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      Review: In ‘Jerusalem,’ a Once-in-a-Lifetime Performance, Again

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      Mark Rylance is back in a role that won him a Tony more than a decade ago. But this London production isn’t just coasting on past kudos.LONDON — There’s mighty, and then there’s Mark Rylance in “Jerusalem,” a performance so powerfully connected to its part that it feels almost superhuman. That’s as it should be for a play about a larger-than-life character named Johnny Byron, who demands an entirely fearless actor, and has one in Rylance.None of this will surprise those familiar with this play by Jez Butterworth, which premiered with Rylance in the lead role at the Royal Court here in 2009; two years later, it transferred to Broadway and won Rylance the second of three Tony Awards. In a thrilling revival that opened Thursday at the Apollo Theater (running through Aug. 7), everything feels enriched by time.Now 62, Rylance is considerably older than a man described in the text as “about 50.” But such is this actor’s boundless energy and enthusiasm that you can imagine him returning to the role again and again: Johnny defies all conventions, including those of age, and so does a wildly versatile actor who approaches this societal rebel as a kindred spirit.The creative team, headed by Ian Rickson, the most empathic of directors, is the same as it was in 2009. To this run’s credit, it is no museum piece coasting on past kudos, but a vital experience with a revitalizing effect. Standing ovations are commonplace here these days, but the one at Wednesday’s final preview possessed a singular fervor that had Rylance jumping up and down with childlike glee at the curtain call.In the show, Johnny, who goes by the nickname Rooster, walks with a halting gait that goes unexplained. Physical impediments, it seems, barely matter to this tattooed, barrel-chested reprobate, who performs a headstand within minutes of his arrival onstage. He then downs a mixture of vodka, milk and a raw egg, whose shell Rylance tosses into the audience. (On Wednesday, someone tossed the shell back, prompting a delicious double take from the star.)Johnny’s outsize gestures are those of a man whose defiantly reckless existence is under serious threat. While the rural community in which he lives is holding its annual spring fete to mark St. George’s Day, Johnny tenaciously stays at the beat-up trailer he has long called home. A magnet for a cross-section of local hangers-on, including a loquacious professor (a beautiful turn from Alan David) and underage female adolescents hungry for spliffs and sex, Johnny’s illegal encampment is soon to be bulldozed. His young son arrives for a visit, only to be whisked away by the child’s disapproving mother (a persuasive Indra Ové).From left, Charlotte O’Leary, Mark Rylance, Mackenzie Crook, Kemi Awoderu and Ed Kear in “Jerusalem.”Simon AnnandNot only is Johnny faced with a final order from government officials to move on, but he must confront the wrath of Troy Whitworth (a fearsome Barry Sloane), whose 15-year-old stepdaughter, Phaedra, has sought refuge with Johnny. Troy will go to violent lengths to claim her back.It’s Phaedra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) who opens the play, singing the English hymn that gives “Jerusalem” its title and whose lyricist, William Blake, is referenced during a game of Trivial Pursuit later on. Worthington-Cox delivers this most stirring of tunes in front of a drop curtain depicting the cross of St. George, England’s flag. But the play itself transcends nationality to speak to any disaffected outsider who won’t be easily silenced and who gathers acolytes like moths to an inextinguishable flame.I’ve now seen “Jerusalem” five times (including on Broadway), and Rickson’s current company — several of them holdovers, with Rylance — are as good as any predecessors, and sometimes better: Worthington-Cox is the most moving Phaedra I have experienced.Mackenzie Crook remains especially heartbreaking as Ginger, Johnny’s friend and ally whose haunted eyes convey a premonition that his buddy’s days are numbered. Jack Riddiford, a company newcomer, brings a boyish appeal to the role of Lee, who dreams of starting afresh in Australia but is thankful for the raucous good times that Johnny has made possible on home soil.You can imagine one or two of these characters as avid supporters of Brexit, though the idea didn’t exist when Butterworth wrote the play: The sweary abattoir-worker Davey (Ed Kear, another cast newcomer) doesn’t “see the point,” he says, of other countries, including neighboring Wales. British newspapers have been busily assessing “Jerusalem” as a defining state-of-the-nation commentary whose legacy and influence are incalculable. Butterworth has stayed out of the discussion, saying only that he revived the play so his young daughter, Bel, could see it.But such considerations are academic next to the visceral immediacy of a play that soars as high as the designer Ultz’s ravishing tree-filled set, which seems to sweep up beyond the theater’s roof. That vast reach is of a piece with a performance you might describe as once-in-a-lifetime, if it weren’t so evident that Rylance’s passion for this part, thank goodness, seems far from over yet.JerusalemThrough Aug. 7 at the Apollo Theater, London; jerusalemtheplay.co.uk. More

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      Michael R. Jackson’s Big Broadway Thriller

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      During a walk along the Great White Way this winter, I saw something peculiar: two marquees advertising two Michael Jacksons. On 52nd Street, at the Neil Simon Theater, where “MJ: The Musical” has been running since December, there’s a graphic of the King of Pop in his iconic early ’90s pose: fedora perched low, obscuring his face; shirttails flying in the artificial wind; white glove; high-water pants; sparkling socks; feet en pointe. Seven blocks away, at the Lyceum Theater on 45th Street, another sign bore the name “Michael Jackson” and an illustration of a 20-something Black man’s head in semi-profile, with six tiny bodies floating around his face and hair. This image advertised “A Strange Loop,” the playwright Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning metafictional musical, which premiered on Broadway in April.“It’s a strange loop,” Jackson told me on the phone when I mentioned the coincidence. He chuckled, his buoyant, lisp-tinged laughter calling to mind fluttering shirttails. “See what I did there?” He stopped, started again, wanting to clarify. “When I say that, I mean that, my whole identity as a person just in the world, has always been sort of tied to that man, because of our names. That’s been both an annoyance and a help.”Jackson has embraced the absurdity of the coincidence — his website name and Instagram handle is “thelivingmichaeljackson,” for example. “Certainly whenever my name is mentioned, the ghost of him appears somewhere. But we’re two very different artists working in two very different traditions.” He paused, punctuating his thinking with ellipsis, his voice relaxed and slowly propulsive, as if his sentences were bridges he was building as he walked over them. “And yet, there’s something about his legacy that is invoked whenever my name comes up. There’s a certain excitement that comes up, and maybe I’ve been able to utilize that. I think that’s true. And I think that maybe it’s given me a certain kind of confidence, perhaps, as somebody in the entertainment world because ‘Michael Jackson’ stands for pop excellence and razzmatazz and razzle-dazzle, and that’s certainly something that I aspire to in my own work.”