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      At Comedy Shows in Lviv, Crowds Look for Humor Amid a Deadly War

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      At the Cultural Defense shows in Lviv, comedians and audiences look for humor amid a deadly conflict. Don’t mind the air raid alarms.LVIV, Ukraine — Some morsels of news are so grim and absurd that they sound like they were conceived in the warped imagination of bored satirists. Like the headline from Belarus a few weeks ago, reporting that 10th graders there were being taught how to aim rifles — using shovels.“What do you think about that?” asks the comedian Vadym Dziunko.Dziunko is onstage with two other comedians and a well-known singer. All are seated and holding microphones, gamely trying to find humor in a place and at a moment when the tragic is trouncing the funny by a spectacular margin.It’s a recent Saturday night at the Cult Comedy Hall, a comedy club in downtown Lviv, near Ukraine’s relatively peaceful western border. Some 100 people have spent about $13 apiece to eat, drink and listen to comics riffing about whatever crosses their minds, which is often the latest news about the war with Russia. Or in the case of this shovel-as-rifle business, the topic is the oddness of life in Belarus, a dictatorship a mere 150 miles to the north.“What do you expect from a country where a potato is a weapon?” says the comedian Oleksandr Dmytrovych. Then he imagines an instructor, giving tips to the kids.“‘We can’t give you rifles yet — —”“‘Because we only have one,’” finishes the third comic, Maksym Kravets.From left, Maksym Kravets, Oleh Luzanov, Bohdan Vakhnich and Oleksandr Dmytrovych riff on whatever crosses their minds.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThis is Cultural Defense, an evening of unscripted and free-flowing humor staged in Lviv every few nights. It began two weeks after the Russian invasion, when Kravets, a Ukrainian intelligence officer by day and a comedian by night, called the co-creator of the show, Bohdan Slepkura, and pointed out that the Cult Comedy Hall was in a basement.“I said, ‘You know, the place is a bomb shelter,’” recalled Kravets, a burly and bearded 42-year-old.Kravets, wearing a T-shirt with “Wildness” on it, and Dmytrovych were sitting in another room in the club after the show recently. Initially, they said, they were not sure anyone in the country was in the mood for chuckles. The shock of the invasion was then fresh and hundreds of thousands of residents from the eastern part of the country were flowing into the city.“Before the first show, we thought, maybe this isn’t the right time for comedy,” said Dmytrovych, who is 30 and bearded, too. (“Without beards we’re ugly,” he explained.)“We were petrified,” he went on. “But after the first show, we came and sat in this room and realized, people want to laugh. They want to hear jokes about our enemy. From that first night, we understood this would be bigger than we had thought.”The shows are held in a basement space that is certified as a bomb shelter.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThere has been exactly one international breakout star in Ukrainian comedy and he happens to be the president of the country, Volodymyr Zelensky. If this puts pressure on others in the business, it wasn’t obvious onstage on this Saturday, when nobody seemed especially pressed to land on a punchline and a singer, Mykhailo Khoma, spent a lot of time ruminating about his childhood.Ukraine has long had a modest live-comedy scene, though anyone accustomed to the standard setup at American clubs will find novelty in the show’s format. There’s no warm-up act, and at no point is anyone standing onstage alone. There are different guests every night. The evening starts with four men leading a raucous call and response in Ukrainian, like the rest of the show.Hosts: “Glory to the Nation!”Audience: “Death to enemies!”Hosts: “Ukraine!”Audience: “Above all else.”Hosts: “Putin!”Audience: Unprintable putdown!After that, the stars take their seats and start to talk.Some of the humor is self-deprecating. In a previous show — they’re all available on YouTube — Dmytrovych riffed about the news that Ukrainian soldiers had mastered a “single use” antitank missile called an NLAW. This was amazing, he said, because by nature and necessity, Ukrainians are accustomed to reusing everything, over and over.“I got slippers in a hotel in Egypt a year and a half ago and I’m still wearing them,” he said. “When they got dirty, I washed them. When they fell apart in the washing machine, I glued them together. Now these are slippers I offer to guests.”Kravets is a Ukrainian intelligence officer by day and a comedian by night.Emile Ducke for The New York Times“For as long as we’re laughing, we’re not giving up,” Dmytrovych said.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThere are plenty of jokes at the expense of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who is scorned as a blustery idiot who underestimated the spirit and resolve of Ukrainians. The Russian military, on the other hand, is largely spared. The point, explained Dmytrovych, isn’t to belittle the invading forces, which Ukrainians regard as formidable and horrifying. It’s to lift the spirits of people who are not on the front lines, or who might have once lived near the front lines and have since relocated.So during one show, Kravets extolled the surprisingly polished beauty of checkpoints in Lviv (“I would not be surprised if they served lattes”), some of which have exceptionally long lines. (“I thought at the beginning they would take my order and at the end I’d be handed a Big Mac.”)Internal politics are a recurring theme. During a show a few weeks ago, a poll was cited that found 90 percent of Ukrainians want to join the European Union.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      ‘53% Of’ Review: Zinging Pro-Trump Women, and Everyone Else

