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      ‘Romeo & Juliet’ Review: Older, Gentler Star-Crossed Lovers

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      With age-blind casting at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, two actors who have been married for 38 years play the teenage leads.GARRISON, N.Y. — A romance and a love story are two different things. In art, we’re not great at differentiating.Take “Romeo and Juliet,” a corpse-ridden romantic tragedy routinely mistaken for a tale of deepest love, even though the lovers are teenagers who’ve only just met — people who, despite their ferocious infatuation, would absolutely flunk a quiz about each other’s likes and dislikes, dreams and histories.They’re passionate, sure; isn’t everyone at that age? But the rash young people in “Romeo and Juliet,” both the title characters and some of their friends, die from their own impetuosity. They’re not old enough to know better than to kill one another in anger in the street, or agree to a harebrained plan that involves faking one’s own death and being interred in a real tomb.Gaye Taylor Upchurch’s staging — which opened on Friday night at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s new 98-acre riverside site, under the canopy of its familiar tent — presents the tragedy as a love story, with a twist. Romeo and Juliet are played by festival regulars Kurt Rhoads and Nance Williamson, actors who have been married for 38 years and done 68 previous shows together. Upon which background, apparently, the central idea of this production mistakenly depends.“With Kurt and Nance in the title roles,” Upchurch writes in a program note, using an ampersand as her production’s title does, “we get to take it for granted that Romeo & Juliet truly love each other.”Even if we could, and I don’t believe we can, that assumption wouldn’t be terribly helpful to a drama that’s driven by the urgency of fresh desire yet played here with the languor of long acquaintance, as if guided by Friar Laurence’s admonition to “love moderately.” And so the sparking attraction between Romeo and Juliet ignites not a raging conflagration but a glowing ember — warmth, not heat.The fault isn’t in the chronologically incongruous casting; audiences are sophisticated enough not to bat an eye at the actors’ ages. And in a summer when Ian McKellen is returning again to the title role in “Hamlet,” which he last played onstage a year ago, at 82, other well-seasoned actors might also want to take their shots at interpreting Shakespearean youths.Upchurch’s elegant interspersing of ethereal choral music by Heather Christian is one of this production’s most alluring features, along with costumes in eye-popping patterns by Enver Chakartash. But Upchurch hasn’t built a frame or puzzled out a conceit that supports her age-blind casting. The idea feels forced, not organic — grasping for meaning rather than providing it.Romeo and Juliet, adolescents still under their parents’ roofs, take drastic measures to wrest control of their lives and futures. But the even-keeled Rhoads and Williamson imbue these teens with none of the tidal-wave emotions that make them idealistic enough to defy their families’ hatred for one another, and heedless enough not to pause for rational thought.Without that palpable, desperate, cocktail-of-hormones recklessness, their actions make no sense. And if we don’t believe the characters, the play loses its stakes and its heft. As when Lady Capulet (a solid Britney Nicole Simpson) urges the almost 14-year-old Juliet to marry her suitor Paris, saying: “I was your mother much upon these years that you are now a maid.” There’s gut-punch potential in that line about girls and imposed maternity, but in the context of this wan production, it merely evaporates.Paris (Erin Despanie), though, is interesting: unusually affable, and thus uncommonly sympathetic. You feel a little bad for the guy as he innocently looks forward to his wedding. And if Kimberly Chatterjee’s appealing Friar Laurence doesn’t manage to reconcile his own honorable objective — ending the antagonism between the Capulets and the Montagues — with his deranged death-faking scheme, he is nonetheless one of the more fully inhabited characters.A hillside along the Hudson River serves as a captivating backdrop, with costumes in eye-popping patterns by Enver Chakartash.T. Charles EricksonThe tent in which this all plays out, with little more than chairs for a set, is a temporary structure nestled at the foot of a sloping hill. It’s due to be replaced nearby with a permanent open-air theater designed by Studio Gang, with Hudson River views — the sort of vista that festival goers enjoyed for decades at Hudson Valley Shakespeare’s former longtime home, on the grounds of the neighboring Boscobel House and Gardens.That backdrop is gone for now, but the customary soft sand stage floor is in place, to be traipsed across by spectators on the way to their seats. Also comfortingly unchanged: the dexterous use of the landscape outside the tent as a playing space. After mortally wounding Romeo’s friend Mercutio (Luis Quintero), Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (Zoë Goslin) runs off to the hill, where, in dramatic side lighting (by Stacey Derosier), he surveys the damage from a distance. Upchurch does well with such tableaus.Covid-19 cases in the company delayed the opening night of this “Romeo & Juliet.” Even when it arrived, two actors wore face masks onstage. It’s impossible to know how much the disruption of illness might have foiled the depth of characterization in this production.But more time would not have alchemized the central elements that refuse to meld: the onstage fiction of Romeo and Juliet’s ruinous romance, and the offstage reality of two veteran actors’ devoted love.Romeo & JulietThrough Sept. 18 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Taurean Blacque, Actor Best Known for ‘Hill Street Blues,’ Dies at 82

