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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

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      ‘Heart’ Review: First a Starter Marriage, Then Real Love

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      In her new autobiographical solo play, the actress Jade Anouka recounts the joys and fears of falling for a woman after her marriage to a man ends.At 24, the actress and writer Jade Anouka got married. Had it been a movie, the first dance would have been set ominously to the theme from “Jaws.” Before the wedding, Anouka dismissed the fact that her fiancé had bought her a ring that did not fit. At 28, she got divorced.That relationship sounds like it had its share of drama — “he’s visited by the Beast,” Anouka says of her then-husband — but she evokes it only in passing in her new autobiographical solo play, “Heart,” which is presented by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan. The brief marriage was only a preamble to what really matters: Anouka then fell in love with a woman. It was easy at first, even though she had never been in a lesbian relationship. Then it was hard. Then it was easy, or easier, again.The director Ola Ince’s production can be oddly heavy-handed at times, as when Anouka must climb up and down a very tall chair, perhaps meant to symbolize her being thrown back into romantic infancy, or love as a precarious balancing act. Mostly it is distracting. Jen Schriever’s expressive lighting design, on the other hand, does an incredible amount of effective work.Anouka occupies the stage with confident grace, despite the heavy-handed production.Trévon JamesIn truth, Anouka needs little, occupying the stage with confident grace as she toggles between naturalistic storytelling and a more rhythmic and poetic spoken-word flow.Obviously her love life’s unexpected turn has been a paradigm shift for her. But at this point, the coming-out tale is a well-trodden genre. Over the past decades, checkpoints have emerged, and obligatory scenes have surfaced, so venturing onto this familiar terrain in 2022 is tricky.“Heart” feels disconcertingly generic at times: Anouka, perhaps in an attempt to make the show feel more “universal,” tends to prefer bromides like “love is love” over the details that would have grounded the play.This starts with her job as an actress. She relates how she couldn’t bring herself to be open about her new relationship with a woman, fearing that it might impact her career. “I wanna stay working, and not just in gay roles,” she tells herself. “I don’t wanna be seen as different.”Putting aside the fact that nowadays stars as big as Kristen Stewart and Tessa Thompson can be openly queer and get cast as Princess Diana and Valkyrie in high-profile films, the complex relationship between an actor and an audience’s gaze deserves more scrutiny than Anouka gives it here.Oddly, this casually charismatic, effortlessly charming performer does not even reflect on her past roles that have scrambled gender expectations, like the powerful witch queen Ruta Skadi in the series “His Dark Materials.” Of her starring in Phyllida Lloyd’s hit Shakespeare trilogy, which was set in a women’s prison, Anouka simply says she lands “a good job, a dream role in a company I already love.” She accompanies those words with some brief shadowboxing, a reference to her Hotspur in “Henry IV.”Information about Anouka’s family is not forthcoming, either, which is especially frustrating since she demonstrates a quicksilver ability to bring her parents to life in a couple of brief scenes — in a classic move, for instance, her mother brings out the Bible when told of the new affair.As for the love interest, she remains frustratingly devoid of identifying details, as if she were in a witness protection program. Those who would like to know more are better off heading to YouTube to watch “Her & Her,” a lovely short film Anouka made on a smartphone in 2020, for the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine project. It is anchored in all the quotidian minutiae we so miss in the play.HeartThrough Aug. 14 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; hearttheplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Billy Crystal’s ‘Mr. Saturday Night’ Will End Its Broadway Run