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      A new comedy by Steph Del Rosso starts as a satire of conservatives, then takes aim at progressives. Too bad the jokes barely cut either side.In America, to vote in a federal election is to commit a secret act. One votes in private, in a curtained booth, on intimate terms with an oversize ballot. But little in American public life stays private for long.Exit polls soon provide precise demographic breakdowns, illuminating just who voted for whom. Perhaps you remember this statistic from back in 2016: Despite the “locker-room talk,” to say nothing of the accusations of groping, forced kissing and assault, 53 percent of white women voted for Donald J. Trump. The fitful new comedy “53% Of,” by Steph Del Rosso at Second Stage’s uptown space, takes that data point as inspiration. (Corrected metrics later showed it was more like 47 percent, but whatever.)The play begins in a middle-class living room, embellished with “Home Sweet Home” throw pillows and an outsize American flag. The setting is a small city in Pennsylvania. The time is wine o’clock. Four white women, members of a local conservative club called the Women for Freedom and Family Group, have met to toast Trump’s win and to make plans for his visit to their city. They’re joined by a fifth white woman, PJ (Eden Malyn), who arrives in a sweatshirt bearing the Confederate flag. That sweatshirt upsets the other women because it says the quiet part — the racism that undergirds their politics — loud and proud. It helps explain why these women have voted against their own gendered interests.After internal squabbles, the meeting devolves — a gelatin salad is thrown — and the actresses return, with slight changes of clothing (jackets instead of skirts), this time playing the women’s boorish husbands. It is a month or so later, and the men, also white, have gathered to watch the Trump inauguration.Grace Rex, Wake, Marianna McClellan and Crivelli, now as a progressive coalition in New York.Joan MarcusAfter a second change, the same actresses return again, this time as an urban collective of the pussy hat-knitting variety. The set, barely altered, has become a cramped New York apartment in some outer borough. The flag has gone, replaced by feminist ephemera. These women are white, too. Apparently the group had one Black member at one point. She hasn’t returned. There’s racism here, too, of course, which manifests as enthusiasm and tokenism.Del Rosso’s play is a kind of target practice, and in every act those targets are big. But the effect is hit or miss. The conservative women crave status and recognition. The conservative men crave women who aren’t their wives. The liberal women mask ego as sanctimony. None of this surprises. (I saw “53% Of” the day after the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, when in progressive corners of social media, ostensible allies had already begun to turn on one another.) The jokes are very shallow when they could go deep. Flesh wounds only. Take for example a moment in which the women contemplate going to a march against police brutality, only to ditch it for a bridal shower, a documentary screening, a date.A note in the script advises that “no one is a caricature in this play. Embrace their full complexities.” But Del Rosso and the director, Tiffany Nichole Greene, judge these characters energetically, which sours the play and leaves the actresses little space to expand beyond parody, though Anna Crivelli and Marianna McClellan find a few more grounded moments.The best scene of the play is also the last, in which Crivelli’s Sasha, who is white, goes for a drink with her college friend KJ (Ayana Workman), who is Black. (She is the one who bailed on the collective.) This dialogue also tackles white privilege, but from a place of greater realism rather than scattershot satire. Crivelli makes us feel Sasha’s good, misguided intentions; Workman delineates KJ’s frustrations with not being seen as fully, fallibly human. It’s a sad scene. And a good one. Here, finally, the aim is true.53% OfThrough July 10 at McGinn/Cazale Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In a Powerful ‘Hamlet,’ a Fragile Prince Faces His Foes

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      Alex Lawther makes for an especially riveting hero in Robert Icke’s chic if imperfect modern-dress production at the Park Avenue Armory.Many Hamlets I’ve seen are wily. Some kooky. Narcissistic, aloof, even pretentious. Less common is a Hamlet who is tender and romantic and achingly vulnerable, like a petal falling from the head of a flower at the end of its bloom.When Alex Lawther’s fragile Danish prince drags himself onstage in Robert Icke’s modern-dress production of “Hamlet,” which opened Tuesday night at the Park Avenue Armory, he recalls the 19th-century poets Arthur Rimbaud and Percy Shelley, a brilliant yet dejected young man who seems resolved to his sorrow — and to a tragic end.In the last decade, Icke has gained prominence for his heightened and contemporary-inflected adaptations of classics. This “Hamlet” played in the West End in 2017, with the hot-priest-sized package of magnetizing charisma known as Andrew Scott in the lead. He was one of the best Hamlets I’ve ever seen — though, as in so many other takes, the focus fell on his brooding and banter more than his emotional depth.Lawther, best known for his role in “The End of the __ing World,” doesn’t have Scott’s starry flair, but he possesses his own demure kind of charisma; he draws you in even as he withdraws into himself. As a result, this rendition honors Hamlet as not just self-indulgently melancholy, but as grappling with legitimate, heartbreaking loss.We begin at a swanky wedding party. (Hildegard Bechtler did the stylish sets and costumes.) Beyond a wall of sliding glass panels, we see Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude (Jennifer Ehle), and her new husband, his uncle Claudius (Angus Wright), dancing amid balloons and strings of lights. Dressed in a black suit, Lawther slowly shuffles across the stage and sits close to, but removed from, the action. He roughly rubs his palms