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      Review: In Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt,’ a Memorial to a Lost World

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      The Viennese Jewish family at the heart of this new Broadway production thinks it is too assimilated to be in danger when the Nazis arrive. They are wrong.In November 1938, in Vienna, life chez Merz — the reciting of books, the games of cat’s cradle, the polished renditions of Haydn at the piano — proceeds with only brief interruptions despite the nearby sounds of broken glass. But then comes the rap at the door. The pianist, Hanna (Colleen Litchfield), goes to answer it and hastily returns.“Trouble,” she hisses.With that one word, the hinge of history swings open upon the abyss.It is also the word that turns “Leopoldstadt,” the harrowing new Tom Stoppard play that opened on Sunday at the Longacre Theater, from a domestic comedy into a Greek drama. What had been until then a loving portrait of Austrian Jewish bourgeois society in the years before the Anschluss — the play begins in 1899 and will follow the family through 1955 — becomes, as the Nazis enter not just the Merzes’ homeland but their home, a portrait of that society’s self-delusion. The cosmopolitan, intermarried and profoundly cultured clan, given less than a day to pack for a future most will not survive, finally understands that, for Jews, history has no hinge; the abyss is always open.Whether complacency is a moral failing, as “Leopoldstadt” seems to argue, is a vexing question. In the play’s first three acts — it has five, each set in a different year and performed without intermission over the course of 2 hours and 10 minutes — Stoppard posits the Merzes, and their relatives-by-marriage, the Jakoboviczes, as golden examples of assimilation. Hermann Merz (David Krumholtz), the wealthy businessman in whose apartment near the fashionable Ringstrasse the story unfolds, has even converted to Catholicism as a kind of insurance. One of the always ambient children is confused enough about the distinctions between Jew, gentile and Austrian to top the family’s Christmas tree with a Star of David.Austrian gentiles are not confused, though. Antisemitic slights and violence are frequent enough that even the Merzes take notice. In 1899, the adults are already arguing the merits of Theodor Herzl’s plans for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But all signs, at least the cultural ones valued by the bourgeoisie, point to progress. Brahms has visited their home; Mahler, though “wet from his baptism,” is still “our man.” Klimt is painting Hermann’s wife, Gretl (Faye Castelow). And the playwright Arthur Schnitzler has inscribed a private copy of “La Ronde” to Hermann’s brother-in-law, Ludwig (Brandon Uranowitz), a mathematician being analyzed by Freud.As Stoppard flips through this Rolodex of Viennese machers, you may recognize his trademark bravura: tossing you into the deep end of his imagination, trusting that you’ll eventually surface. In this case, it’s a very deep end: By my count, 31 characters appear in “Leopoldstadt,” 24 of them members of the extended Merz-Jakobovicz clan. Even if you’ve studied the family tree available on the play’s website, it’s impossible to keep them sorted when they themselves are confused. “She’s my … my sister-in-law’s sister-in-law,” Gretl ventures of Hanna. “I think.”From left: Brandon Uranowitz, Caissie Levy, Faye Castelow and David Krumholtz.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut just when you fear you know too little, you realize you actually know too much. In “Leopoldstadt,” Stoppard takes dramatic irony — the audience’s grasp of what the characters cannot see — to such an extreme that it becomes the subject itself. It applies here not only to tangled relationships and romantic betrayals but to the larger tangles and betrayals of fate; if you’ve heard of Kristallnacht, you will be waiting for that rap on the door and wondering, perhaps unfairly, why the Merzes aren’t. But it’s mostly hindsight that has taught us what happened to Viennese Jews of that vintage.That we remain in suspense anyway is partly the effect of Stoppard’s kaleidoscopic technique, seducing us with manifold pleasures like that boisterous Christmas party in 1899, a polyphonic Passover in 1900, a farcical circumcision in 1924. Much as he has done in earlier plays with the metaphysical juggling acts of poets, revolutionaries and philosophers, he arranges the domestic affairs of these bourgeois characters into highly detailed and glittering patterns, like snowflakes seen under a magnifying glass.But “Leopoldstadt” is not quite as tightly constructed as “Arcadia,” say, or “Jumpers” or “Travesties”; it has too many themes to wrangle, and some dense historical exposition is unconvincingly disguised as small talk. As such, the play leans more than usual on a handsome, foreboding, smartly calibrated production. The acting is excellent across the board, with too many standouts to name. The director Patrick Marber’s deep-focus staging keeps all the stories going at once on a set by Richard Hudson that fairly gleams with honeyed smugness under Neil Austin’s lights. And Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s costumes make you long for the elegance of prewar fashions until you are brought up short by remembering what happened to those who wore them.Even without any overt violence, the Kristallnacht scene, with its shiny blond monster calling the Jewish children a “litter,” is thus brutal, wiping away all the beauty in seconds. But the play’s argument and its likely source in Stoppard’s own life does not really emerge until the scene that follows, set in 1955. It is then, as Vienna prepares to open its new postwar opera house with an ex-Nazi on the podium, that we are explicitly asked to consider the connected problems of historical memory and premonition. Is it a corollary of the warning that we must never forget the Holocaust that we must always expect it again?Uranowitz, right, with Arty Froushan, whose character is ignorant of his Jewish relatives. “You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you,” Uranowitz tells him.