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      He received an Emmy nomination for his work as Detective Neal Washington, a character he strove to portray as something other than “that hip, jive Black man.”Taurean Blacque, the actor best known for his Emmy-nominated performance as a detective on the critically acclaimed NBC drama series “Hill Street Blues,” died on Thursday in Atlanta. He was 82.His family announced the death in a statement. It did not specify a cause, saying only that he died after a brief illness.Mr. Blacque, who began his career as a stage actor in New York, had several television appearances under his belt when, in 1981, he landed his breakthrough role: the street-smart Detective Neal Washington on “Hill Street Blues,” which drew praise for its realistic portrayal of the day-to-day reality of police work and was nominated for 98 Emmy Awards in its seven seasons, winning 26.The part of Washington, Mr. Blacque later recalled, was sketchily written, and it was his choice to play the character as quiet and reflective. “I think the original concept was that hip, jive Black man, you know,” he told TV Guide. “But I wanted to turn it around a little, give him some depth, not get into that stereotype.”Mr. Blacque was nominated for a 1982 Primetime Emmy for best supporting actor in a drama series, but he lost to his fellow cast member Michael Conrad. (All the nominees in the category that year — the others were Charles Haid, Michael Warren and Bruce Weitz — were members of the “Hill Street Blues” cast.)“Hill Street Blues” ended its run in 1987, and two years later Mr. Blacque starred with Vivica A. Fox and others on the NBC soap opera “Generations.” Probably the most racially diverse daytime drama of its era, “Generations” dealt with the relationship over the years between two Chicago families, one white and one Black. Mr. Blacque played the owner of a chain of ice cream parlors.He later moved to Atlanta, where he was active on the local theater scene, appearing in productions of August Wilson’s “Jitney,” James Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner” and other plays. He was also involved in the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, N.C.Taurean Blacque was born Herbert Middleton Jr. on May 10, 1940, in Newark. His father was a dry cleaner, his mother a nurse.He graduated from Arts High School in Newark but did not decide to pursue an acting career until he was almost 30 and working as a mail carrier. He enrolled at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York in 1969 and, he told USA Today, “Once I found out that acting was my niche, I poured all my energies into it.”He said he chose the stage name Taurean Blacque (Taurus was his astrological sign) in part as a way to get casting directors’ attention. Eventually, after several years of paying dues, he did.Work in community theater in New York led to roles with the Negro Ensemble Company and eventually to Hollywood, where he landed guest roles on “Sanford and Son,” “Taxi,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and other TV series before being cast on “Hill Street Blues.”In addition to being an actor, Mr. Blacque, who had two biological sons and adopted 11 other children, was an adoption advocate. He was the spokesman for the Los Angeles County adoption service. In 1989, President George Bush appointed him the national spokesman for adoption.Mr. Blacque’s survivors include 12 children, 18 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Cannabis!’ Review: Preaching to the Partaking Choir

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      This vaudevillian show at La MaMa in Manhattan is like a party where weed is the guest of honor, thrown by ardent, uncritical hosts.The reminder takes up only a single line of small print in the program, but it’s the kind of rule that doesn’t usually need spelling out: “No smoking permitted inside the venue.”“Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville” knows its crowd. A music- and dance-filled celebration of marijuana, it belongs — no question — to downtown theater’s cherished tradition of weird art. Inside the doors of the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa in Manhattan’s East Village, audience members are enveloped in a thick cloud that’s really just theatrical haze, not a pot-smoke fug. But it does the trick, visually if not aromatically, of establishing the atmosphere.Created by Grace Galu, a magnetic, powerhouse vocalist whose character here is called Sativa Diva, and Baba Israel, who conceived the show and serves as its Magical Mystical M.C., “Cannabis!” is like a party where weed is the guest of honor, thrown by hosts whose ardent, uncritical devotion is about pleasure but also politics. Because as much as this experience allows you to get a little soft-focus while the entertainment swirls, there’s no missing its call to activism.“Tonight is for anyone who carries a felony on their back for smoking, growing or distributing a flower,” Israel says at the top of the show. A few moments later, he adds: “Tonight is for my mother, who has dementia, whose morning tincture turns tantrums into a Bob Marley shuffle.”Produced by Here and inspired by Martin A. Lee’s 2012 book “Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana,” the show is built around a call-to-action American history lesson that ties hostility toward the drug to racism in the culture. Yet “Cannabis!,” whose excellent performers include the hip-hop-jazz collective Soul Inscribed and members of the dance company Urban Bush Women, is indeed a vaudeville. Directed by Talvin Wilks and Israel, it occasionally gives in to the stoner tendency toward shagginess but is in many ways quite sharp.Lighted by Tuce Yasak, with a multilevel checkerboard stage and a mammoth marijuana leaf suspended glittering above, the set (by Nic Benacerraf) makes uncommonly elegant use of the theater’s cavernous space, employing a diptych of projection screens as the backdrop. It’s there that we see the video (by David Bengali) that seamlessly complements the narrative we hear in song and spoken word, as Sativa Diva’s glamorous, vegetal-green costume (by Kate Fry) evolves piece by piece through the decades.Louis Armstrong’s affinity for marijuana gets its own chunk of the performance, as do the 1960s. The show also revisits the emergence of medical marijuana as a compassionate response to the AIDS epidemic, and makes a heartbroken case for legalization in the song “No More Drug War,” about a mother and her military veteran son, whose marijuana use lands him in jail. (Galu, who composed the show’s original music, is also its music director.)Grace Galu, center, cocreated the show and