against his thighs, as though to rub the fabric off his body.Throughout the hefty 3-hour-and-45 minute production, Lawther fully embodies Hamlet’s despondency, shuffling like a wayward toddler, with knees slightly bent and a constant sway that makes him appear near collapse. Planning to enact his vengeance on his scheming uncle, he holds a gun off at an angle, as though his arm is being puppeted by someone else pulling the strings above the stage.And when he speaks, it’s in a slow, warbling singsong, at once contemplative and idiosyncratic, especially when he pauses in the middle of sentences as though his mind is hiccuping with existential thoughts.Though the peculiar line readings sometimes turn monotonous, he snaps out of it, erupting into a surprising fit of mania. And Lawther threads the famed “What a piece of work is man!” monologue with poetic resonance, moving from wonder to despair through slow articulation and emphatic rhythm.From left: Lawther, Michael Abubakar, Hara Yannas, Angus Wright (as Claudius),Gilbert Kyem Jnr and Tia Bannon in the modern-dress production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIcke, whose one-woman “Enemy of the People” played the Armory last year and whose “1984” had a brief Broadway run in 2017, brings a cinematic eye to the proceedings, using foreground and background to create dimension. In one clever bit of staging, Hamlet tarries in the forefront as the king and queen canoodle in back and guards race by mid-stage between them, fresh from sighting the former king’s ghost.At the same time, the director brings some curious adjustments to the characters, giving Polonius a touch of dementia and depicting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a couple clearly at odds about how they should respond to the royal request to monitor Hamlet.The women, in particular, get short shrift. Gertrude is unreadable, despite Ehle’s punchy line readings, and Ophelia’s descent into madness occurs faster than you can say “something rotten” — doing a disservice to Kirsty Rider’s perfectly matched delicate companion to Lawther’s Hamlet.As Claudius, Wright has the self-consciously composed air of a politician but misses some of the menace, while Peter Wight leans too heavily on the bumbling as Polonius. Luke Treadaway, however, makes the most of Laertes’s transformation: from refined gentleman and doting brother to unhinged revenge seeker, wildly swinging a gun at the news of his father’s murder and sister’s suicide.There are actual gunshots, too — ghastly pops and flashes of light that make the audience jump to attention. This is nowhere as gratuitous as, say, the 2019 DruidShakespeare production of “Richard III,” or even the current Broadway staging of “Macbeth,” with its severed limbs and crotch wounds. Still, the sight and sound of a gun onstage today, given our country’s despicable relationship to firearms, is unsettling.What’s most frustrating about Icke’s otherwise intriguing approach is the inessential, and, by now, highly unoriginal, incorporation of high tech. A grid of 12 screens hangs overhead, and two larger screens flank the stage, showing security footage from the castle and news reports about Denmark’s conflict with Norway.Clockwise, from lower right: Lawther (as Hamlet), Kirsty Rider (as Ophelia), Luke Treadaway (as her brother Laertes), Wright and Kyem.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe screens also flash “pause” and “stop” before the two intermissions and the final scene, mawkishly calling attention to the audience as spectators. The way Icke and the lighting designer Natasha Chivers handle several of Hamlet’s monologues is more effective; soft overhead light halos Lawther as he seems to addresses theatergoers directly from the edge of the stage, only to snap off when he’s done speaking.Tom Gibbons’s sound design envelops the proceedings in ominous atmospheric gloom:a distant howling wind; the cold, mechanical hum of static and feedback; and, finally, the thunderous exclamations of drums. Less fitting are the production’s folksy compositions (by Laura Marling) and use of Bob Dylan songs, which, even deployed ironically, are a bit too Midwest-porch-jam for this chic production.“Hamlet” is one of the Shakespeare plays that most suffers from diminishing returns — adaptations that try too hard to innovate, to render a classic modern and hip. Though Icke’s protracted production occasionally falls into that trap, ultimately the creative team’s visual and technical prowess — along with its provocative young lead — make this a tale of musing, mania and murder for our age.HamletThrough Aug. 13 at the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 3 hours 45 minutes. More

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      In Munich, Young Directors Offer Horrors Both Real and Fantastical

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      The Radikal Jung festival transports theatergoers to Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine and an American high school in the Middle Ages.MUNICH — At the end of a recent performance of “Bad Roads” here, the play’s Ukrainian director, Tamara Trunova, thanked the audience for staying for the entire 180-minute production, a harrowing succession of vignettes set in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which Russia invaded in 2014, eight years before it undertook a larger war against Ukraine.