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStoppard, no doubt noting the resurgence of antisemitism today, seems to argue for that, painting complacency as a kind of hubris. In the play’s cosmology, more unforgivable than its shiny blond monsters is a callow 24-year-old Jakobovicz family survivor — he too is blond — we meet in this final act. Born Leopold Rosenbaum, he is now called Leo Chamberlain, having adopted the last name of his English stepfather because his mother, he says, “didn’t want me to have Jewish relatives in case Hitler won.” Leo (Arty Froushan) has written two “funny books” and is so ignorant of those Jewish relatives that one of them, a second cousin who survived the camps, cannot hold his tongue. “You live as if without history,” he spits, “as if you throw no shadow behind you.”This is not autobiography, but it’s close enough. Tom Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler, in Czechoslovakia, receiving his new last name just as Leo does, from an English stepfather. He started writing his first funny plays in his early 20s. He came very late to a full understanding of his Jewishness, including the murders of family members in Nazi death camps. You need not equate him exactly with his stand-in to see that in “Leopoldstadt,” by punishing Leo for his belatedness, he is punishing himself for his own.The play begins in 1899 and follows the family through 1955. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe last scene is thus a strange one: powerful, painful and masochistic by implication. But I was left wondering whom its argument was meant for. There are of course people who do not believe the Holocaust happened; I doubt they will see the play.And then there are those in no danger of forgetting, for whom the names of the camps, as intoned in the final moments, are as ingrained as the hypnotic babble of grief we call the Mourner’s Kaddish.That leaves only those who live in the bubble in between, who both know and don’t know. Stoppard seems to place himself there, along with the Merzes, whose refusal to believe the worst led them directly to it.As I would surely have done no better in their circumstances, I cannot bring myself to blame any of them. Not even Tomáš Sträussler. But the uncommonly bitter and personal focus in that final scene makes the play feel a bit unstable, teetering like an upside-down pyramid on its smallest point. “Leopoldstadt” is at its best not in instructing us how we must mourn a lost world but in bringing it lovingly back to life.LeopoldstadtThrough Jan. 29 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; leopoldstadtplay.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      ‘Cost of Living’ Review: Worth Its Weight in Gold

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      Subtle connections bridge the worlds of two caregivers in Martyna Majok’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, making its Broadway debut.How do we connect with people? How do we care for them? And what does it all cost, both fiscally and emotionally? These are just a few of the questions Martyna Majok poses in her wrenching 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Cost of Living,” which opened on Monday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan.After debuting at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2016, “Cost of Living” ran Off Broadway in 2017 in a Manhattan Theater Club production at New York City Center. Now Majok is making her Broadway debut, arriving with an impressive inventory of awards and praise for her poignant, socially conscious work, which includes “Sanctuary City” (2021) and “Ironbound” (2016).In her Pulitzer Award citation, the committee wrote that Majok “invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection.” She does this whether exploring the worlds of undocumented immigrants or working-class New Jerseyans holding on by a thread.As “Cost of Living” begins, Eddie is certainly looking for connection — and redemption, and a way out from under the specter of loneliness since his wife’s death. On this particular night, he says, he’s been stood up for a date with his dead wife, Ani. He sits on a stool center stage at a bar, a shelf of bottles adorned with multicolored string lights floating behind him.What Eddie (an affable David Zayas), a 40-something unemployed truck driver from Bayonne, N.J., leaves out in this impromptu bar eulogy to his wife are the tough times: his years of alcoholism and then a separation.From here the play, tenderly directed by Jo Bonney, jumps back in time, when Eddie and Ani are separated. It’s a few months after a devastating accident left Ani (Katy Sullivan) a quadriplegic and double amputee. Eddie wants to help with her home care; Ani, resentful and depressed, wants to be left alone.Not too far south of Bayonne, in Princeton, Jess (Kara Young) is struggling to stay above the poverty line. A recent alum of the Ivy League school, she’s nevertheless interviewing for a job as an aide to John (Gregg Mozgala), a grad student with cerebral palsy. Jess is direct but guarded when it comes to her life, and John is pretentious and calculating, though he gets Jess to open up with his knavish charm.Kara Young, left, as the caregiver to Gregg Mozgala who plays a grad student with cerebral palsy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe play’s scenes alternate between the two stories of these caregivers, with a turntable set that rotates from Ani’s criminally beige living room and bathroom to John’s upscale, modern apartment with towering windows and a