“A Strange Loop,” which is being marketed as a “big, Black, queer-ass American musical,” is in part about how identity is cobbled together out of the flotsam of pop culture: how the faces we present to the world are neither organic nor stolen, but co-opted, borrowed and reshaped in the borrowing. Jackson relishes the playfulness at work in these kinds of appropriations, and the show bristles with references as varied as Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise; the writing of bell hooks; Dan Savage, the advice columnist; “Hamilton”; Stephen Sondheim. The title carries its own layers of reference: to Liz Phair’s 1993 song “Strange Loop” and to the work of Douglas Hofstadter, the scholar of cognitive science and comparative literature. In his 1979 book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,” Hofstadter coined the term “a strange loop” to describe the recursive nature of selfhood and intelligence.Jackson is dead set against contemporary virtuousness: a puritanical need for fixed, context-repellent delineations of right and wrong.The show is a product of Jackson’s own vicissitudinous loops: his fits and starts of success and failure, when he was working, for five years, as an usher at “The Lion King” and “Mary Poppins” while revising his own play over and over and over again, trying not to give up. Jackson says that the show is not autobiographical but “self-referential,” though the parallels between him and his protagonist are striking. The story concerns Usher (played with vulnerability, charm and delicacy by Jaquel Spivey), a 25-year-old “fat American Black gay man of high intelligence, low self-image and deep feelings.” Like his creator, Usher works as an usher for “The Lion King” and shares his name with a pop star. (In the memory palace of his mind, his relatives are named for “Lion King” characters: His mother and father are called Sarabi and Mufasa, his niece is Nala, his ne’er-do-well brother is Scar.) He “writes stories and songs and wants desperately to be heard.”Usher is trying to develop his own musical — about a Disney usher who’s writing an original musical about an usher who’s writing a musical, and so on — as he deals with the impositions of his mind, which are personified as six Greek-​chorus-like “Thoughts” who voice his desires and cutting internal commentary. The Thoughts (played by L Morgan Lee, James Jackson Jr., John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey and Antwayn Hopper) are “a spectrum of bodies that are Usher’s perceptions of reality inside and out.” They “come in many shapes and sizes. But they are all Black. And they are as individual in expression as they are a unit.”Usher must reconcile the seeming contradictions of his life. He is gay but was raised religious and taught that homosexuality would send him to hell. He uses Grindr but considers himself a feminist — someone who can see through the race- and body-shaming that frequently occur on dating apps. He yearns to be himself and pursue his own artistic inclinations yet feels pressure to pay his parents back for their support by ghostwriting a Tyler Perry play. In the musical’s scintillating, uproarious opening number, “Intermission Song,” Usher declares that he wants to “subvert expectations Black and white, from the left and the right, for the good of the culture.” This idea of subverting expectations — of presenting art that grinds the gears of easy understanding to a halt — is crucial to Jackson’s work.Jackson overlooking the set at the Lyceum Theater in April.Malike Sidibe for The New York TimesOne day, Jackson and I sat together in a Chelsea diner and discussed a play we’d both recently seen (a period piece that Jackson asked me not to name). He detected in the show the urge in many contemporary works of art to retrofit current attitudes onto historical matters. “Everybody keeps trying to speak to the moment,” he said, and punctuated his words by tapping the menu on the table, improvising his own percussive track. “There’s so much presentism in so many works, particularly the ones that are dealing with historical issues. I’m kind of like, Why is there this weird rewriting of history so that it can flatter you and validate you? Why can’t we just tell stories about these people as they were and whatever their positions and attitudes were? I think that that’s actually a lot more powerful, because then you can understand how other people lived and thought and dreamed and made mistakes or whatever. I keep seeing all of this stuff that’s like, This is just like right now, and I’m like, No it isn’t!”The show we discussed treated almost every white character as evil but didn’t give that behavior any emotional or psychological foundation. Yes, racism is ridiculous, but the people who subscribe to it don’t feel that way; if characterization is to be believable, it has to accurately and seriously portray even the views that belong to abhorrent people. Otherwise you get what Toni Morrison called “harangue passing off as art,” and characters who are mere vehicles for political arguments. “There’s a nuance that I feel is being lost in this moment in time, particularly in the arts, in the theater especially, that I am personally at war with,” Jackson said.Jackson is dead set against contemporary virtuousness: a puritanical need for fixed, context-repellent delineations of right and wrong; the performance of utmost certainty, all the time. “A Strange Loop” is dedicated to feelings of uncertainty, presenting, with vivid detail, the internal logic of a character who’s fighting with himself. The self is arguably everyone’s first and most recurrent battleground, and Jackson stages internal chaos that far outstrips arguments you might find between partisan politicians or on Twitter.One of Usher’s Thoughts is called “Your Daily Self-Loathing,” and as you’d expect, it regularly reminds him of how worthless he is. Another Thought is the supervisor of Usher’s “sexual ambivalence”; others represent his loving mother’s religious upbraiding and his father’s confused, macho judgment; others stand in for student-loan collectors and an opportunistic agent. With all of this at play, Usher has to find a way to assert his own value or to “fight for his right to live in a world that chews up and spits out Black queers on the daily,” but first he has to find some peace with his flaws, whether real or imagined.It took Jackson decades to achieve the kind of clarity that Usher yearns for and to distill it into this play. “The only reason why I come to any of these conclusions is because I spent almost 20 years working on one piece of art,” Jackson said. “And the exercise of that forced me to have to really be thoughtful and really be open to changing my mind. I’ve changed my mind so many times with new information coming along.” This thought eventually took him to a Joni Mitchell lyric, from her 1985 song “Dog Eat Dog,” which he quoted to me after breaking into an improvised medley of her deep cuts: “Land of snap decisions/Land of short attention spans/Nothing is savored/Long enough to really understand.”Jackson, who is 41, was born and raised in Motown. Growing up “middle middle-class” in Detroit in the 1980s and ’90s, he had what he calls “a normal external childhood.” His father was in the police force for 27 years before he retired to work as a security consultant for General Motors, and his mother worked in the accounts-receivable department of the automotive manufacturer American Axle. His brother, who is four and a half years older, took him to see horror-comedy films like Rusty Cundieff’s “Tales From the Hood.” They all went to First Glory Missionary Baptist Church, where his mother was a secretary and his father a trustee. Jackson sang in the main choir and played piano for the Sonshine Choir (for little kids) and the Inspirational Choir (for older women). He appreciated church as kind of a workshop; it gave him a chance to hone his craft. “It was just a place for me to play music and to teach songs, and it was almost like I was playing in a jazz club or something. I was building my musical chops playing in front of an audience and for choirs every Sunday.”Pop culture suffused his life. He attended Cass Technical High School, where the legends of alumni like Diana Ross, Lily Tomlin, Ellen Burstyn, Jack White and Kenya Moore haunted the hallways. Jackson’s preteen bedroom was covered with autographed photos of his favorite celebrities that he’d sent away for: Macaulay Culkin, Jasmine Guy, Kadeem Hardison, Anna Chlumsky, Emilio Estevez and Tim Allen, or “whoever was on some TV show or movie I was watching.” In high school he drafted award-​winning poems and worked on a literary journal. Even then, his thinking resisted easy judgment and retained the right to take its time. In a passage in his journal marked by strikethroughs and scribbled-out ink, he wrote about O.J. Simpson’s 1997 civil trial for the death of his ex-wife Nicole Brown: “I don’t know how I feel. At first, I thought he was innocent. Then during the civil case, I thought he was guilty — in both cases I didn’t care whether he did it or not. I resented the fact that people assumed he was either totally capable of murder or not capable of murder.”While his external circumstances were comfortable, internally he was struggling with accepting his sexuality. When he came out to his parents at 17, they confronted him; Jackson says his father asked his son, passive-​aggressively, if he was attracted to him, a moment Jackson reprises in “A Strange Loop.” (He’s on really great terms with his parents now.)It was around this time that Jackson was first introduced to what he calls “white-girl music” after his cousin studied at Interlochen Center for the Arts in 1995 or 1996, and brought back Tori Amos’s albums “Little Earthquakes” and “Under the Pink.” “I was just sort of coming out at that time and trying to figure things out, and that music hooked me right in. The language is very riddlelike, but the music underneath it is so complex and lush and complicated, and I just kept listening. And then the second track comes on: ‘God, sometimes you just don’t come through.