“It’s much easier to drink a glass of wine than it is to watch our play,” Trunova said from the stage of the Münchner Volkstheater, where “Bad Roads” opened this year’s Radikal Jung (Radical Young) festival, an annual showcase of productions by up-and-coming directors.The two previously scheduled installments of Radikal Jung were canceled because of the pandemic. This year’s edition, which kicked off on June 26 and runs through this Saturday, is the first to be held in the Volkstheater’s brand-new home, a luxurious performing arts complex in a former slaughterhouse.The festival is traditionally focused on theater from the German-speaking world, but this year’s lineup of 11 plays was unusually international. The widened geographical perspective seemed to acknowledge the artistic affinities between the work of young German theater makers and their counterparts in Greece, London and Paris. All but one of their productions were of recently written dramas, which seemed to reflect a desire to tell new stories that specifically address contemporary concerns. Many of today’s burning issues — including the pandemic, debates around gender and sexuality, the ubiquity of pop culture and social media, life during wartime and climate change — surfaced in Radikal Jung’s varied crop of productions.In a strong lineup that also featured an innovative digital reworking of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and a brilliantly acted one-woman show about Britney Spears, “Bad Roads” stood out — and not just for its torn-from-the-headlines immediacy.The Ukrainian writer Natalya Vorozhbit based the play, subtitled “Six Stories About Love and War,” largely on reports she gathered while traveling across combat zones in eastern Ukraine. An earlier version of “Bad Roads” was staged, in English, at the Royal Court Theater in London in 2017; Trunova’s production premiered at the Left Bank Theater in Kyiv in 2019. (A film version directed by Vorozhbit was Ukraine’s official entry in the 2022 Academy Awards.)On a stage dominated by a giant fence, a dozen actors vividly conjure Vorozhbit’s nightmarish tales. Hallucinogenic and frequently absurd, they alternate between the barbarically cruel and the banally quotidian. In the opening narrative, a journalist on a fact-finding mission in the Donbas needs to list her identifying body marks, such as moles and tattoos, on an application before entering the region, in case she is killed while on assignment.A scene from Natalya Vorozhbit’s “Bad Roads,” directed by Tamara Trunova at the Munich Volkstheater.Spyros RenntAnother moment in “Bad Roads,” which is subtitled “Six Stories About Love and War.”Spyros RenntThe reporter, who in initiating us into the war zone seems to be a stand-in for the playwright, recites a lengthy monologue that combines the prosaic and the poetic. She tells us about the suffering she finds as well as the conflicted sexual attraction she feels toward the soldier who leads her around. “You aren’t just some ripped Brad Pitt look-alike,” she says. “You really have killed another person.”This introductory story sets up the moral ambiguities of the tales that follow, in which ordinary people, robbed of their lives by a senseless conflict, are driven to extremes.The production is relentlessly dark and savage, even if it’s shot through with morbid humor, such as the moment when a medic who is transporting her lover’s corpse propositions the soldier who has accompanied her on the mission: “A body without a head in a body bag just doesn’t turn me on.”It was sometimes difficult, at least for this non-Russian- and non-Ukrainian-speaking viewer, to tell who was on which side. (The performance had German surtitles). The disorienting atmosphere brought to mind Sergei Loznitsa’s extraordinary film “Donbass,” another anthology of surreal episodes about the 2014 conflict. At the same time, Vorozhbit’s sensitivity to her characters’ psychologies — and her desire to understand the perspective even of violent perpetrators — make “Bad Roads” a deeply human work about the compromises, cunning and sheer blind luck that surviving in an inhuman time requires.It was almost a relief to leave the real-life horrors of “Bad Roads” behind for the immersive dystopia of “Gymnasium,” a “high school opera” written and directed by Bonn Park with music by Ben Roessler. The only Volkstheater production at Radikal Jung, it is quite possibly the loopiest and most entertaining German production that premiered last year. Set in a kooky mash-up of the late Middle Ages and the 1990s, the show is a campy, riotous sendup of films like “Carrie,” “Heathers” and “Clueless” that gleefully pokes fun at American high school myths.The stock characters and plot devices of teen comedies transposed to the eccentric setting provide Park and Roessler plenty of fuel for skewering our off-kilter world. Tribalism, feudalism and superstition are among the medieval codes that are resurgent in the “post-truth” digital age. With scrappily sung musical numbers and eye-poppingly colorful sets and costumes, “Gymnasium” comments on trolling, viral rumors and climate change skepticism with a gentle satirical touch.The hand-drawn sets, the low-budget special effects — including an active volcano that looms over the school — and the rough and spirited playing of the Orchestra Academy of the Munich Philharmonic (credited as the Orchestra of Cheerleaders) help make “Gymnasium” the senior play you wish your school had been awesome enough — or your classmates talented enough — to put on.While “Gymnasium” constructed its sui generis world from history and pop culture references, “We Are in the Army Now,” from the Greek director Elias Adam, plunged its audience into a largely digital theatrical universe to probe the hopes, anxieties and confusions of Gen Z.First presented as part of an online theater festival put on by the Onassis Foundation-Stegi in Athens, this impossible-to-categorize show is a social media vaudeville where four fearless young performers bare their souls (and a lot of skin) while screaming into the cyber void.“We Are in the Army Now,” from the Greek director Elias Adam, at the Munich Volkstheater.Pinelopi GerasimouWhile their tools of self-expression are TikTok and Instagram — and many parts of the live performances are captured with the performers’ smartphones or computers and projected at the back of the stage — their grievances are old as the hills: rage at their parents, unhappy loves, the impotence to change a world that refuses to accept them. Their autobiographical monologues, staged with furious energy and physicality, are alternatively heartbreaking and empowering. In an exuberant finale, the actors engage in some kick-ass cosplay, battling against the patriarchy and their own self-destructive tendencies as glam-rock Power Rangers.Our world and the people in it need some serious sorting out. The innovative productions at Radikal Jung suggested that theater can help us untangle things, however modestly, by fostering a greater sense of solidarity with the victims of complex systems of oppression. As an actor in “We Are in the Army Now” says, “Ideology can’t be explained using emojis.”Radikal JungThrough Saturday at the Münchner Volkstheater; muenchner-volkstheater.de. More