gray-tiled, sit-in shower stall. (The polished scenic design is by Wilson Chin.) Bonney’s deft negotiation of these separate settings and stories is just one of the ways “Cost of Living” impressively teeters between two main axes — the body, and the economy of its care — without toppling over.There’s a satisfying parallelism to the dynamics between the two pairs — the chemistry, the witty repartee, the heartbreak one character offers, intentionally or unintentionally, to another. Each twosome exists in their separate bubbles of Jersey life until they finally intersect. And yet Majok’s sharp writing is never predictable; even when she seems to be leading us down the path to a conventional love story, she pivots and offers an unexpected development — like a wife who sends texts from beyond the grave or a romantic invitation that turns out to be a slick power play.Bonney’s direction adds an extra layer of cohesion to the story: subtle connections that bridge the worlds, like Eddie and Jess each walking separately to the same gentle patter of rainfall on a stormy day (sound design by Rob Kaplowitz).Each of the four cast members performs with a three-dimensional pop of life. Eddie’s insistent affection and optimism is comically at odds with Ani’s dry deadpan. Sullivan’s fiery Ani speaks in a kind of poetry of insults and expletives. Young’s Jess is bright, brusque and uncompromising, even when her life is going sideways. And Mozgala portrays John as someone who is slippery, coy and clever, with a shadiness beneath.Majok’s script insists on the casting of diverse and disabled actors, helping to deepen an affecting work that readily breaks your heart, drags you through hurt and then kisses you on the forehead, sending you off with a laugh.This play left me breathless, and I’m not just using a manner of speech. As I made my way through the crowd of people exiting the theater, I took hard, shallow breaths, knowing that one deep inhale could set off a downpour of tears. This production either broke or mended something in me; I felt — brilliantly, painfully, cathartically — near the point of physical exhaustion.It seems as if the tears, the chuckles, the full body ache of feeling is the currency of an outstanding work of art. We give nearly two hours of attention, and great theater offers us empathy and humanity in return: riches of which even the world’s wealthiest can only dream.Cost of LivingThrough Oct. 30 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      As ‘Come From Away’ Closes, a Newfoundlander Heads Back Home

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      The Canadian actress Petrina Bromley has been in the cast during the show’s surprise hit run on Broadway. It resonated because “it’s about kindness,” she says.On Sunday afternoon, “Come From Away” played its final performance on Broadway, before a raucous sold-out crowd that wept and waved. By Monday morning, stagehands were already taking down and hauling away the real trees that gave the Schoenfeld Theater its forested look.Petrina Bromley, the lone Newfoundlander in the cast, returned to the theater to collect her belongings and to talk about the show, which told the true story of how Gander, Newfoundland — a small Canadian city with a big airport — sheltered thousands of airline passengers forced to land when trans-Atlantic flights were grounded by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.The musical, written by Irene Sankoff and David Hein and directed by Christopher Ashley, opened in 2017 and became a surprise hit, with its message of generosity and community resonating at a time when those values seemed in short supply.Bromley, like all members of the cast, played multiple characters, but she is best known as Bonnie, the woman who ran the local animal shelter, and wound up caring for the dogs, cats and two bonobos that had been onboard the planes. (Among the items in her dressing room: a variety of bonobo-related gifts sent by fans.)A scene from “Come From Away,” near the start of its Broadway run. Bromley said that when she first heard the creators’ idea for the show, she thought, “Good luck to you.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBromley, 51, has been with the show off and on for seven years, throughout its development and the Broadway run. All told, she has been in 1,514 performances of “Come From Away,” including pre-Broadway runs in San Diego, Seattle and Toronto as well as 1,362 Broadway performances. She has also been part of two concert presentations in Newfoundland — one before the Broadway run and one last month — and she was part of the cast of the filmed version, shot during the pandemic shutdown.Her status as a Newfoundlander — she is a career Newfoundland actress who was raised on the island and is returning there now that the show has closed — gave her a unique perspective on the show. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.How are you doing?It’s a lot, right? I thought yesterday would be hard, but this is actually harder. The trees are being felled. I’ve come and gone from the show a bunch of times but the space itself has always been here. And now it’s not going to be here anymore.You wound up in the show because you met the show’s writers in Gander on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11?I was in Gander with a local theater company, Rising Tide Theater — we were doing something as part of those events. We walked into the one coffee shop that wasn’t a Tim Hortons, and the only other people in there were this young couple sitting at a table with cue cards, organizing themselves to do an interview. I had the same reaction everybody in Gander had: “Good luck to you. I’m not sure how you’re going to turn that into a show, but have at it.” We stayed in touch through Facebook and stuff like that, and they saw me in a couple of shows in Toronto, and I was invited to audition.Apparently the audition went well.I was on the other side of the doors, waiting to go in, and some incredible person with an incredible voice sang “Let It Go” so incredibly well and loud and high and my inner monologue was, “What are you doing here?” So I abandoned my book and said to them, “You know, I think considering what the show is, and who I am, and where I’m from, I should sing you a song from Newfoundland.” So I sang a very silly song about a talking goat [“The Mobile Goat,” recorded by Joan Morrissey]. I think they were a little confused by it, but it was certainly something they hadn’t heard. And I do credit that tune with getting me the job in the end.Bromley talking with fans outside the theater on Sunday. “People do tell me their pet stories all the time, and it’s beautiful,” she said.