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah,’ because I was raised in church, and I was having a lot of questions about that.” Amos’s music “met me right where I was at that moment in time. And because I was also writing, it gave me permission to start saying things that I was thinking or feeling or wondering about in like a profane sort of way. And so I began copying her immediately just trying to find my voice.”He also loved Liz Phair and Joni Mitchell and considers the three songwriters his own private religious triptych: Mitchell is the mother, Phair is the daughter and Amos, Jackson’s “first love,” is the Holy Spirit. “These white women singer-​songwriters inspired me to be my truest, rawest self,” he told me. For “A Strange Loop,” Jackson wrote “Inner White Girl,” an ingenious paean to the emotional and lyrical freedom those women employ in their music: “Black boys don’t get to be cool, tall, vulnerable and luscious/Don’t get to be wild and unwise/Don’t get to be shy and introspective/Don’t get to make noise, don’t get to fantasize.”In 1999, Jackson left Michigan to attend Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Shortly after he graduated, he wrote a monologue, a vehicle for his career anxiety called “Why I Can’t Get Work,” that became the kernel of “A Strange Loop.” He kept writing and developing songs in Tisch’s M.F.A. playwriting and musical-theater program, and after that, all while ushering at the Disney musicals. Later, he worked at an advertising agency. Influenced by “Hair,” Wayne Koestenbaum and Michael Daugherty’s “Jackie O,” Kirsten Childs’s “The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin” and Stew’s “Passing Strange,” Jackson kept hacking away at the collection of songs and dialogue that eventually became the musical, trying to make something uniquely his own. These were lonely years for Jackson in New York City, when he was alternately not dating and chasing unattainable paramours, hating himself and finding internal armistice, losing weight and gaining it back.As he aimed to finish “A Strange Loop,” the thing that delayed his progress, he told me, was his own self-loathing. He could not shake the feeling that many things were wrong with him: his gayness, his fatness, his chosen career path. Because the play is so self-referential, Jackson had to figure out his own life before knowing how Usher fares, and therefore how the musical ends. Sometime in 2014 or 2015, Jackson had a breakthrough. During a therapy session, he was engaging in the practice of “tapping,” where you touch various chakras throughout the body and say, “Even though [fill in the blank], I completely and totally accept myself.” That session, he told me, “brought up a sense of grief for my childhood and how sad I had been for a long time — feeling like I didn’t belong or fit in and being able to have compassion for my younger self who was still with me. And having that moment was very powerful and healing in so many ways.”Gradually, he realized that nothing was wrong with him, and he used this insight to unlock the play’s structure. Usher comes to find that his negative, self-effacing thinking is just a series of spiraling feelings that he has some amount of control over. Those thoughts tell a story, but it doesn’t mean that the story is true. Jackson’s two-decade process of writing “A Strange Loop” — and the many years he spent in therapy — helped him accept his own questing mind and the trouble it sometimes causes him. He’s someone who disdains orthodoxy, someone whose ex ghosted him after saying, “Wow, you’re really not a static thinker.”Stew, one of Jackson’s influences, told me that “A Strange Loop” is in a “continuum of Black art” that expresses how Black people “are complete people who have every possible thought that could be had.” Jackson himself, Stew said, is in another tradition. “I just felt like his work is so firmly in that line of Black disrupters, of generous disrupters. Artists that are willing to go beyond, you know, and sort of display themselves? I consider that a kind of generosity and a kind of bravery.” Jackson’s close friend Kisha Edwards-Gandsy spoke of the searching, restless quality of Jackson’s intelligence. “I feel what Michael asks everybody is, ‘If you think you know something, do you?’”Jackson, left, with Jaquel Spivey, who plays Usher in “A Strange Loop,” during rehearsals.Malike Sidibe for The New York TimesOne day in mid-March, I arrived in a Midtown Manhattan studio for Day 3 of rehearsals for “A Strange Loop.” The whole space felt like an extension of Jackson’s imagination: A miniature model of the Lyceum’s proscenium was situated in the background, along with a few props, including an empty Popeye’s chicken box. Jason Veasey, who plays Thought 5, wore a green shirt with “Detroit” across the front; Thought 3, John-​Michael Lyles, had on a T-shirt that read, “Stay weird and live free,” which could be Jackson’s motto.The group started rehearsing “Exile in Gayville,” a song about Usher’s relationship to dating apps and a nod to Phair’s “Exile in Guyville.” Jackson, the actors, the associate choreographer, Candace Taylor, and the show’s director, Stephen Brackett, made changes on the fly. “Can I advocate to make a tiny adjustment to get a little bit more quickly into the line?” Brackett asked about the pacing of the Thoughts’ reaction to Usher calling Beyoncé a “pop-​culture terrorist” (he was paraphrasing bell hooks). “If Beyoncé comes, I’m not going on,” Spivey joked.Later, Jackson and the show’s choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly, jokingly compared themselves to each other and to other Black artists.“If I position you as me in the downtown dance world and me as you,” Feather Kelly said, “in celebrity culture, we are Kanye West, because for so long, no one would give us any attention. And people were like, ‘It’s impossible what you’re doing.’”Jackson: “But does that mean we’re egomaniacs?”“I think we have to be,” Feather Kelly said, “I mean, by virtue of needing to be seen and heard.”“Who is our Pete Davidson? Who is our K.K.W.?” Jackson asked, and Feather Kelly whispered an answer in his ear.“No, no, no,” Jackson squealed.“I won’t say that out loud, but tell me I’m wrong,” Feather Kelly said, grinning.“I won’t tell you you’re wrong,” Jackson replied, cackling.The most interesting comparison Jackson identified was between himself and Tyler Perry, whose artistic work seems to exist at the opposite end of the spectrum from the playwright’s: Perry is a multimillionaire who boasts about producing films in five days, and Jackson, who is not wealthy, spent 20 years working on one project. In his dramedies, Perry often features Black archetypes without complicating them — the stalwart matriarch (exemplified in his Madea character); the “strong Black woman,” usually portrayed as unhappily lonely; the relative addicted to crack cocaine; the closeted gay Black man. Many of his gospel plays, TV shows and films feature a consistent message about the power of prayer.Perry’s work is referenced a few times in “A Strange Loop,” as a paragon of commercial success and an object of Usher’s ridicule. In one of the show’s most biting, farcical numbers, “Tyler Perry Writes Real Life,” Thoughts masquerading as notable Black historical figures like Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and someone called “Twelve Years a Slave” castigate him for disliking Perry’s work. Eventually, though, Usher relents to a Thought playing his agent and ghostwrites the ridiculously derivative gospel play, “Show Me How to Pray,” for Perry.Perry’s stage plays were a