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      The stage musical, adapted from a 1992 film, will close Labor Day weekend after five months at the Nederlander Theater.“Mr. Saturday Night,” Billy Crystal’s musical about an aging comedian trying to reboot his career, will end its Broadway run on Labor Day weekend.The production, which, like many during this challenging time on Broadway, has been facing soft sales at the box office, began previews March 29 and opened April 27 at the Nederlander Theater. The production announced Sunday evening that its final performance will take place on Sept. 4; at the time of its closing, it is expected to have had 28 previews and 116 regular performances.The musical is about a fictional comedian, Buddy Young Jr., whom Crystal has been portraying off and on for decades, first for sketches in HBO specials and on “Saturday Night Live,” and then in a 1992 Hollywood movie. The musical, like the film, was written by Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel; it features music by Jason Robert Brown and lyrics by Amanda Green, and is directed by John Rando.Crystal, 74, once again stars as Young, who is a septuagenarian insult comic, employing jokes honed in the Jewish resorts of the so-called Borscht Belt in the mid-20th-century Catskills, trying to reclaim his relevance in a world that has moved on. Crystal had previously succeeded on Broadway with a solo show, “700 Sundays,” that first opened in 2004.“Crystal is utterly in his element performing live,” wrote the critic Laura Collins-Hughes in a review of “Mr. Saturday Night” for The New York Times. “If you are a fan of his, or simply someone who has missed that kind of symbiosis between actor and audience, it’s a pleasure to watch.”The show was nominated for five Tony Awards, including for best musical, book and score as well as for the performances by Crystal and Shoshana Bean, who plays his daughter, but won none. Crystal and Bean both tested positive for the coronavirus in May, and a few performances were canceled; similar health challenges have plagued many shows in recent months.The show has generally been staged just seven times a week — one fewer than the industry standard of eight — and its box office grosses have been middling, and dropping this summer. During the week that ended July 10 — the most recent for which data is available — the show grossed $542,696 for a six-performance week, playing to houses that were 61 percent full, according to the Broadway League.The musical, with James L. Nederlander as lead producer, was capitalized for $10 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money has not been recouped.Crystal is turning from Broadway back to television — he plans next to star in an Apple+ series, “Before,” which he will also executive produce. More

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      Review: In ‘Between the Lines,’ Romance Is Thwarted by Reality

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      A new Off Broadway musical, based on the best-selling young adult novel by Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer, is uneven but sweet, our critic writes.What a tricky business adaptations are. A musical based on a novel can never be the same as its source material, and it isn’t meant to be. But throw out too many of the original elements and you leave an audience wondering how you lost your way.Case in point: “Between the Lines,” the new Off Broadway musical based on the best-selling young adult novel of the same name, about a teenage romance thwarted by stubborn reality. The novel’s heroine, Delilah, lives in the same world we do, while Oliver, the boy she loves, is a fairy-tale prince trapped inside a book, forced to perform a princess-rescuing adventure each time a reader opens it.He and the other characters spend their lives on perpetual standby, waiting to be called to speak their lines. They are actors, in other words, and everything that happens in Oliver’s world when the book is shut is essentially a backstage drama. But that theatrical setup, so vital to Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer’s 2012 novel, gets hardly a glance in the musical, directed by Jeff Calhoun (“Newsies”) at the Tony Kiser Theater.The musical rebalances the story to center Delilah and her troubles. She’s a little older here — 17, not 15 — so her sudden interest in a children’s book is even more peculiar, but then again, she’s lonely. At school, she’s the friendless new kid; at home, she argues with her overwhelmed mother and misses her father, who left them and has a new family. It’s no wonder that her strongest impulse is to lose herself in fantasy.When Oliver starts speaking to her, she thinks she’s imagining it, but he swiftly becomes the ideal boyfriend — if only she could figure out how to bring him into her world.With a book by Timothy Allen McDonald and an innocuous score by Elyssa Samsel and Kate Anderson, “Between the Lines” has significant assets in Arielle Jacobs, who brings a savvy-sweet appeal to Delilah, and Jake David Smith, who makes Oliver a comically good-hearted naïf.