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesYou had some apprehension about how Newfoundland was going to be depicted.When you have a culture that is distinct, it’s easy for it to be stereotyped. So the accent, and being poor, and being undereducated became the marks of what it is to be a Newfoundlander. In Canada, the “Newfie” joke was a big thing for many, many years, and we were often portrayed in the media and pop culture as stupid Newfies. That was my concern: Here are some mainlanders — “Come From Aways” — coming down to tell a story about us, and how are they going to paint us? But at the very first rehearsals in La Jolla, Chris Ashley made it very clear he wanted every character in the show to be treated with respect and not to be just cartoons. And as soon as he said that, I was like, “It’s all going to be fine.”When this show was in development, there was a lot of skepticism about whether it could work commercially.Absolutely. I’ve been skeptical the whole time. I was always wondering about the sheer earnestness of it, in a world that is as cynical as our world is. And telling a story about 9/11 in New York to New Yorkers — there was a lot of concern.Why do you think the show worked for as long as it did?Because it is about community, and it’s about kindness. There are no dragons and no helicopters and no wizards. This show raised up ordinary people doing very simple ordinary things — just helping each other out — and particularly in the past five or six years, with what’s been going on here in the States and around the world, kindness and generosity are things that we’re losing sight of.You played a woman who runs the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Are you an animal person?I have three dogs. I have allergies or I would have a million pets. People do tell me their pet stories all the time, and it’s beautiful. It’s a lovely way to connect.Did you ever meet Unga, the bonobo most discussed in the musical?She passed away before I was able to go to the zoo. If the pandemic hadn’t put a roadblock up, I would have been there to meet her. But I did meet Unga’s son Gander, and her other son Jerry, at the Columbus Zoo [in Ohio]. Bonnie and I went together and watched them in the enclosure. It was incredible.What is the level of awareness of the show in Newfoundland?You can’t not be aware of it — it’s everywhere. We just did those concerts back home — three shows in Gander and three shows in St. John’s, at large arenas, which sold out in minutes. Hundreds, possibly thousands of people have made the pilgrimage to come see it here or in Toronto or in places across the country where the tour was happening. It’s made its way into being part of the culture now. And everybody wants it to have a further life in Newfoundland.Bromley, center, at the final curtain call with Bonnie Harris, the woman she portrayed in the show.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWhat was your career like before this show?I thought it was fine! I was a very employed, everyday working actor in Newfoundland, which is not easy to do. I had enough of a reputation and experience to be consistently working, mostly in theater, sometimes in TV and film. And I thought that that was as good as it gets. I still feel that way. I’m going home, back to Newfoundland, hopefully to fall back into working with the people that I love who create new, incredible work all the time.What is your career like now?I’m much more recognizable at home, which is lovely. I picked up a TV series back home, called “Son of a Critch,” and we just finished filming the second season of that. I’m a tertiary character, but it’s a lovely little gig to have and hopefully that can blossom into other things. I don’t have an agent, and I never have, and I have worked in Stratford [in Ontario] and on Broadway. But I’m probably going to get an agent so that I can work across Canada.What surprised you about Broadway?While I do have a lot of reverence for it, if you hold things on a pedestal, when you get there in a lot of ways it’s the same thing: It’s a job that you go to every day. I appreciate, being the age that I am, to have had the experience to know that it was going to have highs and lows, and that there would be ordinariness inside of the extraordinariness. And I’m always aware of the privilege of it, and the reality that none of us would have been on that stage but for the fact that a very tragic event happened and thousands of people died. And grateful that I got to tell a story, connected to them, that kept their memories alive in any way, shape or form for people who needed to hear it.What did you learn about New York City?It’s crazy. It’s great. To live in New York was incredible. But again, the layers get peeled back when you live somewhere, and you see that it isn’t just a helluva town. I found it difficult on many levels. To be in a very privileged position of working at this incredible place, but literally walking past the most desperate individuals I’ve ever seen in my life, people who are in jeopardy, on the street, asking for help, and we all walk past them and no one helps them. To come and tell this story, where giving a helping hand makes sense, and watch it not happen in reality on the street, I’ve found that hard to reconcile.Have you changed?Absolutely. In many, many ways. I like to think that I’m a bit more generous, a bit kinder than I was before this. It’s also made me a better singer. It’s made me a better actor. And certainly the cosmopolitan experience of living in a big city has changed me.Why are you going back?Because it’s home. There’s a joke about Newfoundlanders: “How do you know the Newfoundlanders in heaven? They’re the ones who want to go home.” More