staple for Jackson’s mother, who’s still a fan — “If Tyler does it, she’s on it,” he told me. He always felt that Perry’s work wasn’t for him but really started to reject it after watching the 2013 film “Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor,” in which a young woman contracts H.I.V. after a period of sexual exploration. Jackson has loved ones who died of AIDS (“A Strange Loop” is dedicated to “all those Black gay boys I knew who chose to go on back to the Lord”) and knows other people still managing the illness. He found the film toxic and stigmatizing. Still, although Jackson thinks Perry’s work is “intellectually lazy,” he values the joy his Madea films and stage plays bring to his mother and other family members.One day in late February, Jackson and I sat down in the conference room of his production office to watch “A Madea Homecoming,” Perry’s latest Netflix feature, which premiered only days before. We could hardly get from one scene to the next without pausing the film to unpack some narrative error or slapdash prop. “These wigs are terrible … I mean, and consistently terrible … he just does not give a damn about the wig work,” Jackson said, with an air of resignation. “I wonder, do any of the actors think this is dumb, or are they all just excited to be there because it’s Tyler?” he asked.Although he lambastes what he calls Perry’s “simple-minded hack buffoonery,” he also worries he might be capable of something like it, deep down. While working on a horror film for A24, Jackson told me, he compiled a list of his fears to share with the film’s producers Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen. “This film is about my fears, and so I have to write all of them down. Even if those things don’t make it into the movie, they will be in the subtext of it.” One of his fears is that he’s not as advanced as he thinks he is, and that he might not be insulated from the kind of artistic foibles he criticizes Perry for. “Sometimes I worry that I’m a coon. That I think I’m this progressive, freethinking blah blah blah, but really I’m just a coon.” Jackson was referring to a worry shared by many introspective Black people that they are inadvertently performing for a white gaze. “Freedom starts in here,” he said, and pointed to his temple. “I don’t want to live in fear. I can’t live like that. I don’t have a man at home to hug up with. I have to wake up every day alone in my bed and get up out of bed and make something happen for myself. I don’t have generational wealth, I don’t have all this stuff, which means if I want to live, I have to be free.”He can even allow himself to embrace the little overlap that exists between him and Perry. Jackson, too, aspires to a kind of populism. “For me, I’m always trying to mix high and low, Black, white, whatever. That’s sort of what I’m interested in is like, everyone is invited to come into this. The piece can be as entertaining as it is intellectually challenging.” Of Perry, he said, adjusting his glasses, “To me, he’s like a right-wing artistic populism, and I’m more of a left-wing artistic populism. I think. I think. I’m making this up,” he finished, cautiously. “A Madea Homecoming” and its ilk make him “want to double down on what I’m doing, in trying to make art that is Black and nuanced and that doesn’t have sacred cows, that’s emotional, that’s intellectual, that’s silly, that’s all the things.”When Jackson won the Pulitzer, Perry called and playfully threatened to beat him up. Later, Perry texted Jackson a screen cap of the “Strange Loop” cast album as a gesture of support. Jackson texts Perry holiday greetings. The men’s polite acquaintanceship seems like a model for how to disagree about art.When I finally went to see the show, on a Saturday afternoon in April, I was surprised by how it destabilized me. I stumbled out of the theater bewildered, remembering the bawling of a man who sat behind me. Blinking in the sunlight, I eventually made contact with other wide-eyed women. “That was overwhelming,” one lady told me. “Now, it’s going to make me ask so many questions of my nephew. Like, oh, my God, what is your experience of our family, for real, for real?”At some point, I saw Jackson standing under the Lyceum marquee. I told him that I’d purchased a refrigerator magnet from the merch table, so that every time I walk by it, I can remind myself to question the narratives that run through my mind, my own strange loops. “We all have them,” he said. Right then we ran into a woman I’d met years ago; by sheer coincidence we had both been at the show. She asked Jackson if he planned to do a performance just for a Black, queer audience. He explained that he’s open to Black theater night, where Black people are specifically invited and encouraged to attend, but he didn’t want to do a “Blackout” night, where the audience is exclusively full of Black patrons. “I believe that it’s important to have as many people as possible with as many different perspectives as possible,” he told her.Later, on the phone, I asked him if he could elaborate. He’s OK with it if the audience is organically full of Black patrons, like if a church wanted to come and see it. “But I just struggle with the idea that like I’m supposed to create a quote-unquote all-Black space. And yet what I observe is that these all-Black spaces, to me, look like they all sort of come from the same class, and I don’t sense a ton of diversity within the Blackness, which then makes me question the intent of it. I could be looking at it in the wrong way, but I’ve seen the push for a lot of these events, and at the end of the day, they’re just not in the spirit of what I think ‘A Strange Loop’ really is, which is both Black and expansive.” He paused. “I’ve been asked in interviews recently, what do I want audiences to take away from the show, and my answer always is, ‘I want them to be thinking about themselves.’”The week before opening, Jackson shared with me a few lyrical tweaks he’d made during previews, to make a coda easier for the actors to sing, and to make it clear that his critique of Perry’s work is not a personal attack. But when the play officially opened on April 26, Jackson and company ceased being able to make any changes. The show had to “freeze.” I asked Jackson what it was like for a person who’s worked on a show for 20 years, whose creative philosophy is predicated on resisting being locked in, to freeze? He was sanguine about it, explaining that it’s part of the process. “I think the show is good regardless of whether I get every little thing that I want in there before we freeze, but I’m just trying to get it to be the best that it can be.”When I consider the heretofore living, breathing document of “A Strange Loop” frozen, I imagine Jackson holding notes for the next restaging, while also hoping the show goes on a long time — that whatever adjustments he has will be superseded by the revolutions in his thinking that will surely take place during its Broadway run, however long it is. The strange loops will continue. “I have a lot of opinions,” Jackson told me, “and my opinions change, and sometimes I don’t know, and sometimes I’m wrong.” He half smiled, showing the gap in his teeth. “But I feel like the world has made it so that, how can I just adhere to one thing?”Niela Orr is an essayist, a story producer for Pop-Up Magazine and a contributing editor for The Paris Review. She writes The Baffler’s Bread and Circuses column. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Macbeth’ Review: Something Wonky This Way Comes