composed its original music. The show is a call-to-action American history lesson that ties hostility toward the drug to racism in the culture.Maria Baranova“Cannabis!” has a whole flock of dancer-choreographers: Chanon Judson, Courtney Cook, Mame Diarra (Samantha) Speis, Twice Light and Tatiana Barber. Yet that abundance seems right for a tribute to a plant that can change the way that people feel in their bodies, alleviating pain and allowing bliss.In its interrogation of American hostility to marijuana, though, the show never acknowledges any danger associated with it, even as high THC levels can make cannabis products extremely potent. This is an ill-advised omission. Plenty of drugs come with asterisks, after all. But if “Cannabis!” is unlikely to make converts of skeptics, it’s not only for zealots.This is at heart a gentle show, never more so than when we see projected the beguiling image of a beautiful, gracefully dancing old woman. This is Israel’s mother, Pamela Mayo Israel, once a member of the avant-garde downtown company the Living Theater, now ailing and taking those tinctures that her son gives her.Also gentle: the palpable pleasure that ensues, at the end of the show’s first half, when audience members are invited to come down and join the cast in dancing. The night I saw it, there was zero awkwardness — just a mass of people moving joyfully in their bodies, under that giant leaf.Cannabis! A Viper VaudevilleThrough July 31 at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Review: ‘The Kite Runner’ Trips From Page to Stage

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      Amir Arison stars as a guilt-ridden Afghan refugee brooding over a childhood friendship in a stiff adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel.Unsurprisingly, the most memorable image in “The Kite Runner,” which opened at the Helen Hayes Theater on Thursday night, is of the kites. They’re miniature, attached to thin poles that several actors wave, white tissue-paper flitting, birdlike, over their heads. The paper crinkles as the kites part the air with a soft swish.If only the rest of this stiff production, adapted by Matthew Spangler from the popular 2003 novel by Khaled Hosseini, exuded such elegance.A redemption story about an unlikable — sometimes downright despicable — protagonist, “The Kite Runner” opens in 2001, with Amir (Amir Arison), a Pashtun Afghan who explains that a cowardly decision he made at 12 years old shaped the person he is today.He doesn’t tell us what it was immediately; he steps back in time to show us scenes of his life in Kabul, with his single father, Baba (Faran Tahir); their servant Ali (Evan Zes), a member of the oppressed and harassed Hazara minority group; and Ali’s son, Hassan (Eric Sirakian). The rest of the cast of 13 fills in as other figures in Amir’s life, including his future wife, Russian soldiers, and various nameless characters from the Afghan community on both sides of the world.Arison (who plays the preteen Amir as well throughout) reads to the illiterate Hassan, though not without mocking him for it. He lets Hassan take the fall when they get in trouble. Yet Hassan faithfully partners with Amir in a competitive game where kite owners maneuver and use coated or sharpened strings to cut their competitors out of the sky; runners chase and catch the fallen kites as a prize.Reporting From AfghanistanInside the Fall of Kabul: ​The Taliban took the Afghan capital with a speed that shocked the world. Our reporter and photographer witnessed it.On Patrol: A group of Times journalists spent 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul. Here is what they saw.Face to Face: ​​A Times reporter who served as a Marine in Afghanistan returned to interview a Taliban commander he once fought.A Photographer’s Journal: A look at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, chronicled through one Times photographer’s lens.When Amir fails to stop an act of violence against Hassan, the boys’ friendship is irreparably damaged. Hassan never truly leaves Amir, though; he carries the guilt to America, to which he and Baba escape after Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan ushers in the vicious regime of the Taliban. After finding love and a successful career, Amir eventually returns to his homeland to redeem himself from his past transgressions.“The Kite Runner” was first staged in 2007 at San Jose State University, and went on to play throughout England, eventually on the West End. For the Broadway engagement, producers turned to Arison, an Off Broadway regular who had a supporting role for nearly a decade on NBC’s “The Blacklist.”Under Giles Croft’s direction, Arison’s Broadway debut proves spotty. He recites his opening lines with the stiffness of a child delivering a book report, and never totally eases into the role.The part would be tough work for any actor; Amir is onstage for the entire show, and the transitions between his middle-aged and younger selves, some three decades apart, require the kind of gymnastics that not every performer can stick.Not to mention the challenge of the character himself: a cowardly, insecure boy who becomes a cowardly, insecure man despite a childhood bolstered by the unfaltering love and loyalty of his friend Hassan, played with heartbreaking innocence by Sirakian.Eric Sirakian (in red) is heartbreaking as the childhood friend of Arison’s Amir in the play, which Matthew Spangler adapted from the novel.