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      ‘Mud/Drowning’ Review: 3 Fools, 3 Kooks, 2 Bizarre Plays

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      A new production of two of María Irene Fornés’s short plays, “Mud” and “Drowning,” tries to accentuate the weirdness of the playwright’s worlds but too often overreaches.What absurdist work perhaps does best is map the places where our comprehension ends. The surreal reality of being human in the world is enough to lead a writer to create worlds in which, say, bestiality, petty theft and cuckoldry are just business as usual, or where odd, misshapen humanoids reflect on love.In “Mud/Drowning,” a new production of two of María Irene Fornés’s short plays, presented by Mabou Mines and Weathervane Productions at the Mabou Mines theater in Manhattan’s East Village, the director JoAnne Akalaitis tries to accentuate the weirdness of the playwright’s worlds. But too often she overreaches, obscuring the more subtle turns of the text.In “Mud” (1980), a poor woman named Mae (Wendy vanden Heuvel, a touch overzealous) works jobs ironing and goes to school on the side, learning how to read and do math. Her slovenly, illiterate companion Lloyd (a fascinating Paul Lazar, at turns crouched in a chair like a gargoyle or seated on the floor, staring off like a despondent animal) isn’t impressed. He’s mostly concerned with his erection.Mae brings home a neighbor she likes, Henry (Tony Torn, perfectly posturing), a wannabe intellectual who’s not nearly as wise as he thinks he is. Soon she, Henry and Lloyd (her adopted brother, or lover or something in between) are living together in a perverse love triangle of desire and codependence.Paul Lazar, left, and Wendy vanden Heuvel in “Mud.”Julieta CervantesAkalaitis’s self-conscious direction tries to meet the text on its own terms: The hourlong performance of “Mud” is punctuated by abrupt transitions between each of its 17 scenes; while Fornés simply called for the actors to freeze in place, this production includes cheesy, slow-motion dances and synchronized pantomimes.The physical interactions have been cut, and instead a narrator (Sifiso Mabena) reads all of the stage directions. As a result, we get Fornés’s poetic descriptions — “The wood has the color and texture of bone that has dried in the sun” — but also an unnecessary additional character who gives the story a level of removal. Instead of encountering the play as is, we get descriptions and explanations that serve as barriers, not windows, into the work.The production’s treatment of “Drowning” (1986), a work of just five pages, is more on par with Fornés’s pithy play about three freakish figures who discuss life and love. “Is this why we have come to live? To love like this? And hurt like this?” asks Pea (Gregory Purnhagen), one of three sickly looking men with face sores and unnaturally bloated bodies, in neutral tan-and-brown wardrobes.He’s talking about his love for a woman whose picture he discovers in a newspaper, an object previously unknown to him — along with things as commonplace as snow. Pea and his more knowledgeable companions, Roe (Peter Stewart) and Stephen (Tomas Cruz), walk languidly through the space, mirroring one another’s movements and singing the bizarre dialogue in mesmeric operatic tones.Here “Drowning” is scored to a new “pocket opera” by Philip Glass, performed by Michael A. Ferrara, the keyboardist and musical director, and the harpist Anna Bikales. It elicits a multitude of sensations in the brief 30-minute performance: A bold, steady rhythm unexpectedly stops and restarts like a game of Red Light, Green Light; a mounting crescendo spells drama and heartbreak even when the action onstage is static.Whereas in “Mud,” the music seems like an interruption overpowering the dialogue, the music, the dialogue and the movement in “Drowning” are all on the same plane. That play also uses the minimalist sets and dramatic lighting more wisely; both sets comprise just a single table and chairs, with tiles and wallpaper in similar retro brown-and-tan patterns, along with neon-yellow strip lights set along the back wall. It’s too much for Mae and Lloyd’s modern abode, but the off-putting color palettes and Gatorade-colored lights draw out the otherworldly qualities of Pea and company.Along with Caryl Churchill and Edward Albee, Fornés made stages weird for decades before she died in 2018, influencing those eminent playwrights and many more — even though her work isn’t as widely known today as that of her peers. Her characters live in weird corners of the imagination, where uninhabited desire and grim existential queries abound. Such spaces need no introduction or justification: It should feel like an honor to be a stranger in Fornés’s strange lands.Mud/DrowningThrough Oct. 9 at Mabou Mines, Manhattan; maboumines.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Bad Cinderella’ to Open on Broadway in March