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      Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga star in Sam Gold’s oddly uneasy take on the Scottish play.Macbeth, the character, is full of compunction, as well he should be, having murdered a king to get to his throne.But why should “Macbeth,” the play, be just as uneasy about its authority? Despite the star power of Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, the overthought production that opened on Thursday at the Longacre Theater seems unsure of its welcome, as if a classic that has enjoyed nearly 50 Broadway revivals since 1768 might no longer find an audience willing to meet it halfway.I could understand that attitude if we were talking about the utterly unlovable “Troilus and Cressida.” But “Macbeth” is the most instantly accessible of Shakespeare’s tragedies: violent, elemental, familiar, short. No matter which way the story is bent, it maintains its recognizable human core of ambition and regret. Directors can emphasize its witchy aura, its bloodthirsty politics, its marital drama or critique of masculinity without endangering its essential stageworthiness.But this relentlessly analytical production, directed by Sam Gold, takes even that last quality apart, offering not so much “Macbeth” as a private inquest into it. To signal that, as the audience enters, it begins with the curtain half up, only timidly exposing the play to view. On a nearly empty black stage, the cast of 14 is milling about in what look like street clothes, seeming to make food at a communal table as if this were dinner theater, or not theater at all.Gold then softens the transition from real life to drama by having Michael Patrick Thornton, who otherwise plays Lennox and one of the assassins, deliver an amusingly potted prologue like a Catskills tummler. His largely improvised spiel explains the play’s origins in a time of plague — around 1605 — and under the influence of King James’s obsession with the supernatural.Revisiting the Tragedy of ‘Macbeth’Shakespeare’s tale of a man who, step by step, cedes his soul to his darkest impulses continues to inspire new interpretations. On Stage: Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga star in Sam Gold’s take on the play. Despite its star power, the production feels oddly uneasy, our critic writes. Onscreen: In the “Tragedy of Macbeth,” Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand embody a toxic power couple with mastery. Break a Leg: Shakespeare’s play is known for the rituals and superstitions tied to it. How does the supernatural retain its hold on the theater world? Beyond ‘Macbeth’: This spring, there’s an abundance of Shakespearean productions in New York City. Here is a look at some of them. Good information. How did generations of theatergoers get along without it?Craig, center, with Negga, left, and, sliding out from underneath the table, the ghost of Banquo (played by Amber Gray).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf you’ve seen enough of Gold’s Shakespeare — whether excellent (“Othello” at New York Theater Workshop, starring Craig and David Oyelowo) or inexplicable (“King Lear” on Broadway, starring Glenda Jackson) or in between (“Hamlet” at the Public Theater, starring Oscar Isaac) — you’ll know that he does not make idle or showy choices. His experimentation is always purposeful, even if, as here, it’s sometimes hard to know what that purpose is. For at least the first half-hour of “Macbeth” I thought he was trying to demystify the play by placing it in more familiar contexts.That kitchen, for instance. Or the scenes set in what looks like someone’s TV room. (The “thrones” in Christine Jones’s set are raspberry-upholstered chair-and-a-halfs.) At other times it seems we’re at a high-school pep rally; when Scotland’s mortal enemy, Norway, is mentioned, Gold has the cast mutter “Boo!” as if at an opposing basketball team.I’m not sure the play benefits from demystifying, though. Macbeth is no ordinary man, nor Lady Macbeth an ordinary woman. Their ambition and regret are extreme, and both alter extremely during the action. At first, when the witches tell Macbeth he will one day rule Scotland, he is horrified by the thought of what that means for the people in his way. But his wife is electrified; with her courage making up for his qualms, he kills Duncan (Paul Lazar) and takes the crown.That’s supposed to be the end of it but of course is not. As logic and a developing taste for blood demand, Macbeth now kills his comrade Banquo (Amber Gray). Though he goes mad with guilt, seeing ghosts over dinner and retribution in dreams, he nevertheless massacres the family of the suspicious Macduff (Grantham Coleman). It’s the macho Lady Macbeth who eventually quails and collapses; sucking renewed manliness from her death, Macbeth all but dares the world to incite his own.Negga, left, with Gray in the play. Like a feral cat, Negga can seem quicksilver and weightless or menacing and bristly, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCraig, and especially Negga, hit these marks clearly. We see how their characters’ chemistry and symbiosis allow each to fill the gaps of the other, at first for their mutual gain and then to their detriment. Craig is at his best in physicalizing Macbeth’s transitions; you can see in his bearing the effects of flattery and finery on his balloon personality. Had it not been inflated it would never have burst.Negga, unrecognizable both emotionally and bodily as the actor who played Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2020, is wonderfully physical, too; like a feral cat, she can seem quicksilver and weightless or, when enraged, menacing and bristly and twice her size. (The superb costumes by Suttirat Larlarb contribute to the effect, nearly telling the story on their own.) But Negga is also extraordinary with the verse, one of the few cast members who not only makes its meaning clear but also projects that meaning past the conceptual firewall Gold has erected.Though the production too often feels as if it were designed for the company’s own edification — an endless rehearsal rather than a Broadway revival — it is not without its outward-facing qualities, especially after the initial throat-clearing. There are beautiful, quietly observed moments: a glance between Craig and Negga, for instance, that says more about marriage than some entire plays on the subject. There are smaller characters crystallized in a flash: Lazar’s Duncan dainty and handsy, Maria Dizzia’s Lady Macduff heartbreakingly resolute.But the top note here is gore, the more so because most other notes are muted. We see slit throats, amputated legs, huge spouts of blood and, for good measure, a gun. Even that cozy food table from the start of the show turns out to be the witches’ workshop, where they brew their disgusting potions — some involving human body parts pulverized as if by Julia Child with an industrial stick blender.Craig, our critic writes, is at his best in physicalizing Macbeth’s transitions; you can see in his bearing the effects of flattery. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAll this is accompanied by effects that put yet another demystifying frame on the action, this one not from life or theater but from movies. The fog at the Longacre is thicker than in “Casablanca.” The foreboding aural effects (sound design by Mikaal Sulaiman) recall slasher flicks; the screeching violins (music by Gaelynn Lea) more specifically reference Bernard Herrmann’s score for “Psycho.”Perhaps to help us, or the cast, come down from all this, Gold concludes the show by having Bobbi MacKenzie, who otherwise plays a witch, sing a song by Lea called “Perfect” as the company slurps at what I hope to God is soup. The moment is lovely and would be fitting if this were, say, the finale of “Pippin.”Still, at the end of an often brutal Broadway season that was rightly concerned with harm and heartlessness — in which many shows, including this one, were bedeviled by illness and delays — I liked Gold’s showing us that in times of distress and violence people should remember to care for one another. If it has nothing to do with “Macbeth,” it has plenty to do with us.MacbethThrough July 10 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; macbethbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Holland Taylor Plays Ann Richards One Last Time