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIt’s easier in the novel to ride the twists and turns of Amir’s journey, even as he leaves Hassan behind in the first third of the story. Onstage the play shuffles along, and it’s hard to stay invested in this unpalatable hero with Hassan in the rearview mirror.For those who haven’t read “The Kite Runner” or seen the 2007 film, I won’t spoil the violent scene that causes the rift between the two friends, but it’s one that feels jarring in what otherwise reads like a tidy parable. Gasps of surprise from the audience signaled the sudden shock of real-world horror.Again, part of that isn’t negotiable, since the emotionally pandering novel is the show’s DNA. But Croft’s mechanical direction often plays up the pathos, as when a character dies too dramatically, or in a scene where Amir prays for a loved one to be spared. Then there’s the phlegm-inducing serving of cheese, when Amir finds himself in 1981 San Francisco: Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” plays as characters in gaudy ’80s duds traipse across the stage throwing out random decade-appropriate nouns like “Prince,” “Pac-Man” and “Darth Vader.”For “The Kite Runner” to work, the boys’ nemesis needs to be formidable, but Spangler’s script diminishes Assef (Amir Malaklou), the childhood bully. He is no longer the novel’s sociopathic neo-Nazi, but more of an antagonist from an after-school special — with a shaky accent.Speaking of shaky, Barney George’s set design — which includes a stage-length vert ramp seemingly borrowed from a skate park and jagged rectangular panels lined up along the back wall — is frustratingly ambiguous. Two giant fabric sails occasionally descend from on high, resembling wings of a kite, but they are mostly distracting.William Simpson’s projection design provides a dose of whimsy, however, the watercolor renderings of a kite-filled sky or a pomegranate tree lending a fanciful storybook quality to the script.Legitimacy is always a tricky question when it comes to productions about people of color. That a story about the struggles of Afghans over the course of nearly three decades is on Broadway is a feat in itself, as is the cast of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent.Chunks of dialogue are spoken in a Farsi dialect (all credit to the cultural adviser and script consultant Humaira Ghilzai) and much of the underscoring features the tuneful plinks and thumps of the tabla player Salar Nader, a steady presence on one side of the stage and one of the production’s gems. (Jonathan Girling wrote the evocative music.)Still, “The Kite Runner” is not nearly as rich as the spate of Off Broadway plays that have recently explored the individual and national losses faced by Iran and Afghanistan, including Sylvia Khoury’s “Selling Kabul” and Sanaz Toossi’s “English” and “Wish You Were Here.” As Off Broadway has often proved, there are more compelling ways to tell a story.The Kite Runner Through Oct. 30 at the Hayes Theater, Manhattan; thekiterunnerbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Putin, Chekhov and the Theater of Despair

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      In London, a new play about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and a revival of “The Seagull” explore undercurrents of pain.LONDON — There’s a chill in the air at the Almeida Theater, notwithstanding the record-breaking heat here. That drop in temperature comes from the coolly unnerving “Patriots,” a new drama whose look at power politics in Russia over the last quarter-century induces a shiver at despotism’s rise.The gripping production, directed by Rupert Goold, runs through Aug. 20.Written by Peter Morgan (“The Crown,” “Frost/Nixon”), “Patriots” surveys the sad, shortened life of Boris Berezovsky, the brainiac billionaire who died in 2013, age 67, in political exile in London. An inquest into Berezovsky’s mysterious death returned an unusual “open verdict,” but on this occasion, it is unequivocally presented as a suicide: The play ends with this balding man, bereft of authority, preparing to end his life.An academic whiz-turned-oligarch who expedited the rise of the younger Vladimir V. Putin, Berezovsky later fell out with the onetime ally who enlarged his power base, according to the play, with promises of “liberalizing Russia,” yet proceeded to do anything but.Morgan introduces Berezovsky, age 9, as a math prodigy whose mother hoped he might become a doctor. (A gleaming-eyed Tom Hollander plays the role throughout.) From there, we move forward 40 years to find Berezovsky an integral member of Russia’s moneyed elite welcoming to his office an obsequious Putin, then deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.“Respected Mr. Berezovsky,” says an initially indrawn, ferret-like Putin, “one would have to live on another planet not to know you!” But it isn’t long before Putin has changed his tune, and his tone, as he rises from prime minister to president and consolidates power around himself. In one notably effective wordless scene, Putin tries out poses in front of a mirror to see which makes him look most impressive. His earlier hesitancy has given way to a man in love with his own heroism.Berezovsky looks on at so dramatic a change in character appalled, urging the former K.G.B. operative to “know your place.” But Putin by this point simply won’t be sidelined. And besides, reasons Putin, why hold your enemies close when they can just as easily be destroyed?Tom Hollander as Boris Berezovsky in “Patriots.”Marc BrennerGoold, the director, dealt with a different headline-maker at the Old Vic this spring in “The 47th,” which imagined Donald J. Trump in the run-up to the next presidential election. Goold is in better company this time: “Patriots” is a richer, less fanciful play, with grim resonances for today. Although Morgan rightly leaves it to the audience to make the connection, you can draw a line between the glorious empire Putin yearns for in the play and his ongoing attack on Ukraine.In one of the performances of the year, Will Keen, as the Russian leader, astonishes throughout, bringing his character to agitated, unpredictable life. His early fawning in Berezovsky’s presence gives way to an icy rejection that finds its fullest expression when his onetime mentor writes as a fellow patriot requesting permission to come home to Russia. Putin dictates a reply, then tells his secretary to rip the letter up: Berezovsky, Putin concludes, “is not worth it.”Hollander impresses, too, as he did in a dazzling star turn in “Travesties,” which won the actor a 2018 Tony nomination — two talky plays requiring an actor at home with reams of language. His character is both a quick-tempered womanizer, and too naïve to realize the young Putin’s potential for authoritarian misrule.Widening the play’s scope yet further is the Russian president’s friend, the oligarch Roman Abramovich (the excellent Luke Thallon), who battles Berezovsky over ownership of the oil company Sibneft. That case, which came to trial in London in 2012, plays out here as a resounding defeat for Berezovsky that only amplifies his psychic distress. Alexander Litvinenko (Jamael Westman, a former leading