“I had a fight with my mom,” Delilah tells him one night, the fairy tale open to the only page where he’s alone and can speak freely. “She loses it every time I mention my dad.”“Ah!” Oliver says, all sympathy. “Was he taken by a dragon?”These two are adorable, and so is Frump (Will Burton), Oliver’s floppy-haired best friend — a human transformed by a curse into a dog, which does not help his chances with the princess he adores, Seraphima (cleverly played at the performance I saw by an understudy, Aubrey Matalon). Also winning: Wren Rivera as Jules, who in the novel is Delilah’s closest friend but here is a fellow outcast she’s only just met.From left, Vicki Lewis, Wren Rivera and Jerusha Cavazos in “Between the Lines.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesThese characters leave you wanting more of them, while the musical spends time on the fractured relationship between Delilah and her mother, Grace (Julia Murney), who is made to look unaccountably drab when all she needs to look is tired. (Costumes are by Gregg Barnes; wigs, hair and makeup are by J. Jared Janas.) Too much oxygen is also given to the popular kids at Delilah’s school, in what feels like an attempt to lure theater’s “Mean Girls” demographic.Jules, who is nonbinary here, isn’t permitted simply to be a cool person the way they might be in life. Instead, the show uses the character as an occasion for teachable moments about what it means to be nonbinary. It’s well intended but demeaning.The musical makes a big deal of Delilah rejecting the fairy-tale notion of happily ever after in favor of shaping a more deeply fulfilling life. But the script forces antediluvian clichés on some of the grown-up female characters. Ms. Winx (Vicki Lewis), the school librarian, is a tragic spinster, warning Delilah not to end up in the same situation; Mrs. Brown (Lewis), the chemistry teacher, “has more plastic in her than the ocean” and is evidently sleeping with the principal. When Queen Maureen (Murney), Oliver’s fairy-tale mother, and the Lady in Waiting (Lewis) trade insults, they go like this: “Spinster.” “Wench.” “Lush.”The musical does nail its very sweet ending, which is different from the ending of the novel. The show also gives Frump, the dog, a darling tap dance (choreography is by Paul McGill), and has fun with its book-lined set (by Tobin Ost).But one of the show’s most enchanting visual effects — tableaus of Oliver and other fairy-tale characters upstage, as if illustrated on the page — has an unfortunate flaw: Faintly behind the scrim, we can see the actors clambering into and out of position. It doesn’t seem deliberate, just distracting. (Lighting is by Jason Lyons; projections are by Caite Hevner.)For Delilah and Oliver to be together, it seems, they need to change the story he’s in so that they can follow their own narrative. “Between the Lines,” then, is an empowerment musical about using the agency you have to shape the existence you want.This show’s creators certainly have used their own agency to rewrite a story. Alas, for them and the audience, the results are decidedly mixed.Between the LinesThrough Oct. 2 at the Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan; betweenthelinesmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Lend Me a Jukebox Opera. Yuks and Tenor Required.

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      “Let’s do a Rossini comedy that doesn’t exist yet,” the head of the Glimmerglass Festival said. Coming soon: Ken Ludwig’s “Tenor Overboard.”Comic operas tend to be crowd-pleasers: At last, a break from all the tragic deaths and doomed lovers. The problem is there aren’t that many to choose from. Opera companies can program “Così Fan Tutte,” “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” or “L’Elisir d’Amore” and a handful of others only so many times.So Francesca Zambello, the artistic and general director of the Glimmerglass Festival, came up with a novel idea. “I just said, ‘Let’s do a Rossini comedy that doesn’t exist yet,’” she said in a recent video conversation.In other words, a jukebox opera — “Tenor Overboard,” which is to have its premiere at the festival, in Cooperstown, N.Y., on Tuesday and run through Aug. 18.While the jukebox format is common enough on Broadway, it is much rarer in opera houses. Baroque opera lends itself to the genre better than most styles, from the “pasticcio” of yore, which recycled pre-existing works, to “The Enchanted Island” in 2011, a Metropolitan Opera commission in which the librettist Jeremy Sams inserted music by Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau and others into a plot borrowed