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      ‘Titanique’ Review: A Musical Finds Its Sea Legs

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      The camp reimagining of the maritime blockbuster revs up into increasing absurdity and Celine Dion songs.“Titanic” got a lot right. After all, it grossed roughly a bazillion dollars, cemented Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as stars, spawned catchphrases and iconic poses and, most important, reminded us that romance was not dead.Yet some fans still think that wasn’t enough. After all, the movie featured only one Celine Dion song, and you had to wait over three hours to hear it. Clearly this structural defect had to be fixed.Enter “Titanique,” a musical retelling of James Cameron’s nautical blockbuster in which the co-authors, Tye Blue (also the director), Marla Mindelle and Constantine Rousouli, have cranked the Celine-o-meter all the way up. They added not just a bunch of her songs to the story, but the Canadian superstar herself. As played by Mindelle (Broadway’s “Sister Act” and “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella”), she is now a narrator who keeps popping in and out of the action.The premise is that Dion was on the doomed cruise liner in 1912 and is somehow still around to explain what happened — cue “I’m Alive,” of course. The singer mingles with the passengers, and by mingle I mean she shamelessly tries to overshadow them, sneaking in one of her hits at every opportunity. As James Corden said in his epic “Carpool Karaoke” with Dion: “You really have a song for every moment.” (The music supervisor Nicholas Connell did the arrangements and orchestrations.)Unlike, say, Bob McSmith and Tobly McSmith’s spoofs (“Love Actually? The Unauthorized Musical Parody,” “Showgirls! The Musical!”), “Titanique” does not feature an original score. It feels closer to “Cruel Intentions: The ’90s Musical Experience,” which added a number of tracks from that decade to its adaptation of the film (itself an update of “Dangerous Liaisons”). Rousouli, who portrayed the scheming Sebastian Valmont in that 2017 production, distinguishes himself again here as the lovelorn Jack. He renders him as an aw-shucks, wide-eyed naïf straight out of “Newsies,” a very funny performance that teeters inches from caricature yet never quite spills into it.“Titanique,” playing at Asylum NYC, incorporates a measure of improvisation and a strategy of shattering the fourth wall.Emilio Madrid“Titanique” is playing at the subterranean Asylum NYC, the former home of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe, a fitting spot for a show that incorporates a degree of improvisation. But it takes a little while to find its sea legs. The first scenes are frantic yet oddly sluggish, and it looks as if the entire evening will consist of Mindelle leaning hard on the goofball humor, idiosyncratic body language and seemingly random non sequiturs that have made Dion’s interviews so popular on YouTube.But eventually “Titanique” comes into its own as it revs up into increasing absurdity and the actors try to out-ham one another. Contrast that with Michael Kinnan’s one-man retelling of “Titanic,” “Never Let Go”: If that production captured the emotion running through both the movie and the feeling of watching it, this one doubles down on “Titanic” and Dion as modern camp icons. And speaking of camp: Ryan Duncan, in the drag role of Rose’s mother, is reminiscent of Everett Quinton at his Ridiculous Theatrical Company finest. Younger pop-culture fiends are more likely to spot Frankie Grande — yes, Ariana’s half brother — as Jack’s pal Luigi and Victor Garber (who played Thomas Andrews, the ship’s builder, in the film).That Grande plays the actor and his character in “Titanic” is typical of the show’s fourth-wall-shattering strategy, which is pretty much its entire strategy. As the production spins ever more crazily into a finale that involves that darn iceberg (Jaye Alexander), a lip-syncing contest and “River Deep, Mountain High,” you might as well admit you have been clubbed into satisfied submission.TitaníqueThrough Sept. 25 at Asylum NYC, Manhattan; titaniquemusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      She’ll Have You at Moo: Milky White and the Power of Puppetry

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      Once upon a time on Broadway, back in 1987, the skinny old “cow as white as milk” in the new James Lapine-Stephen Sondheim musical “Into the Woods” was played by a prop as still as a statue. The cow, Milky White, has no lines, so it worked.Years went by, the fairy-tale mash-up musical returned to Broadway in 2002, and this time Milky White was played by an actor in a cow suit. Now she could dance, and that worked, too.Decades passed, and in the frenzied spring of 2022 came a hit Encores! revival so delicious that it transferred almost instantly from New York City Center to Broadway. Now in previews at the St. James Theater, where it opens on July 10, this “Into the Woods” presents Milky White as a puppet who breathes, coughs, moos and mourns — which works enchantingly.Or as an enchantment? It is a mysterious thing, the preternatural dynamic between a puppet onstage and the people in the seats, even the grown-up ones.”We’re best friends,” the actor Kennedy Kanagawa said of the cow puppet that he brings to life in “Into the Woods.