man in “Hamilton”), the Putin critic who was poisoned in 2006, shows up, too, as the “most honorable” of dissidents (or so Morgan maintains): a political casualty wreathed in glory that the sorrowful Berezovsky never knew.There’s an aspect of bravery, you feel, in writing “Patriots” at all while Putin is on the march. (That said, like Trump with “The 47th,” it’s possible these men’s egos would thrive on the attention.) In the days after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, orchestras, concert halls and opera houses pulled Russian works from their stages, and it looked as if it might no longer be allowable to perform the Russian repertory in the West; overseas trips by the Bolshoi Ballet, among other storied Russian arts companies, were canceled, as well.Emilia Clarke, second from right, in Anya Reiss’s interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” directed by Jamie Lloyd at the Harold Pinter Theater.Marc BrennerSo it’s a relief to welcome a Russian classic, “The Seagull,” first presented in 1896 by Anton Chekhov, who died nearly a half-century before Putin was even born. That this first of Chekhov’s four great plays ends, as does “Patriots,” with a suicide is an intriguing coincidence that also points to the undercurrents of pain that inform both plays.Performed barefoot and in modern dress, Jamie Lloyd’s enthralling production, at the Harold Pinter Theater through Sept. 10, furthers the stripped-back approach to the classics he brought to a recent “Cyrano de Bergerac” that was acclaimed in New York and London.Just as that play dispensed with a fake nose for its title character, this “Seagull,” seen here in Anya Reiss’s 2012 version, never features the wounded bird of the title onstage. Doing without props of any kind, the cast members, headed by the “Game of Thrones” alumna Emilia Clarke in a terrific West End debut, deliver the play seated on green plastic chairs and boxed in by chipboard; they speak with a quiet intensity, as though we were eavesdropping on the characters’ innermost thoughts. Some will be exasperated by the approach, but I was riveted from the first hushed utterance to the last.Like “Patriots,” this “Seagull” draws from its own well of grief, even if the world of writers and actresses in Chekhov’s play is a long way from Morgan’s power-brokers and politicos. Lloyd’s ensemble communicates the shifting affections of a quietly devastating play that leaves you transfixed by the theatrical potency of despair.Patriots. Directed by Rupert Goold. Almeida Theater, through Aug. 20.The Seagull. Directed by Jamie Lloyd. Harold Pinter Theater, through Sept. 10; in cinemas Nov. 3. More

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      An Immersive ‘Next to Normal’ Debuts in Barcelona

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      The Broadway musical and its Tony-winning star, Alice Ripley, return to the stage in this condensed and deconstructed production.BARCELONA, Spain — When Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey began writing their 2008 rock musical, “Next to Normal,” they wanted to create a piece in which, according to Yorkey, they could “bring the audience into the mind of the main character.” That character, Diana Goodman, is a suburban wife and mother with bipolar disorder who grapples with the harrowing symptoms of her mental illness while trying to maintain a functional life.The emotional musical not only won acclaim — it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010 — but also resonated with theatergoers, playing on Broadway at the Booth Theater from 2009 to 2011. In his review, Ben Brantley wrote that the show “gives full weight to the confusion and ambivalence that afflict not only Diana but also everyone around her.”Now, audiences here are experiencing “Next to Normal” in a whole new way through an immersive, hourlong production that recently opened at the Festival Grec de Barcelona. This version, stripped of its props, sets and live orchestra, is being presented in a venue with an open-floor plan, a surround-sound system and 360-degree projections. The cast performs in English, with Spanish and Catalan supertitles, alongside the audience members, who sit in small cubes and become ghostlike witnesses sharing living quarters with the Goodman family.Alice Ripley, who originated the part of Diana, has returned to the role, and she shares the stage with Andy Señor Jr., who plays her husband, Dan; Lewis Edgar, who portrays her son, Gabriel; Jade Lauren, who plays her daughter, Nathalie; and Eloi Gómez, who is Nathalie’s love interest, Henry. But some of Ripley’s most thrilling exchanges occur with an actor thousands of miles away: Adam Pascal, who plays her “rock star” doctor, and who, in a nod to the pandemic, holds his sessions with her via Zoom. Ripley and Pascal rehearsed their scenes together in Florida (he is performing in the national tour of “Pretty Woman: The Musical”), and the recordings of his scenes make Pascal appear to be a larger-than-life figure, adding to the show’s surreal effect.“I would venture to say that I am now the first actor to perform simultaneously in the United States and Barcelona in two different shows at the same time,” Pascal wrote in an email.Ripley won a Tony Award for her role as a woman grappling with mental illness. The immersive show features wall-to-wall screens, with imagery of abstract landscapes meant to evoke Diana’s inner state. David Ruano“Next to Normal” is being produced by the Grec Festival, Layers of Reality and Pablo del Campo, who first saw the musical in 2010 and became obsessed with it. (At the time, he was working as the worldwide creative director of the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, splitting his time between London and New York.) Struck by Diana’s emotional ordeal, he said he felt the story needed to be translated into other languages and began working on a Spanish-language adaptation during layovers. A determined del Campo soon found himself pitching his idea directly to Yorkey, and not long after, the Spanish-language production, titled “Casi Normales,” was onstage in Buenos Aires, where it has been running for 10 years.But that wasn’t the end of del Campo’s involvement with “Next to Normal.” In early 2020, weeks before Covid-related lockdowns began, del Campo had what he called “a moment