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      Taylor, 79, first performed her solo play “Ann,” about the former governor of Texas, in 2010. Now, she’s saying goodbye to the white suit.The actress Holland Taylor had long been a fan of Ann Richards, the Democratic firebrand and former governor of Texas, and so she was “strangely overcome,” as she put it, when Richards died in 2006.“I was in mourning for months and months,” Taylor said. “I wanted to do something creative about her to use these feelings, and it just came to me in a flood that I was going to write a play about her and I was going to perform it. It was aberrant behavior for me: I am a supremely practical person, but I launched into this at 65 or [6]8 or something, absolutely blind to any of the pitfalls, any of the dangers, any of the impossibilities.”After a few years of extensive research, Taylor first performed her solo play, “Ann” (its title at the time was “Money, Marbles and Chalk”), in 2010 at the Grand 1894 Opera House in Galveston, Texas. Several productions followed, including one on Broadway that earned her a Tony nomination in 2013.“She’s not a Texan, but I think she captured the part of Texas that I am proud of — that kind of iconoclastic, funny, laconic storytelling,” said Julie White, who was raised in the Lone Star State and recorded the lines delivered by Richards’s assistant Nancy that we hear in the show.Holland slipped into Richards’s drawl and her tailored white suit for the last time during a monthlong run of the one-woman show at the Pasadena Playhouse that concluded this past Sunday. (A version of the play recorded at ZACH Theater in Austin, Texas, can be streamed on PBS and BroadwayHD.)Two days after her final performance as Richards, Taylor, 79, in a video conversation from her Los Angeles home, spoke about dark jokes, the stress of closing performances and the meaning of politics. These are edited excerpts from video and email conversations.“When you say ‘politics’ in our culture today, it has kind of a negative tone to it,” Taylor said.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesDid you ever consider including other people in “Ann”?No, because it is not a play that takes place in time — I never thought of it as being about events. I imagined the circumstances and the dialogue, but the play is very true. In the back of my mind, this is a visitation. This is what the theater allows: The theater allows you to do any [expletive] thing you want.Up to a point, since you were writing in character, based on a real person.Well, 95 percent of this play — the words, the language, the sayings — are totally my invention. So many lines emerge from the pudding of stuff in one’s brain from research. I know a joke that she told on the morning of 9/11 that was so dark. I said to the person who told me that, “Wow, that’s almost gothic.” And that person said, “Nothing was off-limits for her.” So I wrote a joke that was equally shocking. I know what she would say in given circumstances and my own ability to write funny stuff was in some way absolutely elevated. What I wrote for her is funnier than anything I could ever write for myself.Did you ever think about using more of her own words?What would be the point of that? It wasn’t like she was Abraham Lincoln. She was a very accessible speaker — even her greatest speeches are very conversational, and they’re tied to her kind of homespun, hardscrabble roots. There’s probably 10 sentences that I sliver in, like, for instance, “Why should your life be just about you?” How simple is that?How did you approach the Pasadena run?One of the reasons I did it was, I’ve always worn so many hats and had to work so hard during every production. With Broadway, the work I had to do was not onstage: There’s no one who can do press for the show but me. I’m the only actor, and also the creator behind the whole production in every way. And so on Broadway I barely had time to think, and I was executing the play at the highest level I could. Because I was not doing many other chores this time around, I thought, At last I will deal with this text as an actress. I really explored how she gets from this flagstone to the next flagstone to the lily pond to the bridge to the puddle to the stone — jumping from thing to thing. Because to have written a play is not to have prepared to perform it at all. Very different tasks.Has “Ann” changed the way you think about politics?This show is really not about politics at all.But at the end, for example, she talks about government and public service, which is — or should be — a key aspect of politics.I think it’s about participation. When you say “politics” in our culture today, it has kind of a negative tone to it. She had a practical sense of how things worked; she wanted people to be involved in their lives, where they had agency. You’re giving a [expletive] about what happens around you and to other people. So it’s all about participation: “If you don’t participate, you’re jus’ lettin’ other people make some big ol’ decisions for you.” That was political in that sense. Absolutely.What was it like to perform in front of masked audiences?It’s daunting at first but believe me, while I’m performing I have a lot of things on my mind. And I had been living for months in surgical wrapping: I was terrified of getting Covid, not for my own health but that I would shut down the production. So I had a lot of generalized anxiety and from the minute I agreed to do this, I lived behind a mask. Each day would go by and I’d say, “One more down.” We made it through and my relief was just immeasurable from not having that show close.How did the last performance go?I found the last day very stressful. Final performances have so much riding on them. I myself would never go to see an actor’s last performance, the same way I try to avoid going to opening nights, because I feel the actors’ anxiety. Openings and closings are so stressful, they’re just hard. But I think it went very, very well. People said so. I felt complete.So this was really the last rodeo for “Ann”?I could have a pang, I suppose, and maybe I will, but I don’t think I’ll ever say, “Gee, I wish I could do it again.” I am turning 80 this winter and what I do in this show is unquestionably the hardest thing I’ve ever done onstage. I don’t have that kind of confidence in my constitution any longer to say, “I’ll do another one of that.” Learning the text takes me two hours every day with someone on FaceTime, six days a week, for two months. To do this again means I have to carve five months out of my life, and there is no five months like that I can carve out of my life. A wonderful producer-director asked me on Instagram how I feel, and I said “satisfied.” I’ve achieved what I wanted to achieve. More

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      ‘Cost of Living’ Will Come to Broadway This Fall

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      Manhattan Theater Club will stage the Martyna Majok play, which explores disability and caregiving, at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Martyna Majok’s “Cost of Living,” a play that explores disability and caregiving and which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2018, will be staged on Broadway this fall.Manhattan Theater Club, one of the four nonprofits that operate Broadway houses, said it would stage a production of the play at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater this fall.The play has two parallel plots, one about a man with cerebral palsy and his hired caregiver, and the other about a double amputee and her estranged husband. The Pulitzer board described the play as “An honest, original work that invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection.”Manhattan Theater Club previously staged the play, in 2017, at its Off Broadway space at New York City Center, where it won praise from the New York Times critic Jesse Green, who wrote, “If you don’t find yourself in someone onstage in ‘Cost of Living,’ you’re not looking.”The Broadway production, like the Off Broadway production, will be directed by Jo Bonney, and it will feature two of the same performers, Gregg Mozgala and Katy Sullivan.In 2018, the Williamstown Theater Festival, which staged the first production of the play, said it had commissioned a musical adaptation from Michael John LaChiusa; a Williamstown spokesman said those plans are now “on hold.” More

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      The Carnage of War, in Punchdrunk’s New London Show