from Shakespeare plays.Undaunted by this relative dearth, or maybe stimulated by it, Zambello called the playwright Ken Ludwig last summer to ask if he would be interested in writing the libretto for the project. He was a good candidate on two counts: He wrote the book for “Crazy for You,” the Tony-winning Gershwin jukebox musical, and his most famous play, “Lend Me a Tenor,” is a farce involving an opera star in the 1930s. (His new “Lend Me a Soprano,” with lead female characters in the same basic plot, opens at the Alley Theater in Houston in September.)Ludwig, an opera buff, jumped on the opportunity to collaborate, sort of, with Rossini. He decided to set “Tenor Overboard” in the 1940s and to cram it with what he called “the great tropes of comic opera.”“Often they are stories about love that can’t be fulfilled because the older generation is trying to stand in the way of the sexual urges of the younger generation: ‘You can’t marry that boy,’” he said in a video chat. “I also wanted a storm — they often change the story, as they did in ‘Barber of Seville’ and ‘The Italian Girl in Algiers.’”Rossini “was such a comic genius,” Ludwig said. “And I’ve tried to write a libretto that is comic in the same way, and in the same way my plays normally have that sense of rhythm.”Adrianna Newell for The New York TimesLudwig cooked up a story involving two New York sisters, Gianna (Reilly Nelson) and Mimi (Jasmine Habersham), trying to escape their domineering father and an arranged marriage for Mimi. They end up joining — in cross-dressing disguise, a narrative device beloved by Shakespeare, opera and screwball comedy alike — an all-male quartet called the Singing Sicilians on a ship sailing to Sicily. Naturally, mayhem ensues.“Tenor Overboard” relies more on theatrical dialogue than on the usual operatic recitative, so Ludwig’s libretto had to be fairly extensive — and funny. “Rossini has given you moments that clearly land comically because he was such a comic genius,” Ludwig said he told the singers. “And I’ve tried to write a libretto that is comic in the same way, and in the same way my plays normally have that sense of rhythm.”Ludwig also retooled the supertitles that accompany the arias, which are sung in Italian, trying to give some of them “rhyme and rhythm,” as he put it. “Opera supertitles do need to convey to people something and you want people to be looking at the stage,” said Zambello, who is directing the production with Brenna Corner, “but these also have a little bit of extra Ludwig humor.”From left, Matt Grady and Gavin Grady, with Stefano de Peppo. “Tenor Overboard” was hatched in about a year. “Rossini wrote his operas sometimes in a month so why shouldn’t we?” Francesca Zambello said.Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass FestivalAfter a general synopsis had been agreed upon, the hardest part was still to come: It had to be filled with music — which, in the end, came from 15 different sources.“We wanted to be absolutely sure that we weren’t just rehashing famous arias of Rossini,” Joseph Colaneri, Glimmerglass’s music director, said on Zoom. “Yes, we have the ‘Barbiere’ duet, but we wanted this piece to also represent lesser-known music by Rossini.”Colaneri became part detective, tracking down obscure versions of obscure operas online and in libraries, and part MacGyver, adapting some vocal scores to make them work in their new context. The text of the “Barbiere” duet, “Dunque io son,” that Colaneri referred to, for example, was slightly adjusted to make sense in the story. And because Ludwig’s main couple is made up of a mezzo and a baritone (a nod to “Dunque io son”), some transposing was required — Rossini tended to pair a tenor and a soprano for the love duets of his comic operas.Another challenge was the scene introducing the Singing Sicilians, whom we first meet at a Y.M.C.A. — because why not? Colaneri looked at male quartets in Rossini operas but couldn’t find anything suitable. So he turned his attention to short pieces the composer wrote for “soirées musicales” after he stopped writing operas, and spotted the patter song “La Danza” (recorded by Luciano Pavarotti, among others).Colaneri had to write a vocal arrangement for two tenors, a baritone and a bass — and more. “It has to work again in the second act because two of the men are replaced by the two women who are in disguise as men,” he said. “They’re singing in the female range, but I designed the piece so that it could work with mixed vocal styles.”