of electroshock” while visiting an artificial intelligence exhibition at the IDEAL Center d’Arts Digitals de Barcelona, which specializes in producing and showcasing digital arts projects. As he watched robots translate texts into visual displays, del Campo said he envisioned Diana in the number “Wish I Were Here,” in which she sings, “When the bolt of lightning crashes / and it burns right through my mind.”Before long, del Campo approached Kitt and Yorkey with his idea for an immersive production, and they — surprisingly — agreed to compress their two-act, nearly two-and-a-half-hour musical. Some scenes of dialogue were cut, but all the big musical numbers remain. The British director Simon Pittman was brought in to oversee the project, and Søren Christensen and Tatiana Halbach, who work under the name Desilence, created the visuals (including abstract landscapes meant to evoke Diana’s inner state). “There’s something to look at everywhere you turn,” Christensen said. “It’s like ‘Dogville’ meets a music video.”Reflecting on the richness of the production’s images, he added: “If movies are 4K, and really good-looking movies are 8K, this is up to four times that.”During a recent rehearsal at IDEAL, the cast was practicing “Who’s Crazy”/“My Psychopharmacologist and I,” a song about adjusting Diana’s medication. At first, the actors practiced their blocking in a completely empty space. Then the wall-to-wall screens lit up, and the actors were transported to a surrealistic world with ticking clocks, larger-than-life-size neurons floating like jellyfish, and pills resembling colorful raindrops falling from the sky. “We need more pills!” Halbach exclaimed at one point.The other element flooding the space was Ripley’s achingly emotional voice.“When we first made [Diana], I didn’t know what it was going to be — the audience watched me figuring it out live,” Ripley said, reflecting on the musical’s Off Broadway run at Second Stage Theater in 2008. She drew from that same feeling of adventure in tackling this new production, though she said she found the experience disorienting at first.“We actors are told never to give our backs to the audience,” she said, “and here all of those rules are gone.”The team behind the immersive production figured it was a no-brainer to bring back Ripley, who won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Diana, even in the wake of a 2021 report in The Daily Beast in which she was accused of “having sexual conversations with a girl as young as 13 and puppeteering a cult-ish, obsessive fan base of vulnerable youngsters.” Ripley later denied the accusations in a statement to The New York Post’s Page Six. “It is a misinterpretation of my actions to say I manipulated anyone, and more shockingly, that there was abuse,” she wrote in a statement.During a break from rehearsals last month, Ripley said she had no further comment about the accusations.Musical purists might clutch their pearls at the idea of a beloved Broadway show being deconstructed, but, as Pittman put it, “We’re doing a ‘Next to Normal.’” And Barcelona might just be the perfect locale for this experiment. After all, it’s the city of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, a towering basilica that’s been under construction since 1882 and a reminder that true masterworks can sometimes never truly be finished.Ripley, seated center, with from left: Lewis Edgar, Jade Lauren and Andy Señor Jr.David RuanoFor Pittman, directing one of his biggest shows to date felt like a throwback to his Fringe days in Edinburgh, which began in 2005, when he received rave reviews for his direction of “Hospitals and Other Buildings That Catch Fire.”“It’s like being in the underbelly,” he said, before adding: “I’ve never directed a show where you’re both building the process and the venue,” referring to the new technology that was installed at IDEAL to satisfy the production’s needs. (According to del Campo, the show’s budget is close to $1.2 million.)It’s been nearly 15 years since Ripley first inhabited the character of Diana. “Playing Diana is definitely more fun than it’s ever been,” Ripley said of her role in the production, which runs through Aug. 14. “I like to use my whole body to tell the story, and now I know people will be watching my hands or my heels or something.”She added: “I have gone through hell and back since I last played Diana,” referring to life-altering events like the death of her parents and changes in her body and her voice, “but this feels incredibly liberating. We come to the theater to be impacted like that, and to make an impact ourselves.” More

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      In a New Take on ‘Gaslight,’ a Heroine Finds Her Own Way

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      NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ontario — Nobody is coming to rescue Bella Manningham. And that’s a good thing.Bella, the damsel in seemingly self-inflicted distress at the center of “Gaslight,” has been a source of pity among theater and film audiences for more than 80 years. But when Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson dusted off the 1938 Patrick Hamilton melodrama, set in 1880, for this year’s Shaw Festival, they envisioned a very different fate for their heroine.“We didn’t want to change the rules of Victorian society and how they affected women,” Wright said. “Our question was: Is there a way for her to play by these rules and win?”And so they embarked on an ambitious reboot of the play, keeping the spooky setting (a Victorian sitting room) and the basic premise (is Bella losing her mind?), but jettisoning one major character. Gone is Detective Rough, the canny inspector who sets everything straight and explains it all to poor, poor Bella. The result is a total overhaul, complete with a nifty Act I curtain that forces audiences to spill into the lobby, sputtering, “What should she do now?”Ingrid Bergman as a wife pushed to the verge of madness, with Joseph Cotten as the London detective who solves the case, in George Cukor’s 1944 film version of “Gaslight.”Warner Bros. Those smothering rules weren’t confined to the action onstage, said the “Gaslight” director Kelli Fox. “I think the play was originally written for an audience who still expected that demure version of womanhood,” she said. “They wanted a story about a male hero coming to the rescue.”To some degree, current events have made “Gaslight” more topical but also more predictable. Its very title gives an indication of just how much trust the audience should put in Jack, Bella’s ever-solicitous husband. In fact, the term “gaslighting” — psychologically manipulating people into questioning their own sanity — draws its origins from the play, in which the household’s gas lights flicker and dim on the evenings when Bella is alone, causing her to question her own sanity.The concept lived on in psychological circles for decades but only burbled into mainstream society in recent years, to the point where the American Dialect Society honored the word as “most useful/likely to succeed” in 2016.