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      The immersive theater company’s production invites up to 600 spectators to roam freely around a loose re-creation of the siege of Troy’s aftermath.LONDON — It’s unusual in a live performance to construct your own narrative, shaping the event as you see fit. But that has long been part of the appeal of Punchdrunk, the ambitious immersive theater company whose latest show, “The Burnt City,” opened here last week.There are no assigned seats, or even spoken words, in the company’s first London project in nine years. Instead, the co-directors, Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle, encourage up to 600 spectators to roam two onetime munitions factories (and a new structure conjoining them) and make of the occasion what they will. In my case, that meant being enthralled more often than I was baffled; others may well have the opposite response.Taking as its topic the fall of the ancient city of Troy, the show includes in its cast of characters Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Cassandra, and it dramatizes the cycle of vengeance that follows Paris’s abduction of the famed beauty Helen.The characters, played by a hard-working company of 28 who perform their scenes in a loop, aren’t identified, so you’re left to work out who might be the Trojan queen, Hecuba, or her ill-fated son Polydorus, whose murder is one of several in a narrative full of grief. If you happen recently to have read “The Iliad” or the tragedies by Euripides and Aeschylus that underpin this venture, so much the better.Wearing masquerade masks, as is the Punchdrunk norm, we begin in a hall of display cases filled with artifacts from a 19th-century excavation of supposed Trojan ruins by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann — pottery, libation bowls, headgear and other items. They form what Barrett has described as a “decompression zone” to help us shake off the outside world and plunge us into a bygone civilization. (To that end, cellphones are placed in sealed bags during the performance.)Leaving the dimly lit gallery, we embark on our chosen journey: Turn one way for Troy, the other for Mycenae, the Greek military stronghold that vanquished the smaller city around 1250 B.C.“The Burnt City” is the first London project in nine years from Punchdrunk, which also created “Sleep No More.”Julian AbramsMost of the action plays out in the capacious, high-ceilinged rooms of the warehouse representing Mycenae, including Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia and his eventual murder — here graphically depicted in a shower. (Nudity is presumably one of several reasons that playgoers ages 16 and 17 are allowed entry only with “a responsible guardian.”) Stephen Dobbie’s mood-setting sound design thrums ominously throughout, and at several points we encounter some frenzied, furious dancing in which Doyle, a noted choreographer, lets her performers cut loose.Troy, by contrast, is a deliberate mash-up of eras and references, and the exemplary design team of Barrett, Livi Vaughan and Beatrice Minns get to have some macabre fun. This neon-lit labyrinth features a department store called Alighieri’s that evokes the underworld of Dante, and piles of bones to remind us of the siege of Troy’s carnage. An illuminated sign advertises “finest fake flowers,” for anyone who might want to pay respects.In contrast to previous Punchdrunk shows — like the company’s signature New York success, “Sleep No More” — there is little buttonholing of individual playgoers for one-on-one encounters (perhaps not so desirable in the age of social distancing), and the proceedings don’t build to the usual galvanic finale. You depart impressed by a concerted appeal to the imagination, though maybe another go-round is needed to fill in the gaps.Punchdrunk asks audiences to expect the unexpected, and so, in its way, does “Daddy: A Melodrama,” the Jeremy O. Harris play running through Saturday in its London premiere at the Almeida Theater. Directed, as in New York in 2019, by Danya Taymor, the production places an infinity swimming pool downstage — not the first thing you expect to see upon entering an auditorium.Terique Jarrett and Sharlene Whyte in Jeremy O. Harris’s “Daddy: A Melodrama,” directed by Danya Taymor at the Almeida Theater.Marc BrennerSpectators in the first few rows shield themselves as the actors splash about, with frontal nudity, as in “The Burnt City,” presented unselfconsciously. The frolics serve a story that grips across nearly three hours, even as it tilts after the intermission toward the melodrama of the title. Telling of a Black American male artist and the older white “daddy” who acts as the younger man’s patron and lover, Harris’s play is a parable of possession, in which people can be owned, just as art can.The charismatic Danish actor Claes Bang (now onscreen in “The Northman”) plays Andre, a European art collector based in Los Angeles, and the hugely gifted Terique Jarrett, handed the driving part, plays Franklin, the mid-20s boytoy who makes dolls of varying sizes — and who may represent a doll of sorts to Andre.Complications arise when Franklin’s deeply religious mother, Zora (Sharlene Whyte, commendably fierce), arrives for a visit only to voice displeasure with the lifestyle her boy has chosen. “What happened?” she demands to know of the Bible-quoting son who once sat on her lap in church. Franklin’s chums take their own poolside view of events: “So I guess since Mom’s a no-go,” says Max (the musical theater actor John McCrea, in waspish form), “Daddy has to suffice.”Whyte’s Zora faces down her son with an outsize grandeur worthy of Punchdrunk at its most heightened. The male leads, meanwhile, expertly chart the changing dynamics of a liaison at risk of burning itself out. Franklin, for all the fuss made over him, looks poignantly set on a path toward loneliness, left with not so much a burnt city as a scorched soul.The Burnt City. Directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle. One Cartridge Place, through Dec. 4.Daddy: A Melodrama. Directed by Danya Taymor. Almeida Theater, through April 30. More

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      Review: Billy Crystal Carries the Tune in ‘Mr. Saturday Night’

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      In a mishmash new musical based on his 1992 movie, he charms the audience as a has-been comic reconnecting with family.On the heels of “City Slickers,” just a few years after “When Harry Met Sally,” Billy Crystal was at the apex of his film stardom when he made the 1992 movie “Mr. Saturday Night.” If you watch it now, you can see why it flopped, not least because Crystal was playing against type as Buddy Young Jr., a ruthlessly selfish has-been comic with a vicious streak.At the time, Crystal was in his 40s; for much of the film, Buddy is in his 70s. And Crystal embodied him with a middle-aged comedian’s idea of that later phase of life: under old-guy makeup so egregious that viewers couldn’t possibly suspend disbelief, and with the physical mannerisms of an ancient — like Miracle Max, Crystal’s indelible elder from “The Princess Bride,” but without the charm.Three decades later, Crystal too is in his 70s, and in the new musical comedy “Mr. Saturday Night,” which opened on Wednesday night, he slips much more naturally into Buddy’s skin. As a piece of theater, the show is a bit of a mess; the jokes, even some of the hoary ones, work better than the storytelling, and the acting styles are all over the place. Still, it makes for a diverting evening — because it will almost surely make you laugh, and because of how acutely tuned into the audience Crystal is.Ad-libbing his way through the script, fine-tuning the funniness, he feeds off the energy of the crowd at the Nederlander Theater. Like Buddy, who mopes around his New York apartment in a tragic cardigan, lamenting the gigs he’s been reduced to taking — the morning slot at a retirement center is, after all, no comedian’s dream — Crystal is utterly in his element performing live. 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 musical, though, is an ungainly beast, by turns zany and sentimental. Directed by John Rando, with a mood-setting score by Jason Robert Brown (music) and Amanda Green (lyrics) that goes vocally easy on its star, it has a book by the film’s screenwriters, Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. Less cynical and more hopeful than the movie, it gives us a Buddy who is still cruel but not so callous, and thus a better candidate for our sympathy.That’s despite the myriad ways in which he has failed his brother, Stan (the immensely likable David Paymer, an Academy Award nominee for the same role in the film), who has sacrificed his own ambitions to be Buddy’s manager; his wife, Elaine (Randy Graff, stymied by an almost total lack of chemistry with Crystal), who has put Buddy first for half a century; and their daughter, Susan (Shoshana Bean, in a beautifully calibrated performance), who at 40 has been justifiably angry with her father since she was 5.David Paymer, left, as Buddy’s brother and Randy Graff, right, as his wife.