“Some people would say, ‘How can you transpose Rossini?’” Colaneri said. “But Rossini did this himself all the time.”For Act 2, Colaneri had to find a basso buffo aria for the sisters’ father, Petronio (Stefano de Peppo). Instead of the popular “A un dottor della mia sorte,” from “Il Barbiere,” he chose “Io, Don Profondo” from “Il Viaggio a Reims” (an opera Rossini himself had harvested for parts, reusing some of it in “Le Comte Ory”). “To me, it’s the greatest of these buffo arias,” Colaneri said. “Rossini kind of went over the top with it. We knew we were going to have Stefano and that he would be able to pull it off.”Contreras and Reilly Nelson in this jukebox opera.Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass FestivalColaneri and his cast also had to deal with the vocal embellishments and ornamentation that are part of performing Rossini. The conductor suggested that the singers listen to Ella Fitzgerald’s live version of “How High the Moon” for an example of masterful improvisation, which he described as “harmonically off the charts.” He also worked closely with them to come up with ornamentations that fit their register and roles. “You can’t write ornamentation for someone until you hear what they can do,” Colaneri said. “You have to kind of suss that out.”As with most comedies, speed and timing are of the essence onstage and even off — “Tenor Overboard” was hatched in about a year. “Rossini wrote his operas sometimes in a month so why shouldn’t we?” Zambello said.Fans should be reassured that they will laugh with Rossini, not at him. “We are seeking to perform these pieces with all the musical integrity necessary to make them come off,” Colaneri said. “We’re taking it all musically very seriously, and putting a spin on it.”Still, it’s clear that Zambello wants this work, part of her last season as the head of the Glimmerglass Festival (she remains the artistic director of the Washington National Opera), to be unabashedly festive. “It’s Italy, Sicily, food — things that people love.”When asked if she was willing to embrace Ludwig’s love of farcical shenanigans and have someone hurl a plate of spaghetti for a laugh, Zambello smiled. “I’m resisting that,” she said. “But I think it’s going to work its way in.” More

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      Medieval Times Employees Vote to Unionize in New Jersey

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      The horsemen, courtiers, stablehands and other performers at ye olde New Jersey tourist attraction formed a new kind of medieval guild when they voted to unionize.LYNDHURST, N.J. — In 11th-century Spain, a nobleman trying to put his hand up the queen’s skirt after a royal feast might be subjected to medieval torture methods.But at the Medieval Times just off Route 3, dealing with that kind of behavior has been accepted as part of the job for too long, said Monica Garza, one of several actresses who plays the queen at the dinner-and-a-tournament attraction.Garza said management made her feel like a “diva” for requesting additional security protocols after she pointed out increasingly bold behavior from guests. It was only after an incident in which a rowdy ticket holder got close to her throne and tried to shout into her microphone, Garza said, that management installed a chain to block access to her.The desire for bolstered security and other safety measures at the castle — where falling off horses can be part of the job description — was one reason that queens, knights, squires and stablehands at the Lyndhurst castle voted on Friday to unionize.The unionization effort, first reported by The Huffington Post, prevailed on Friday, when the employees voted, 26 to 11, to join the American Guild of Variety Artists. The medievalists will join a wide array of performers represented by the guild, including the Radio City Rockettes, some circus performers, and the character actors who perform at Disneyland — including Mulan and Aladdin, for example — in California.The employees are also seeking higher pay (Garza receives $20 per hour, and squires start at about $14 per hour), and for higher-ups to treat them more like skilled workers — trained stuntmen who perform intricate fights with lances, swords and axes, and experienced actors who do more than just read lines. Medieval Times management did not respond to requests for comment.A knight, Sinan Logan, with one of the horses backstage in 2007. Sylwia Kapuscinski for The New York Times“A huge point of the union is just basic respect,” said Garza, 25, a trained actor and self-described history nerd. “People will always exploit you when it’s something you love, because they know you’ll do it for nothing.”Many performers ultimately fall in love with the job, even if they didn’t initially dream of working at the concrete castle, with its vast hall of arms and seemingly endless supply of tomato bisque. The two-hour shows are staffed by a motley crew that includes an ex-Marine, an erstwhile Elton John backup singer, a musical theater student turned stuntman, a former zookeeper and an actor known for his voice work on the video game “Grand Theft Auto.”