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWe, the savvy spectators, know that the puppet isn’t what it pretends to be. We can plainly see, for example, that Milky White is not an actual cow, that her scrawny ribs are built of cardboard, that an agile actor — the Broadway newcomer Kennedy Kanagawa — is operating her. But we look right past the artifice and invest in the puppet. Whereupon it unlocks in us a less guarded, more primal sympathy than we might allow ourselves to feel for a human performer.“There is a funny sort of yes-and that has to take place,” said James Ortiz, the Obie Award winner (for the puppet-filled Tin Man prequel “The Woodsman”) who designed Milky White. “There’s a magical sort of agreement that automatically happens. I really can’t explain fully why, but an audience just leans in and goes, ‘It’s real.’”In the musical, Milky White is the cow traded by Jack — the not-so-bright boy of beanstalk fame — for a pittance of five magic beans. With floppy ears, a free-swinging udder and a head of soft foam textured with paper, she has a handmade aesthetic that’s ideal for Lear deBessonet, the revival’s director, who confessed to having “almost an inverse emotional relationship” to slickly engineered production elements.For her, high-tech means low emotion. Whereas with Milky White, deBessonet melted as soon as she saw her move — though that initial glimpse was digital, in a short video that Ortiz shot after he first built Milky White.Kanagawa, Milky White and Cole Thompson during a rehearsal of “Into the Woods” at New 42nd Studios.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“He conceived a cow that has a full range of ecstasy and sadness and embarrassment and longing and all of these things,” said deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores!, who is making her Broadway debut with this production. “He knows how to leave just that right amount of space for the actor’s imagination, the puppeteer’s imagination and the audience’s imagination to combine and lift that object into this whole other stratosphere of meaning and play.”As high-profile Sondheim revivals tend to be, deBessonet’s is packed with stars: Brian d’Arcy James as the Baker, Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife, Phillipa Soo as Cinderella, Patina Miller as the Witch, Gavin Creel as the Wolf and Joshua Henry as Rapunzel’s Prince.Milky White is the principal puppet, but Ortiz has designed her some puppet company: a gargantuan and sinister pair of witch’s hands; the Giant’s elegant, open-weave boots (for which Ortiz tapped the wicker expertise of a fellow puppet designer, Camille Labarre); and, as Cinderella’s loyal friends, a flock of normal-size birds. Their wings have fragments of text on them, even though Ortiz knows the detail is too tiny for the audience to see.“The feathers are made out of torn-up pieces of poetry,” he said. “There’s also bits of Shakespeare in there from ‘Twelfth Night,’ because it’s about a young girl who disguises herself and finds love.”Early one evening in June, after the first rehearsal for the Broadway run, Ortiz and Kanagawa were sitting in a rehearsal studio on West 42nd Street, giving an interview for this article. A few feet away Milky White hung next to the birds on a metal rack, looking as lifeless as any puppet does without its puppeteer.Phillipa Soo, right, as Cinderella and Albert Guerzon, rehearsing a scene in which he operates a flock of birds, Cinderella’s loyal friends.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesKanagawa walked over and, after checking with Ortiz to make sure it was OK, took her down. Holding her by the handles, Kanagawa played with her spindly, splaying cardboard legs and recounted how he learned to shift her udder to one side when she needs to sit down. But he wasn’t puppeteering her just yet; she was still inanimate.Then he tilted her head ever so slightly, and instantly there she was: imbued with life and seemingly quizzical — even if her big, almost teary eyes are really just beveled foam coated with clear epoxy that catches the light.“Yeah, we’re best friends,” said Kanagawa, who was praised for his expert puppeteering in Alexis Soloski’s review of the Encores! production in The New York Times.It’s a recent skill for Kanagawa. Ortiz asked him to play Milky White because of his playfulness and imagination as an actor and his deep-rooted passion for the show. Then he taught him how to do it.This production has offered both of them the space to evolve the musical’s performance tradition, considering the sparsely written Milky White as a full character in puppet form.“We just kind of talk endlessly about cow logic,” Ortiz said.“Which honestly is kind of dog logic,” Kanagawa said. “Milky is a pet.”There’s the “right amount of space for the actor’s imagination, the puppeteer’s imagination and the audience’s imagination to combine and lift that object into this whole other stratosphere of meaning,” said Lear deBessonet, the revival’s director.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOrtiz, 38, grew up in Dallas, and made his Broadway debut this spring, designing the frolicsome mammoth and dinosaur puppets for “The Skin of Our Teeth” — and, the season being what it was, filling in for three performances as that show’s head puppeteer. The first live musical he ever saw was a high school production of “Into the Woods,” with a statue-style cow.Kanagawa, 37, was born in Tokyo and moved to the Washington, D.C., area when he was 10. In seventh grade, at a birthday party, he watched the video recording of “Into the Woods” with its original Broadway cast and original Broadway cow — then got his own VHS copy and, he said, “absolutely destroyed it with watching it so many times.”More recently, in Rob Marshall’s 2014 movie version (with James Corden as the Baker, Emily Blunt as the Baker’s Wife, Anna Kendrick as Cinderella, and Meryl Streep as the Witch), a genuine cow played the cow — not a casting decision likely to be emulated by many stage productions.Long before that, though, an idea percolated in Hollywood that might have permanently altered the performance tradition of “Into the Woods.” The Muppets creator