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      The musical, which was known simply as “Cinderella” during a previous run in London, is a new adaptation of the classic fairy tale.The famed composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s unbroken streak on Broadway — at least one of his musicals has been onstage since 1979 — will not end with the closing of “The Phantom of the Opera” next year.Lloyd Webber announced Monday that his next musical, “Bad Cinderella,” will begin performances on Feb. 17, one night before the scheduled closing of the long-running “Phantom.”“Bad Cinderella,” which had a previous run with a sparer title, “Cinderella,” in London, is a contemporary adaptation of the classic fairy tale, now with a consideration of beauty standards and body-shaming, plus bawdy language and same-sex relationships. “It adds up to not so much a ball as a blast,” Chris Wiegand wrote in a five-star review for The Guardian, adding that it was “silly but warm and inclusive, with relatable, down-to-earth heroes and pertinent points about our quest for perfection and our expectations of each other and ourselves.”The New York production is to star Linedy Genao, in her first leading role on Broadway. Genao, who described herself in a news release as “a proud Dominican American,” was in the ensemble of the Broadway production of “On Your Feet!” and an understudy in the Broadway production of “Dear Evan Hansen,” and this fall she is to star in a production of “On Your Feet!” at Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J.“Bad Cinderella” features music by Lloyd Webber (his many credits include “Evita,” “Cats” and “Phantom”), lyrics by David Zippel (“City of Angels”), and a book by Emerald Fennell (she won an Academy Award for the screenplay of “Promising Young Woman”). The director is Laurence Connor and the choreographer is JoAnn M. Hunter; they previously collaborated on Lloyd Webber’s “School of Rock.”The musical, produced by Christine Schwarzman’s company, No Guarantees, alongside Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group, will run at the Imperial Theater, with a scheduled opening night of March 23.The run in London was repeatedly delayed by the pandemic. When it finally opened last year, Matt Wolf, a critic for The New York Times, declared it “worth the wait” and said it “looks set for a sturdy West End run.” But that turned out not to be the case: It closed in June, after a run of less than a year.Lloyd Webber said in a news release that the creative team has been developing “a few new songs” for the Broadway production. A spokesman said the show has also been redesigned. More

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      Review: Revisiting ‘Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge’

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      Elevator Repair Service, the experimental theater company, brings to life the 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr.On Feb. 18, 1965, the Cambridge Union hosted a debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. The resolution: “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.” Baldwin, unsurprisingly, spoke for the affirmative. Buckley, who agreed to appear after several other American conservatives had refused, opposed him.Elevator Repair Service, the experimental theater company, revives this discussion — every word of it and a few more — in “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” directed by John Collins at the Public Theater in Manhattan. Greig Sargeant, a longtime company member who conceived the piece, stars as Baldwin. Ben Jalosa Williams, another veteran, plays Buckley. The set for this Cambridge University institution is minimal — two tables, two chairs, two tabletop lecterns. Sargeant and Williams don’t imitate the real men’s accents and cadences, the better to bring the debate closer, showing how germane its arguments remain, with Baldwin insisting that America has been built on the forced labor of its Black inhabitants and Buckley countering that if Black Americans would only put in the effort, they too could enjoy of its fruited plains. House lights stay on through most of the show, implicating the audience.“Baldwin and Buckley” overlaps with a couple of past E.R.S. shows. Williams has played Buckley at least once before, in the company’s “No Great Society,” which staged an episode of “The Steve Allen Show,” in which Jack Kerouac confronted establishment types. “Arguendo,” which opened at the Public in 2013, presented oral arguments from a Supreme Court case in which exotic dancers advocated for the right to perform nude. E.R.S. often works from texts — novels, verbatim transcripts — that are not intrinsically dramatic. The company tends to approach these texts obliquely, playfully, with an elbow to the ribs.There are few elbows here, however. Christopher Rashee-Stevenson, a Black actor, horses around with his part of a white Cambridge undergraduate who speaks on Buckley’s side. (Gavin Price, a white actor, plays the young man, also white, who bolsters Baldwin’s.) Otherwise the debate is staged with an unfrilled gravitas. Sargeant is forceful, with a tinge of Baldwin’s mannered veneer. Williams is lightly oleaginous. Neither relies on exaggeration or archness. The gonzo props and goofy sound design and butt dances of prior E.R.S. shows? These do not appear.What “Baldwin and Buckley” does provide feels both dense and thin, with the translation from transcript to theater incomplete. The arguments — even Buckley’s offensive ones, such as his contention that if Black Americans lack equality it’s because they lack the “particular energy” to attain it — are multifaceted, and as they speed along, unelucidated and uninterrupted, it is easy to lose the shape of them. The moral danger here could not be higher. Reduced to its essence, Buckley’s pro-meritocracy argument denies the effects of systemic racism, even while condemning individual instances of discrimination; Baldwin’s demands it. And yet, looking around the space, I saw several people quietly dozing.Sargeant is forceful, with a tinge of Baldwin’s mannered veneer.