“We are a bunch of misfits,” laughs Sean Quigley, 33, the backup singer who is also a classically trained actor from London, giving him no need to fake a British accent. (The show is technically set in Spain, but New Jersey audiences aren’t picky.)Read More on Organized Labor in the U.S.Apple: Employees at a Baltimore-area Apple store voted to unionize, making it the first of the company’s 270-plus U.S. stores to do so. The result provides a foothold for a budding movement among Apple retail employees.Starbucks: When a Rhodes scholar joined Starbucks in 2020, none of the company’s 9,000 U.S. locations had a union. She hoped to change that by helping to unionize its stores in Buffalo. Improbably, she and her co-workers have far exceeded their goal.Amazon: A little-known independent union scored a stunning victory at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. But unlike at Starbucks, where organizing efforts spread in a matter of weeks, unionizing workers at Amazon has been a longer, messier slog.A Shrinking Movement: Although high-profile unionization efforts have dominated headlines recently, union membership has seen a decades-long decline in the United States.Taking orders from their corporate headquarters in Texas, the Lyndhurst shows are engineered to follow the same structure each night. Visitors here put on the same paper crowns and eat the same four-course meal as in Atlanta and Baltimore. The queens are paid to say the same lines as in the company’s other nine castles, where a reported 1.5 million guests visited last year.“Good nobles, welcome to the hall of my forefathers,” Garza says as she rides atop a white Andalusian into an arena of shrieking children wielding light-up swords.The queen hasn’t been in charge of the realm for long. The show had always cast a king as the lead, but about five years ago the company rewrote the script, putting a queen on the throne to accommodate requests for more substantive roles for women.The new story goes something like this: After inheriting the realm, the queen stages a tournament in which six knights on horseback compete for a vaunted title, but her power is threatened by a sleazy adviser who plots to marry her off. The dialogue is often drowned out by the aforementioned shrieks and the bustle of the “serfs and wenches” (Medieval Times-speak for waiters), who are known to end the evening with, “Cash or card, milady?”For the actors, who can perform the same script several times a week, year after year, the lines start to feel tattooed on their brains — so they find ways to entertain themselves.Paper crowns have long been de rigueur at the castle, as seen in 2007. Sylwia Kapuscinski for The New York Time“I’ll do a show where I’m pretending I’m secretly in love with the queen; I’ll do a show where I’m secretly in love with one of the knights,” said Quigley, who plays Lord Marshal, the show’s emcee. “In order to keep it fresh, you can tell a different story in your head.”Quigley, who auditioned for a job at Medieval Times after struggling to make a smooth transition between London’s West End and New York’s theater scene, also amuses himself by assuming various accents. He’s tried a cockney drawl, performed the whole show as if he were Sean Connery and put on a voice like Jon Snow from “Games of Thrones” — it was only when he tried doing the entire performance with a lisp that the sound department sent a runner to tell him to cut it out.For Christopher Lucas, the video-game voice actor who has also appeared in daytime soap operas, his improvisational frisson comes during a scene where, as the queen’s slimy adviser, he goes on and on about his adoration for oranges from Valencia in an oration that verges on the unhinged. For reasons that even Lucas can’t quite understand, the audience loves it, sometimes starting a chant — “Oranges! Oranges! Oranges!” — and bringing him fresh fruit on their next visit.“As a performer, these are the types of things you live for,” Lucas said.Ultimately, the enterprise of Medieval Times, which started in Spain and came to the United States in 1983, revolves around the knights, who parade around the arena on horseback before jousting and dueling for the queen.One of New Jersey’s most veteran knights, Antonio Sanchez, 31, had grown disillusioned with the idea of a long-term career in the U.S. Marines when he saw on Facebook that Medieval Times was hiring. On a whim in 2014, he drove to the Lyndhurst castle, walked into the horse stables, and soon, he was mucking out stalls and saddling up the steeds before showtime.