Jim Henson was interested in making a film adaptation. He “saw the show and was a fan,” Lapine wrote in an email. “He was a wonderful fellow.” But Henson died in 1990.Five years later, the idea moved forward anyway at Columbia Pictures. As Sondheim recalls in his book “Look, I Made a Hat,” the animals in the movie were to be played by “Henson creatures.” The script got a couple of readings with a couple of deliriously starry casts (one had Robin Williams as the Baker, Cher as the Witch and Carrie Fisher and Bebe Neuwirth as Cinderella’s stepsisters) before, Sondheim writes, the project was killed in a studio shake-up.It’s easy to envision a profusion of puppet Milky Whites, a whole generation’s worth, blossoming forth onstage if that film had happened. Instead, the cow that deBessonet asked for, and Ortiz designed, and Kanagawa operates, will be Broadway’s first puppet Milky White.Just lean in and look into her eyes. There’s no question at all: She’s real. More

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      To Play Hamlet, Alex Lawther Became an ‘Expert on Grief’

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      The British actor shares what helped him transform into the doomed Danish prince: French poetry, “Pandemonium,” and postcard art (with breaks for lemon cake).Alex Lawther, known for his portrayal of troubled young men in projects like “The End of the __ing World” and “Black Mirror,” has taken on the Western canon’s moodiest: the title role in “Hamlet,” now running at the Park Avenue Armory.Though the English actor, 27, said his second New York stage appearance (following 2019’s “The Jungle” at St. Ann’s Warehouse) is going smoothly, the production has not been without its troubles, including an injury during rehearsals that delayed the premiere and led to the last-minute recasting of Gertrude.“Angus Wright, who plays Claudius and did so back in London, says he’s now played the part with four different Gertrudes,” Lawther said. “I suppose it’s a testament to the resilience and flexibility of actors that there’s no such thing as ownership of parts; you just find your feet in a company.”In a recent interview, Lawther described the works of art that have helped him get into the play’s tragic key; in order to embody Shakespeare’s doomed prince, he said he was counseled by the director, Robert Icke, to “become an expert on grief.”“The wonderful thing about literature is that there’s so much grief — it’s something of a whole genre,” he laughed. “So I readied some literary allies and friends, as it were; books and poets I could turn to that offered some sort of reflection on Hamlet, accidentally or not.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Pandemonium” by Andrew McMillan One of my best friends gave it to me on my birthday, and I read it in one sitting. It deals with acute suffering, but with such a language that you might have with a friend on the phone. Toward the end of the book, there are a lot of allusions to working a garden, and the connection between that, the relationship the speaker has to someone they love, and the struggle between keeping the garden alive and keeping this loved person alive. It’s not an easy read, but it’s very moving.2. The song “Grace” by Kae Tempest I started listening to the album this is from, “The Line Is a Curve,” as rehearsals kicked off, but not because I was searching for a soundtrack to the play in any way. This last song is like some ancient saint has looked something terrible in the face and come back from that only interested in talking about love. There’s this sense of experiencing pain and responding to it with masses of love. I listen to this song every night before I go onstage.3. “The Argonauts” by Maggie Nelson I remember a director once saying to me that sometimes it’s useful to think of text as an obstacle, and that you’ll never really get to say what you want to say. In the book, Maggie and her partner Harry have a conversation quite similar to that, about how you can’t blame a net for having holes, or something like that. That was a facet of something I was trying to understand with the heavy, thorny text of Shakespeare.4. “Paroles” by Jacques Prévert I live partly in France, and I speak quite good French now, but I didn’t when I first arrived. So I was trying to find French writers that I could read in French to try and get better. Prévert is amazing because, as a writer, he has immense profundity, but his language is really, really simple. For a non-speaker, you can sort of sit there quite happily, with a pencil, reading his poems, which are often quite short and with simple syntax. It’s words you might learn in high school, but the ordering of them is so beautiful.5. “Keep the Lights On” (2012) dir. Ira Sachs I wanted to watch a film set in New York before coming here, and I’d seen this one years ago and been really moved by it. It sat in my brain for a while and came back to me. There’s something so vulnerable and tender and sort of feral about Thure Lindhardt’s performance in it.6. Nigel Slater’s lemon and thyme cake I have some things that I cook again and again, and one of them is this cake. My mom introduced me to Nigel Slater, and now we both buy each other his cookbooks for Christmas. It’s basically a lemon drizzle cake but with a ton of almond powder, so it’s very moist, but it feels very grown up because you put thyme in it. It makes me feel like I’ve got control over my life and quite sophisticated, which are both sort of fantasies of mine.7. “A Common Turn” by Anna B Savage This is her debut album, and it’s extraordinary to have the courage to be as frank as she is here. It’s this otherworldly voice that touches on something almost operatic, something huge and expansive and intimate. She’s going to cringe if she reads this, but I gave our Ophelia, Kirsty Writer, a copy of this album because there’s something I think Hamlet’s obsessed with about using honesty as a tool. I think he would love Savage’s music for that reason.8. Duncan MacAskill’s postcard art MacAskill has a project he’s