a Brechtian approach, self-consciously nodding to the performance as a performance. In that way it’s not unlike, say, James Ijames’s thrilling “Fat Ham,” which ran at the Public Theater this spring — shows that push back against both the text and the fourth wall.This “Hamlet,” however, has neither the same poetry nor grace, which isn’t to say it’s unsuccessful. The production exhibits cleverness in its puckishly untamed and untidy circus act, but tips over into excess as it tries to make its spectacle of spit, dirt and trash into a masticated art piece with Shakespeare’s great work as its fodder.The cast of characters is condensed; a six-person ensemble plays 11 parts (everyone except Eidinger takes on two roles). The pairings are cleverly thought through: It makes sense that the actors who play Horatio (Damir Avdic), Hamlet’s closest confidante, and Laertes (Konrad Singer), Hamlet’s peer, also play the prince’s treacherous friends Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, offering opposing views of what Hamlet’s relationships look like. Claudius (Thomas Bading, on this evening) crumbles in a heap on his wedding table, in a drunken stupor, but then rises, as if from the sleep of death, as the late king’s ghost.Robert Beyer takes on two fools: Osric and Polonius. (He delivers an especially fine performance of the inane royal adviser Polonius, not as the clown productions often make him to be, but as a more realistic yet still comical daft uncle who isn’t as wise as he lets on.) Jenny König is left with the play’s troubled women — Queen Gertrude and the ill-fated Ophelia — though they are at least as ill-served in this production as in so many others. The fact that they are conflated here wisely calls to Hamlet’s psychosexual fixation on his mother’s eroticism and Ophelia’s innocence. But these female characters are also reduced to a seductress tongue-wrestling with her dead husband’s brother and a tragic nymphet whose arc is cut even shorter in this adaptation of the story; Ophelia is barely introduced before she is killed off.In the middle of a flurry of action, like a force of nature, is Eidinger, who retches, eats dirt, face-plants into the ground, tumbles, break-dances, twitches, hoots, spasms, shrieks, cross-dresses and wanders into the audience as he pleases. He throws empty drink cans, kicks around plates and flatware, sprays a hose of water across the stage (audience members in the first few rows, beware the splash zone), takes breaks to drop contemporary music references and pop culture jokes in English and to D.J. Though this production relentlessly trims down the text, it’s bloated back up with improv that steers the show to a nearly three-hour running time.König and Robert Beyer as Polonius in the play, which is presented in German and features a muddy graveyard increasingly littered with empty beer cans and other detritus.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd what we get is a show stripped of its pathos; Eidinger’s performance is as vibrant as it is off-putting and as aloof and performative as it is fascinating. This “Hamlet” is no longer a classical Greek-style tragedy of vengeance, mortality and fate but rather a tragedy of a man undone by his own solipsism.In “Hamlet” we see a production that sometimes succumbs to one of the frequent pitfalls of experimental takes on classic works: It feels more attuned to inherited ideas about and traditions of the play as opposed to being attuned to the material itself.Ostermeier’s direction is confrontational, from Eidinger’s interactions with the audience to the occasionally piercing, cinematic music (Nils Ostendorf). The lighting design, by Erich Schneider, takes us from horror to comedy, and occasionally targets the audience when Ostermeier starts to lean against the fourth wall. A nimbly choreographed fencing match (choreography by René Lay) so convincingly recalls the casually deadly jabs you’d see from two boxers in a street fight.One of my many favorite lines in the play is when Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he sees his country as a prison. Rosencrantz challenges him, suggesting that he is trapped in his own mind. Hamlet replies, “I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space.” In Ostermeier and Eidinger’s “Hamlet,” the characters, setting and details become less important; the whole world we have is the chaotic space between Hamlet’s ears. Though being trapped in Prince Hamlet’s mind offers us a new perspective that some will find freeing, others will see only bedlam and madness.HamletThrough Nov. 5 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Seymour Press, a Behind-the-Scenes Fixture on Broadway, Dies at 98