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAt the close of the debate, the show glides into an invented scene, a conversation between Baldwin and his close friend Lorraine Hansberry (Daphne Gaines). Over drinks, they speak briefly of progress.“We’ve got to sit down and rebuild this house,” Baldwin says.“Yes,” Hansberry agrees, “quickly.”But within two minutes they are playing themselves, Greig and Daphne, discussing how they met performing E.R.S.’s adaptation of Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” a show that the company had originally staged without any Black actors. It’s a provocative scene, which calls out E.R.S.’s own past failings. Really it’s two provocative scenes. But they are over almost as soon as they begin.At the real debate, Baldwin won handsomely, 544 to 164 votes by union members. Today, one hopes, the breakdown would shake out even more emphatically. Because Buckley, I would argue, was wrong on every point, excepting those points on which he claimed to agree with Baldwin. But Baldwin wasn’t entirely right either. He concludes his remarks by saying that if America fails to have a true racial reckoning “there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, “because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it.”We are 57 years beyond these debates now. Some change has come, by means both quick and slow, but the house remains unrebuilt and the questions of whether the American dream still exists, whether it ever really existed, are vexed ones. But if the dream has been wrecked, it is not the denied who have done it. It is the groups and classes who started at the top. And then pulled the golden ladder up after them.Baldwin and Buckley at CambridgeThrough Oct. 23 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      ‘American (Tele)visions’ Review: Tune In, and Buckle Up, for Family Drama

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      In Victor I. Cazares’s play, Walmart is a haven for a family of undocumented Mexican immigrants, but it comes with a cost.The program for “American (Tele)visions,” which opened Thursday at the New York Theater Workshop, comes with an addendum tucked inside: a bibliography of the nearly 50 books, movies, and works of art and music that inspired the playwright, Victor I. Cazares. The wide-ranging list of titles includes works by Luis Buñuel, Haruki Murakami and the Magnetic Fields as well as Stephen Mitchell’s 2000 translation of the Bhagavad Gita.It’s a fitting way to illustrate the occasionally unwieldy yet often absorbing treasury of themes, metaphors and ’90s American cultural touchstones that is this memory play, which is set among the reflective screens of a Walmart television department.For young Erica and her family, undocumented Mexican immigrants living in a “poor but racially diverse” trailer park, Walmart is the linoleum-floored, discount-priced heaven where dreams come to life. Erica (Bianca “b” Norwood), who prefers boys’ clothes and toys, eyes racecars while her best friend, Jeremy (Ryan J. Haddad), zeros in on the pink boxes of Barbies. Erica’s father, Octavio (Raúl Castillo), stands entranced by the TVs — just like he sits for hours, in a near-catatonic state of despondency, at home. Her mother, Maria Ximena (Elia Monte-Brown), disappears to some unknown part of the store for a reason Erica knows is connected to Maria’s later abandonment of her family for a truck driver. And her brother, Alejandro, is secretly buying K-Y Jelly and condoms.But Alejandro can’t even play himself in this scrambled account of the family, because he’s already dead, Erica tells us. So Maria Ximena assigns the role to Alejandro’s best friend, Jesse (Clew), who came home with Alejandro one night and ended up staying.Though the story already has the hairpin turns of a telenovela, full of secret affairs, betrayals, familial resentments, deaths and a gasp-worthy slap, the characters — Erica in particular — are empowered to lead the narrative, changing the chronology of events, reframing and re-categorizing challenging memories. Which makes “American (Tele)visions” an acrobatic work of storytelling. It switches modes and tones so rapidly — from the living room couch to Erica and Jeremy’s imaginary detective series to Walmart’s layaway department — that the production evokes the sensation of channel-surfing.From left: Clew, Castillo, Norwood, Ryan J. Haddad and Elia Monte-Brown in the play, whose set includes four giant cubes that open to reveal micro-settings.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRubén Polendo’s direction is lively and clearsighted but also exaggerates the vulnerabilities in the script: the heightened language, repetitive and overstuffed with a few too many metaphors (Octavio is a television, Alejandro is a chain-link fence), and the length. Even though it runs just 100 minutes without an intermission, the show seems to stretch on and on like the channel guide for a premier cable TV package.Though Norwood, a nonbinary actor who uses the pronouns they/them, spends most of the play as Erica’s bright, imaginative childhood self, there are traces of adult Erica in their performance: a certain bluster and confidence, a kind of grown-up wisdom of someone who has come to terms with her trauma. As Erica’s parents, Monte-Brown is at her best when unleashing a mother’s roar of grief, and Castillo grounds his performance in a crushing, pervasive melancholy.While cast as the supporting actor in Erica’s life and fantasies, Haddad’s Jeremy comes across as a fully formed figure in his own right, delivering some of the play’s best quips, like when he calls a capitalist video-game-style villainess an “Ayn Rand erotic fantasy.” As a brilliant composite of Alejandro and Jesse, Clew, who also uses the pronouns they/them, is both strangely present and absent: As two characters, one living and one dead, they give a performance that feels fittingly transitory. They