“The weird thing,” Wright said, “is that we started writing this before ‘gaslighting’ became a big thing in the news. Maybe we sensed it was coming.”In her review of the play for The Toronto Star, Karen Fricker called it “a very satisfying piece of theatrical reinvention,” suggesting that theatergoers “bring a smart friend to this show to share the fun afterwards of combing through what happened, picking up cues and evidence in retrospect.”“Gaslight” is one of a handful of plays at the Shaw Festival, held in this bucolic town 20 miles north of Niagara Falls in honor of the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, to grapple with the idea of gender and femininity this year.Also at the Royal George Theater is Rabindranath Tagore’s one-act “Chitra,” based on a tale from the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, about a warrior princess who temporarily sheds her “manly” tendencies to attract a world-renowned archer. And the festival will expand to its full 11-show repertory next month to include one of August Wilson’s century cycle plays, “Gem of the Ocean,” which features the matriarch to end all matriarchs: the 285-year-old Aunt Ester Tyler. All three works will then run through early October.For Kimberley Rampersad, who both directed and choreographed “Chitra,” the 1892 play (translated into English from the original Sanskrit in 1913) was a natural fit for the festival: “Shaw and Tagore were both polymaths, and you can feel their politics coursing through their words,” she said. But it is also a reminder that such fits can be found outside the Western canon. “I picked this not to be disrespectful but to prove a point,” she said.Chitra’s gender fluidity had resonated with Rampersad since she was a young girl: “My parents call me their ‘boy child’ — I know, I know — and my father told me, ‘There is a play about you.’” (In the sort of dizzying cross-casting that is common at the Shaw Festival, Rampersad is also playing the decidedly and eternally feminine Lola in “Damn Yankees,” which also features Jamieson, the “Gaslight” co-writer, in its cast.)Gabriella Sundar Singh, center, as Chitra, with members of the corps in “Chitra.”David CooperFor “Gaslight,” Jamieson and Wright said they had originally planned to simply diverge from Hamilton’s play here and there, but soon realized that a gut renovation was needed to tell the story they wanted to tell. “I don’t know if there’s any original dialogue left in our version,” Wright said.Another modification involved adding some shadings of good and evil among the play’s female characters. One of the day-to-day stresses that Bella faces is a “new girl,” a housekeeper who is at the very least impertinent and lazy — and possibly a good bit worse.“It’s pretty boring to make this just a battle of the sexes,” Wright said.That battle was central to several works by Shaw, who is considered the first major playwright to depict what became known as the New Woman. (Rampersad said her initial exposure to his works came from reading “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” which takes a sympathetic view toward sex work. She remembers thinking, “A man wrote this?”)Much has been made of the Shaw Festival’s evolving “mandate,” which originally confined its repertory to Shaw and works written during his (usefully long) lifetime. The mandate then expanded to newer works set during Shaw’s life, then grew again to include essentially any play that Shaw might have liked.As it happens, “Chitra” and “Gaslight” both qualified under the original parameters. (Shaw died in 1950.) But Fox, who spent many years in the Shaw Festival acting ensemble before shifting her focus to directing, remembers feeling hamstrung by many of the roles she was offered here and elsewhere. “There was a time in my mid-30s when I said, ‘I would like to stop playing a naïve child now. Can I be a woman?’”As it happens, one such part was out there. It just hadn’t been rewritten yet. More

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      An ‘Impossible Dream’ Comes True, Again, for Marylouise Burke in ‘Epiphany’

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      The 81-year-old actress stars as an eccentric dinner party host. When she was a teenager, though, wanting to act was a secret she didn’t dare tell.The staircase in Brian Watkins’s play “Epiphany,” at Lincoln Center Theater, goes up and up. Tall and imposing, it’s the kind of centerpiece to a set that makes you wonder, when you arrive for a performance, who is going to be climbing and descending it.The actor Marylouise Burke, for one, spends considerable time dashing up and down those steps, which she knew from the script would be in the show. So when her agent got a call asking her to play the lead role of Morkan, the warmly eccentric host of a dinner party fueled by existential desperation and touched with spiritual longing, she asked him to inquire: Was it going to be “a normal staircase or a crazy staircase?”Not that she wasn’t tempted by the part, with which she had felt immediately simpatico since performing it in a prepandemic reading. But Burke, who is 81, diminutive and a longtime favorite of the playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, shattered both wrists and her left kneecap two years ago when she tripped on a pothole in front of the West Village building where she has lived in a studio apartment since 1977.And sometimes, she said the other afternoon, sitting a bit shyly for an interview in the theater’s glass-walled lobby, “you have a designer who decides that the floor is going to be