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      He started playing in Broadway orchestras in 1957, and eventually he began recruiting those orchestras as well.Seymour Press, who for more than 60 years served an important role — though one that went largely unnoticed by audiences — in dozens of Broadway and Off Broadway shows, first as a member of pit orchestras and later as the person who assembled those orchestras, died on Monday at an assisted living facility in Hackettstown, N.J. He was 98.His daughter, Gwynn Press Anidjar, said the cause was advanced myelofibrosis, a bone marrow cancer.Mr. Press, known as Red because he had red hair in his younger days, played multiple instruments, including saxophone; he first sat in a Broadway pit for the 1958 musical “The Body Beautiful,” one of the first shows to feature music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. In the mid-1970s he began taking on the demanding job of musical coordinator (also called music contractor), although he continued playing in orchestras well into the 2000s.His primary duty as coordinator was hiring orchestras for shows. But he also scheduled rehearsals, made sure musicians were paid, handled issues between their union and management, and ironed out all manner of problems.“The guy who waves his arm is the music,” he said in a 2018 episode of the podcast “Behind the Curtain: Broadway’s Living Legends,” referring to the conductor. “Everything else that has to do with the orchestra is me.”For 28 years, he filled that role for the Encores! revival series at New York City Center; he announced his retirement only this spring. He was also working on Broadway until just a few months ago, receiving the coordinator credit on the current productions of “The Music Man,” “Funny Girl” and “Into the Woods,” all of which opened this year.In 2007, he received a Tony Honor for Excellence in Theater, which recognizes outstanding achievement in theater by those who do not qualify in a traditional Tony Award category.Mr. Press in 2016. He was the music coordinator for the Encores! series at New York City Center for 28 years before announcing his retirement this year.Walter McBride/Getty ImagesSeymour Press was born on Feb. 26, 1924, in the Bronx. His mother, Rose (Guttman) Press, was a homemaker, and his father, Arthur, was a salesman and “a frustrated musician,” as Seymour Press put it in the podcast. His father’s cousin, he said, played the saxophone and introduced him to the instrument; Mr. Press later added flute, clarinet, piccolo and others to his arsenal.Mr. Press graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. In his second year at what is now the City University of New York, he enlisted in the Army. He had expected to be drafted, he said, so when he saw a poster recruiting for the Army band, he bit.He spent his service playing for troops as they shipped out of Newport News, Va. It was, he said, both a safe assignment and good music training.“I went in an amateur saxophone player,” he said on the podcast. “I came out a professional.”After mustering out in 1946, he toured with various bands, small-time ones at first and eventually those of Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. But by the mid-1950s, big-band music was fading; “the musical style I thought would last my lifetime was gone,” he said. He married Nona Gwynn Holcomb in 1957 and began looking to trade life on the road for something at least somewhat more stable.“The Body Beautiful” didn’t last long, but in 1959, Mr. Press found himself in the pit for a show that did: the original production of “Gypsy.”“Not only was it the first hit show I had,” he said, but it was also “the first time I could look at myself and say, ‘I’m going to be working 52 weeks a year,’ which was a big thing.”Mr. Press’s wife died in 2021. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a stepson, Edward Finkenberg, and two grandchildren.In his decades as a pit player and musical coordinator, Mr. Press saw lots of change: orchestra sizes and instrumentation varied, the pits moved (often to create more seats), and sound engineering became more sophisticated. He also fielded his share of odd requests. On the podcast, he recalled being asked to recruit a trio for one production: cello, violin, piano. But, the director told him, not just any players would do.“He wanted one to be tall and thin, one to be overweight and one to be very short,” Mr. Press said. “That was a problem.”Mr. Press got an insider’s view of countless shows, but his tastes weren’t infallible. He remembered working on “Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge,” a sequel to the 1977 smash “Annie.” He first heard it at a backers’ audition.“I left that and I called my wife and said, ‘It’s going to be a giant hit,’” he said.Audiences at the pre-Broadway tryout in Washington in 1990 disagreed.“I watched them walk out — in throngs, not just four people, not just five people,” he recalled, adding, “We opened in Washington and closed in Washington.” More

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      ‘Walking With Ghosts’ Review: Gabriel Byrne Roams His Past