run in and out of scenes, switch characters from line to line; it’s almost as if they’re part ghost.The show, which is co-produced by Theater Mitu, which is known for its experimental mixed-media theater, has high-definition color and depth. Bretta Gerecke’s set design elicits the immersive feeling of living in a world of screens: The stage is a colossal box, inside which there are four towering cubes, two stacked on each side, that swing open to reveal micro-settings (a forest that’s been struck by a meteorite, a living room, the front exterior of a truck and a Walmart toy aisle). Animations, recorded videos and live camera footage are projected onto the surfaces of the cubes and the back and side walls of the set, helping to illustrate a breathless story that begins with the scourge of U.S. capitalism (“I want to not want,” Erica declares) and contends with immigration, citizenship, queerness, the intersection of commerce and gender roles.The lighting design (by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew) is as eye-catching as you’d expect in a show about electronics, from a dreamy aquamarine to the hazy twin beams of a car’s headlights in the distance. So are the intentionally tawdry specialty costumes (designed by the “Project Runway” alum Mondo Guerra), which include a pink, frilly princess dress and a mermaid-cut white-and-black bar-code dress with fringe and headpiece.“American (Tele)visions” can be a bit repetitive at times. Yet the production still manages to surprise and entertain — so don’t touch that dial.American (Tele)visionsThrough Oct. 16 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Textplay,’ Stoppard and Beckett Get Snarky, FWIW

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      An imaginary electronic conversation between the two playwrights falls somewhere between a ❤️ and a 🤷.The game is Guess That Play and the first round is a gimme. Among the clues one player texts the other are emojis of a skull, a goblet, crossed swords and nine tombstones. The answer is obviously “Hamlet,” but the next round isn’t as easy. What to make of a glass of milk, some trees and, yes, another tombstone?If you can solve that one, you’re probably the right kind of audience for “Textplay,” a witty two-character, no-actor sketch, conducted entirely in the world’s latest lingua franca, complete with emojis, emoticons, ellipses and erasures. (The virtual NYU Skirball presentation is available on demand through Dec. 3.) On the screen of your choice, you watch as a pair of playwrights amuse themselves electronically: teasing, bickering and generally debunking their reputations, or having them debunked.That the playwrights are Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard (it’s Stoppard’s phone we supposedly see) makes “Textplay” a somewhat Inside Theater experience, with untethered references to the two men’s works, styles and obsessions. That the credited author, Archer Eland, is clearly a pseudonym, deepens the atmosphere of esoterica.Could Stoppard himself be Eland? Anonymity might be just the kind of publicity he prefers as an amuse-bouche for his latest real-world play, the uncharacteristically personal “Leopoldstadt,” which opens on Broadway on Oct. 2. For that matter, could Eland be Beckett, so existential he seems to exist even now, an avant-gardist more than 32 years after his death?Yet neither Stoppard nor Beckett, as scripted here, seems sure of his stature, pre- or post-mortem. They complain that some playwrights, like Pinter, got the classier adjectival ending “-esque” even as they each wound up with “-ian.” (“It’s really unfair,” Stoppard whines un-Stoppardianly.) They worry more seriously that their work came to nothing, perhaps deservedly. “All we did was tart up a hole and claim it was an abyss,” Beckett types. “And NO ONE read our novels.”In compensation, they get to preen over their “genius” hair, certainly compared with Pinter’s. Beckett praises Stoppard’s as “Messy and brilliant, like your mind.” Stoppard returns the favor: “And you have those beautiful silvery rows. Like sharks.”After live theater shut down in March 2020, and in the two and a half years since then, we’ve seen lots of experiments in digital dramaturgy. Those that succeeded did so by offering apt substitutions for in-person performance or by abjuring it completely in favor of a frankly virtual experience. In the middle ground lay boredom — and the reflex, born of so much streamed television, to watch only until another show or a snack beckoned.“Textplay” might seem to fall into that middle ground; it’s both live (you can’t pause it) and unlive (the entire “conversation” is preprogrammed). Unlike “Hamlet,” it makes little claim on your soul, and unlike “Under Milk Wood” — the answer to the clue with the glass of milk and the trees — none at all on your heart.Indeed, the playwrights haunting “Textplay” aren’t Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas, or even Beckett and Stoppard. Instead, I thought of Edward Albee, for the merciless wit, and Sophocles, for the Oedipal anxiety. Cutting one’s forefathers down to size is an entertaining, if dangerous, endeavor. The cleverness of the writing comes, to some extent, at the expense of honor.Still, at about 35 minutes, “Textplay” is a snack in itself. There’s even a blink-and-you-miss-it Easter egg at the end. (I missed it.)Theater types might also derive from the stunt a little encouragement about the uses of technology. Humans now send six billion text messages a day, most of which, data scientists say, are read. If the ever-dying theater could access even a fraction of an audience as large and willing as that, it might just perk up. Beckett and Stoppard and even poor, average-haired Pinter may one day be more immortal than ever. Who needs tombstone emojis?TextplayThrough Dec. 3 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 35 minutes. More