absurd because the script is absurd or something like that. I just knew I needed it to be even steps going up. You know, they can’t all be different heights, or tilted.”Burke, seated at center left, with her fellow castmates at the dinner party table in the Lincoln Center Theater production of “Epiphany.”Jeremy DanielIn John Lee Beatty’s design, they are neither. Burke is on perfectly solid ground, which leaves her free to do the destabilizing. That is something of a specialty of hers: luring an audience in with a portrayal that on its surface is so instantly fascinating that we never think to expect that there’s more underneath. And there is always, always more underneath — comic, tragic or very possibly both.To Tyne Rafaeli, the director of “Epiphany,” Burke’s “particular brand of humor” and “ability to mask a simmering fragility” made her the ideal match for Morkan, a character who draws even new acquaintances toward her and elicits from them the impulse to help her.“Marylouise is that,” Rafaeli said. “She has that effect on other artists. People who are around Marylouise, they want to collaborate with her. They want to lean toward her. She just has that kind of energetic pull. So the line between her and the character is very thin, obviously.”Morkan is for Burke a rare starring part. Another was Kimberly, the teenager with the rapid-aging disease in Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo,” a role she originated in 2001, long before the play morphed into a musical. A character actor, Burke has been performing on New York stages since she arrived in the city in 1973, when she was 32 and eager “to have more opportunities to act for free,” she said, kidding but not. “It never occurred to me that I would ever in my whole life get paid to act.”Burke with John Gallagher Jr. in David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2001 play “Kimberly Akimbo” at City Center’s Stage I.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt was another eight years before she got her Actors’ Equity card, in a tiny part in an Off Broadway production of Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Broken Pitcher,” starring Larry Pine. By now she has amassed nearly 50 years of New York theater credits — many in the strange downtown productions she loves, among them the title role in the Mabou Mines-Trick Saddle show “Imagining the Imaginary Invalid,” at La MaMa in 2016.Her screen credits include movies like “Sideways,” in which she played the sprightly broken mother to Paul Giamatti’s middle-aged wreck, and television series like Netflix’s “Ozark,” in which she had a darkly delightful, Season 3 arc as the marriage therapist to Laura Linney and Jason Bateman’s extremely crimey central couple.“I actually knew probably from the time I was 13 or 14 that I wanted to act,” Burke said from behind a white KN95 mask that engulfed her lower face. “But it seemed like such an impossible dream. And I never admitted that to anybody.”She spent her childhood in Steelton, Pa., a Bethlehem Steel company town where her father owned a grocery store and her mother was a homemaker with comic timing that Burke inherited. The town was proud of its high school football team, and she played fight songs on clarinet in the school band at their games. But she didn’t know anyone who acted.Her adolescence coincided with the cookie-cutter conservative age of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and her family’s expectation — “once they found out that I was smart” — was that she would become a teacher. Off at college, though, in what she called “a major rebellion,” she swiftly changed her major from education to English, with a philosophy minor, and started acting in school plays.“I just always felt better when I was in a play,” she said, wrapping her arms protectively around her body, making herself even smaller. “I just always felt more who I was.”Hang on, what is that arm-wrapping gesture about? Burke hesitated, considered. Then: “I’d like to be nice to that girl back there,” she said, meaning her young self, the one with the “incongruous dream.”Burke at Lincoln Center. When it comes to acting in his new play “Epiphany,” the playwright Brian Watkins said her “level of specificity is just a gift to a writer.”Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesAfter college she earned a master’s degree in English literature, and discovered as a teaching assistant that she hated getting up in front of a class to speak. Floundering after a brief marriage in her mid-20s, she found herself living with a sympathetic aunt in suburban Philadelphia, holding down day jobs and taking classes at night at the nearby Hedgerow Theater Company.For years after she moved to New York, office jobs — copy editing, proofreading, word processing — kept her afloat. When “Kimberly Akimbo” opened Off Broadway in 2003, she said, five of her ex-bosses came to see it with their wives.She first worked with Lindsay-Abaire on his play “A Devil Inside” at Soho Rep in 1997; his “Fuddy Meers,” two years later at Manhattan Theater Club, was a career turning point, because casting directors started to notice her.When Watkins asked Lindsay-Abaire about casting Burke for “Epiphany,” Lindsay-Abaire thought it would make perfect sense. While their plays are very different, he said, “there is that dual tone of funny grief that runs under both of our works.”He told Watkins of Burke’s extraordinary devotion to playwrights, which Watkins marveled at nonetheless when she questioned him closely on the pronunciation he intended for the exclamation “Agh,” which appears repeatedly in her lines.“That level of specificity is just a gift to a writer,” he said.Even more strikingly, Burke was fighting through brain fog and physical fatigue to learn her lines, having had Covid just before rehearsals started.But Morkan is in her bones now — and Burke does, as Lindsay-Abaire said, come “bounding down those stairs like she was a 14-year-old.”At a time when, she said, theater is still “not the same” as it was prepandemic, she feels grateful for Lincoln Center Theater’s caution about Covid protocols, and grateful that its audience is masked. She is also happy to be back onstage, alongside eight fellow actors, telling her character’s story.“It’s very precious to be going out there,” she said. “Going out there together.” More