“From the back of the stables, you could hear the crowd roaring,” Sanchez said, recalling the moment he started dreaming of becoming a knight.To get the job, no experience with horses is required. As knights’ apprentices, the men undergo hundreds of hours of training, learning both how to ride and how to roll off into the sand safely when rival knights “knock” them off.Employees at the castle in Lyndhurst, N.J., are now unionized.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“I don’t think I had ever been face to face with a horse before,” said Joe Devlin, 28, who started as a squire after he returned home from a stint as a touring musician and was in desperate need of a job.Protecting themselves with aluminum shields, the apprentices learn fight choreography that will gradually become committed to muscle memory.Still, accidents happen. The fact that the show is dependent on a stable of about two dozen horses adds an element of constant danger, said Purnell Thompson, a stablehand who was hired after losing his job taking care of farm animals at a local zoo. In an arena of boisterous revelers, there are many potential triggers for a horse to spook, including if audience members flout the rules and bang their metal plates and bowls onto the tables.Once, when Devlin was in training, he fractured his ankle learning how to jump off a horse. And Jonathan Beckas, a knight of two years, has dealt with an injured knee and two head injuries, including one that involved taking a wooden lance to the head. (Full-time workers receive health insurance.)One reason the knights are unionizing, said Beckas — a 27-year-old trained stuntman who is paid $21.50 per hour, up from $12 when he started working as a squire — is that they feel acutely underpaid considering the risks they take at work. “I am a knight, but I’m also a human,” he said.This isn’t the first time a union vote was held at this castle. There was a similar effort in 2006, where complaints largely centered around a lack of job security and fears that squires were becoming knights too quickly. That vote narrowly went against forming a union.Even before the vote on Friday’, employees said, they were seeing changes. After news of the unionization effort went public, garnering support from Gov. Phil Murphy, management installed a more robust barrier to her throne, Garza said.Now, the knights have bargaining power, and they plan on using it.“Being a knight is every little kid’s dream,” Sanchez said. “But I got older, and fun doesn’t pay the bills.” More

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      Review: In ‘Sex, Grift and Death,’ One-Acts That Test Perceptions

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      PTP/NYC, celebrating its 35th repertory season, returns to New York with short works by Steven Berkoff and Caryl Churchill.Two strangers on a park bench by the beach, partnering in a vicious dance of seduction. A woman from a family of swindlers, lying her way through dates with a wealthy new beau. Mourners at a funeral, and the deceased man himself, facing the frightening notion of the future and the afterlife to come.These scenarios, explored in three short, wily plays — “Lunch” (1983), by Steven Berkoff, and “Hot Fudge” (1989) and “Here We Go” (2015), by Caryl Churchill — create a triptych about the ways we love, lie or steal, and how we may act when the realities of the world don’t suit our expectations. Produced by PTP/NYC (Potomac Theater Project), the one-acts are being staged together at Atlantic Stage 2, where they recently opened under the title “Sex, Grift and Death.”In the first play, “Lunch,” directed by Richard Romagnoli for this New York premiere, a lonely salesman (Bill Army) spots a woman (Jackie Sanders) sitting on a park bench. The man approaches and begins an exchange — verbal but also physical, a pantomime of sex and combat — that reveals the primal urges that underlie courtship rituals.Army makes a virtue of his character’s sleaziness, so that even his outpouring of distasteful stream-of-consciousness thoughts, mixed with his desperate cajolery and odious asides, take on a kind of charm as he conspiratorially winks and nudges in the audience’s direction. Sanders’s character is aloof — calculating and willing to play the mating game but only on her terms. She’s both a player and an umpire, engaging him one moment and enforcing imaginary calls the next. Their verbal attacks feel like barbarous blows: “Your expressions are the buried side of a stone, moving with strange fetid life,” she fires at him. He