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      The Irish actor’s one-man show on Broadway delves into painful and playful memories alike. He even imitates the oddballs of his Dublin boyhood.The Irish actor Gabriel Byrne has a genius for listening. On the HBO show “In Treatment,” playing a psychologist wrestling with his own internal conflicts, he spent minutes at a time in silence, as tides of concern and compassion flowed and ebbed across his handsome, craggy face. But “Walking With Ghosts,” his autobiographical one-man show at the Music Box Theater, directed by Lonny Price, finds him alone onstage, within a series of retreating golden frames. And so Byrne, with no one to listen to, kindles into speech.The show is drawn, often verbatim, from Byrne’s recent memoir of the same name. Slipping back and forth in time, the book traces the 72-year-old actor’s life from boyhood on the rural outskirts of Dublin to his eventual success. The wispy show, by contrast, follows a strict chronology, but even here Byrne favors association over causality, image over argument — offering a slide show of the mind, with little relation between and among the anecdotes. He claims to feel like “an intruder in my own past. Emigrant, immigrant, exile.” Yet his recollections are vivid and immediate. At times the form echoes Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” a catalog of experiences that will go on to shape the mature artist’s mind and soul.“Walking With Ghosts” has the texture of a vanity project. Nearly every autobiographical show does. And during a preview performance, the audience — “In Treatment” fans, perhaps, or devotees of Byrne’s 1995 film “The Usual Suspects” — rewarded that vanity, laughing at jokes before Byrne delivered the punch lines, sighing sympathetically at the sad parts. But Byrne is a serious writer, rendering memory and image in the energetic vernacular of his childhood: “slingeing along,” “stravaging,” “gobdaw.” And he is a serious actor, too, which eases the self-indulgence. The script, while often mournful, allows him to show a playful side and a gift, neglected in Hollywood, for physical comedy. In one sequence, he imitates the oddballs of his boyhood. In another, he shows how the various actors in the amateur theater troupe he joined take their bows. Who wouldn’t want to spend a clinical hour with this man? Or two, plus intermission.And yet, the transition from page to stage feels undermotivated, incomplete. The lively language shifts easily enough from prose to monologue, and Byrne — with his wide, serious face, his bright, worried eyes, his voice like the growl of a polite bear — is compulsively watchable. What the show lacks (and this is true of the memoir, as well) is a sense of why he’s examining his life now. In public. Why would a man lay himself bare like this, on Broadway? It’s hard to discern because the show all but ignores the latter part of his life and acting career.“Walking With Ghosts” never provides satisfying answers, even as it keeps the focus relentlessly on Byrne, with little to distract from his performance. He wears the same clothes throughout — blue shirt, blue vest, blue blazer, gray slacks — and he sketches characters sparingly, with accents and funny voices kept to a minimum. Byrne, who last visited Broadway in 2016 with “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” appears at ease on the stage, bestriding it as easily as another man might stroll his own patio.Minimal set and lighting design, by Sinéad McKenna, keeps the focus on Byrne’s performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor better or worse, Price’s direction is mostly unfelt. Price has him move backward, beyond another arch or two, as he reaches into the past and forward as he nears the present day, finally sitting at the lip of the stage as he discusses his alcoholism and the sobriety he ultimately achieved, twentysome years ago. Otherwise the interventions are few.The design can also feel less than intentional, slapdash almost. As imagined by Sinéad McKenna, the set’s back wall is a mirror, riven with cracks. Apt enough. But the way in which the lights (McKenna) play against it turns Byrne’s shadow upside down, so that it lurks behind him, like a vampire bat. The sound and music, by Sinéad Diskin, come and go, sometimes offering a sense of place, at other times leaving place ambiguous, universal.Byrne unearths embarrassing memories and painful ones, like the death of a boyhood friend and an incident of predation by a priest at the seminary he attended for a few years. Later, he finds that the priest doesn’t remember him. Byrne, though he has blacked out some of what occurred, can’t forget it. But in general, he seems to have had that rare thing for an artist — a happy childhood, loved by parents who loved each other. He is elegiac in recalling a celebration at the Guinness brewery, his grandmother’s love of the movies.Whether discussing good memories or bad ones, the show rarely draws connections — the kinds a clinician might encourage — between the boy Byrne was and the actor he became. In fairness, neither does “The Prelude.” At times, Byrne suggests some internal restlessness and malleability, an inability to settle himself to any particular practice or trade, which may have fitted him for acting. (With the priesthood barred, he rapidly cycled through stints as a plumber, a dishwasher and a toilet attendant.) But aside from one comic story about scenery chewing — and scenery breaking — on an early television play, he never discusses his practice or art. The boy and the professional man seem to exist separately, not continuously.The show seems to conclude with a kind of resignation and acceptance, that if the people of his past are dead now, they persist within him. How those ghosts have made him and shape him and haunt his work still? That remains unspoken.Walking With GhostsThrough Dec. 30 at the Music Box Theater, Manhattan; gabrielbyrneonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More