been doing for decades where he will send other artists pieces of his own work to wherever they are in residency. They might just be colors or cartography or collage, and he’ll often put a GPS coordinate on them, which points you to another place in London.I love the idea of an artist being in conversation with another artist through their work. I think it’s good, when you’re working in a group, to remember that there’s other work being made elsewhere, and that we’re all part of something a little bit larger.9. “Mayflies” by Andrew O’Hagan The friend who gave this to me described it as an ode to friendship, which I think is a better way of putting it than I possibly could. It’s about two young men who are best friends during their high school years. The first part is about this crazy, sort of filthy weekend they spend in Manchester and how that weekend encapsulates the whole of their youth. In the second half, 30 years later, one of them is terminally ill. It tricks you into thinking it is a coming-of-age story, but it’s more about coming to terms.10. “The Sopranos” It does something I suppose we’re trying to do with this production, which is making something on a very big scale that is ultimately about the fractured nature of being part of a family, and how complicated it is to live with other people. They live in a castle, and the choices they make influence the well-being of an entire state, but they’re still struggling as mother and son, sister and brother. More

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      ‘Chains’ Review: Drab Lives, but Dreaming of More

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      A young boarder’s plan to make a new life in Australia unsettles a staid British family in Elizabeth Baker’s 1909 play, revived by the Mint Theater Company.On a Saturday afternoon in April, warm sunshine streams through the French doors of Lily and Charley Wilson’s rented London house, with its modest garden just outside. A comfortable home, it’s a bit of a stretch for their budget, so they have a boarder — Fred Tennant, a pleasant young clerk.And Fred, it turns out, has news that will send shock waves through the Wilsons’ peaceful marriage and the contented, conformist lives of their extended family. With two days’ notice, Fred is leaving England for Australia, trading the security of his office job for the risk of adventure in a new, wide-open country.“I’m going to chance it, you know,” he says. “There’s no fortune waiting for me.”To 21st-century American ears, that sounds like nothing to get flustered about. But in the early 20th-century England of Elizabeth Baker’s play “Chains,” which made a splash when it was first produced in London in 1909, Fred is nothing short of a social rebel, tossing away a sure thing to scratch the itch of his restlessness and — heaven forfend — pursue some happiness.“You don’t come into the world to have pleasure,” Lily’s mother says, scandalized.Baker argues otherwise in this well-constructed drama, which beneath its placid surface is as political as any play by George Bernard Shaw — one of her apparent inspirations — but without his dense, intrusive speechifying.In Jenn Thompson’s beautifully acted production for the Mint Theater Company, at Theater Row in Manhattan, the love between Lily (Laakan McHardy) and Charley (Jeremy Beck) is unambiguous. But Fred’s decision unleashes Charley’s anger at his drab, deskbound life, and his regret at having settled down before he saw the world.Trouble is, the country that Fred (Peterson Townsend) is headed to had, in 1909, a law called the Immigration Restriction Act, also known as the White Australia policy, which made it exponentially more difficult for nonwhite immigrants to be allowed into the country.There is no mention of the law in the text, but it would be a reality for any Black migrant. So with a Black actor as Fred — giving a perfectly lovely performance — we are seemingly meant to look past his race, in a way that makes the casting read as colorblind rather than color-conscious, the philosophy that the Mint says it had in mind. Unless we’re intended to think that Fred has done very minimal research before embarking?Peterson Townsend, at right, plans to find his fortune in Australia, which has a thrilling effect on Olivia Gilliatt (center, with Brian Owen), who is engaged to a man she doesn’t love.Todd CerverisOn a nimble set by John McDermott, flatteringly lit by Paul Miller, the action of the play unfolds in under 48 hours, which Baker gives a cheating urgency: When Charley is seized by the temptation to upend his own life and set out for Australia, leaving Lily behind, it’s as if the boat Fred is taking is Charley’s sole chance.They are not the only ones fed up with their jobs. Lily’s sister, Maggie (Olivia Gilliatt), is so tired of working in a shop that she’s gotten engaged to a man she does not love, whose comfortable income will let her stay at home and even have a servant.Her fiancé (Ned Noyes) dotes on her, which turns out not to be what she needs. Fred’s courage thrills and inspires Maggie. She wants a man brave enough to seek his fortune. And she wants to be brave enough herself not to do what society expects of her.Baker, an office worker turned playwright, had some of that daring herself, going into a line of work not known to be welcoming to women. When New York audiences first saw “Chains,” on Broadway in 1912 in an Americanized version, the script was credited in all capital letters to the adapter, Porter Emerson Browne. Baker’s name appeared “in very small type,” according to the review in The New York Times, which accused Browne of “the attempted stealing of her thunder.”Calling Baker’s play “exceedingly clever,” and praising the performances, that review deemed “Chains” nonetheless “something too familiar to create any great excitement with our playgoers.”That’s still true. It is diverting. It’s just not especially resonant in the here and now.ChainsThrough July 23 at Theater Row, Manhattan; minttheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More