describes her as a “lump of fornicatory stew.”A British playwright, director and actor, Berkoff is a kind of Shakespeare of invective, writing with a savagery of scorched earth warfare but also an alluring eloquence and imagination. A mad scramble of metaphors that activate the senses, Berkoff’s text for the two characters contains such indelicate imagery as “various succubi and incubi swarming” in a woman’s underwear, and boorish men in suits who “stream out like diarrhea” from their offices at 5 p.m.Berkoff’s script is written in a kind of speedy Morse code with asides, dashes and ellipses, all delivered in an unrelenting pace onstage. Under Romagnoli’s direction, the play moves like a speeding train — so fast that it throws you off, making it hard to get back onboard, which is unfortunate, given the compelling content and performances. Romagnoli incorporates physical theater — the kind of interpretive range of movement that characterizes much of Berkoff’s work — but even the more daring choreography and tableau, like the woman ripping open her shirt or straddling the man like a pony on a horse ranch, feels tame in comparison to the language.There’s a similar lack of punch in the Churchill works, both of which felt narratively incomplete and directionally imbalanced. “Hot Fudge,” the second play of the evening, begins with a family drinking in a pub and debating the best strategy for hustling banks out of money. Sonia (Molly Dorion) and her partner Matt (Gibson Grimm) lay out a convoluted scheme of deposits and withdrawals under fake names, but Sonia’s father, the cantankerous Charlie (Chris Marshall), praises the old tried-and-true stickup while his sloshed wife (Danielle Skraastad) makes crude jokes.This band of thieves is fascinating — enough to carry a whole play — and the perfect example of Churchill characters, who are often eccentric and inhabit unpredictable worlds. But there’s a bait and switch: The introduction of these relatives only for them to be forgotten doesn’t surprise as much as the shift to the character with the least amount of lines in that first scene — Sonia’s sister Ruby (Tara Giordano), who is thinking of getting out. Still, that doesn’t mean Ruby’s coming clean to her suitor, Colin (David Barlow), who thinks she’s the owner of a successful travel agency. Instead she doubles down on the lies as they go clubbing with his pretentious rich friends.From left: Chris Marshall, David Barlow, Tara Giordano, Teddy Best and Wynn McClenahan in Caryl Churchill’s “Hot Fudge,” directed by Cheryl Faraone.Stan BarouhThe last play, “Here We Go,” in its New York premiere, is similarly missing some bite. It begins at a funeral with several of the chatting mourners gossiping about petty matters and occasionally describing, in abrupt asides, when and how they’re going to die — whether in their sleep, by suicide or in a homicide. Then we hear from the dead man (Barlow, who gives a convincing performance, particularly in the ending), in a breathless existential monologue about life and death. The last scene, a solemn yet matter-of-fact couple of minutes of pure realism, is performed in total silence.As with “Hot Fudge,” this play seems at first to pull us toward the mourners, and their fascinating moments of prophecy, but quickly disposes of them. Cheryl Faraone, who directs both Churchill plays, tackles them with an even hand, though the tone and pacing could do a better job of helping to steer us to an understanding of each play’s priorities. As presented, it is hard to discern which moments and characters should most grab our attention. And Churchill’s overlapping dialogue could be smoothed out in some of the production’s choppier moments. (Under tighter direction it can move in a satisfying rhythm of interrupted sentences, outbursts and exclamations.)This production of short plays, which runs just under two hours, has hints of the remarkable among the more conventional moments. PTP/NYC (celebrating its 35th repertory season) goes for understatement here, aided by Mark Evancho’s minimal staging (one large projector screen; a bench and a lamppost in “Lunch”; and three smaller vertically hung projector screens, some stools and chairs for “Hot Fudge” and “Here We Go,” all on a stage roughly the size of a small New York City apartment living room).Still, the text could be enlivened, even challenged, with more forceful direction. A night of sensual play, manipulation, machinations and tragedy courtesy of two fiery playwrights like Berkoff and Churchill should never leave a room as cool as it does here.Sex, Grift and DeathThrough July 31 at Atlantic Stage 2, Manhattan; ptpnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. More