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Mr. Saturday Night” traces Buddy’s second chance at life and fame, set creakily in motion one night in 1994, when he catches the in memoriam montage on the Emmy Awards broadcast and sees his own face and name appear right after John Candy’s. Buddy gets booked on the “Today” show to crack wise about the error.As his career wobbles toward possible resuscitation, he gradually notices that he’s been a schmuck to the people who love him. “Hurt them” is the command he has always used to psych himself up before he goes onstage, but however many audiences he’s killed, he’s done lasting harm at home.In the film, the brothers’ relationship is paramount. In the musical, the father-daughter fracture comes to the fore, while Elaine — whose only solo, a fantasy about going to Tahiti, is the show’s most cuttable song — is again strikingly under-imagined. (The six-piece orchestra, which sounds terrific, is conducted by David O.)“Mr. Saturday Night” means to be a valentine to both the bonds of family and the comedians of a bygone age — pros like Buddy, who got his big break in the 1940s at a Catskills resort and hosted a hit TV show on Saturday nights in the ’50s, before he blew a hole in his career with his loose-cannon arrogance.The costume designers, Paul Tazewell and Sky Switser, have their silliest fun dressing Buddy’s wacky sidekicks — Joey (Jordan Gelber), Bobby (Brian Gonzales) and Lorraine (Mylinda Hull) — for the musical’s ’50s flashbacks. A singing, dancing pack of cigarettes, anyone? (The choreography is by Ellenore Scott.)As for Crystal’s singing, he doesn’t have the range to play Fanny Brice, but he doesn’t need to. He does OK. Paymer, in Stan’s one emotional outburst set to music, kind of, sort of, almost approaches singing but doesn’t have those chops. Which works on a meta level, because Buddy is the brother who’s at ease onstage.What’s surprising is how unpersuasive the show is when the principals play decades-younger versions of their characters — a transformation that in theater, so much less literal a medium than film, can require no more than an altered demeanor. Bean is the only one to tap into that simplicity.Shoshana Bean as Susan, Buddy’s estranged daughter, in the musical, which is based on a 1992 film.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut most of the show unfolds in 1994. By then, Buddy’s old sidekicks are fixtures at the Friars Club, and so is he. Though if Lorraine is a member, she must be a relatively recent one; in the real world, the Friars Club of New York admitted its first female member, Liza Minnelli, in 1988.This is where nostalgia gets tricky. That boys’ club territoriality is the backdrop to an encounter at the Friars that the authors have kept largely, and unwisely, unchanged from the movie: when Buddy, expecting a powerful male agent to join him for lunch, is met instead by a smart young female agent, Annie (a sunny Chasten Harmon, who has a fizzy chemistry with Crystal).Annie, who will prove to be a godsend for Buddy, handles comics for a major agency. Yet she has never heard of any of the comedy greats whose names he fires off at her in a bullying pop quiz, or even, apparently, of the Friars Club — implausible for an industry professional, and almost impossible so soon after the Friars’ infamous 1993 roast of Whoopi Goldberg. Annie is written as ignorant just so that Buddy can school her, which carries a strong whiff of dinosaur on the authors’ part.Of course, Buddy himself is a caveman. When his old pals called him and Elaine “Fred and Wilma” — as they did, affectionately, at the performance I saw, Crystal not being the only one enlivening the script with variations — it was funny because it’s true.But Buddy does want to evolve, at least a little. If his epiphany about his need to change seems to arrive out of nowhere, buoyed by piano and brass in a lovely, impassioned solo, we root for his redemption anyway.This is a musical that wants its guy to get a happy ending. Despite all of the show’s faults, and all of Buddy’s, it turns out that so do we.Mr. Saturday NightAt the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; mrsaturdaynightonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘POTUS,’ White House Enablers Gone Wild

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      Seven female farceurs bring Selina Fillinger’s new Broadway comedy about the president’s protectors to life.Keep your eye on the bust of Alice Paul.You remember Paul, the suffragist who helped secure the vote for women in 1920 and then went on to write the still-unratified Equal Rights Amendment? If not, you could head downtown to the Public Theater to see “Suffs,” the musical about Paul and her colleagues.But uptown, Paul is a projectile. Or rather, in “POTUS,” the snappy and intermittently hilarious farce that opened on Wednesday at the Shubert, a plaster sculpture of her face is. It’s Paul who brings down the first act curtain of Selina Fillinger’s rough-and-tumble feminist comedy — and with it, in a way, the patriarchy itself.I’d be giving away too much to say exactly how a sculpture undoes Fillinger’s nameless and unseen president, who may remind you of someone who in real life recently held the position and still thinks he does. The play, in any case, is happy to be rid of him. Its lumbering subtitle — “Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” — makes clear that “POTUS” is less interested in the incompetent man than in his hypercompetent enablers.“POTUS” is in fact an encyclopedia of enabling, a natural field guide to the various poses that women who subcontract their souls get into. The classic cases are Harriet, the president’s beleaguered chief of staff, and Jean, his constantly blindsided press secretary. What Jean (Suzy Nakamura) tells Harriet (Julie White) applies to them both: “You stand in for him every single day, you’ve done it for years. You clean up his messes, you make excuses, you do his job, and then you wake up and do it all over again.”Rachel Dratch, left, and White in Selina Fillinger’s rough-and-tumble feminist comedy, directed by Susan Stroman.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn the day “POTUS” is set, that means trying to keep the president on track as he faces a series of public engagements, including a nuclear nonproliferation conference, a political endorsement, a photo op with disabled veterans and a gala honoring a women’s leadership council with the apt acronym FML. By 9 a.m. he is already disastrously off course, having referred to the first lady, at his first appearance, with a word that should have been unspeakable and is at any rate unprintable here.Though there appears to be no love lost between the two, Margaret, the first lady, is no Melania Trump, except for the catlike smugness that’s the top note of Vanessa Williams’s sleek performance. Margaret is spectacularly accomplished: a graduate of Stanford and Harvard, a lawyer, an author, a gallerist and a taekwondo practitioner. She must nevertheless put up with and cover for her husband’s tawdry affairs, including one with a “woke powderpuff” named Dusty (Julianne Hough), who shows up at the White House vomiting “blue raz” slushies.How Dusty enables the president with her own spectacular accomplishments, which include both adventurous sex play and flax farming, I leave for Hough — who, like the play, is gleefully filthy — to reveal.In any case, Dusty introduces a new note to the proceedings, which until her arrival seem, in Susan Stroman’s prestissimo production, at least loosely tied to reality. You can imagine how a woman like Stephanie, the president’s secretary, who speaks five languages and has a photographic memory, might still be disdained as a loser in this environment, because she’s fainthearted and has no polish. The first lady calls her “a menopausal toddler” — a description that Rachel Dratch, with her repertoire of cringes and moues, fully inhabits.And Lilli Cooper, winning even when whining, makes it easy to imagine how a woman like Chris, a Time magazine journalist and a newly divorced mother, might be worried about her job despite her experience and expertise. There are always, Jean warns her, younger male colleagues who “can out-tweet you, out-text you, chug a Red Bull and work three days straight.” Whereas Chris, on hand to interview the first lady, spends most of the play multitasking just to keep afloat — coordinating with her babysitter, her ex, her editors and her subjects while either pumping breast milk or leaking it.Still, you would readily include her as one of the women about whom the play asks, in frustration and shock, “Why aren’t you president?”Dusty does not fit that bill, gifted though she may be. Nor does the seventh character, Bernadette (Lea DeLaria), the president’s exuberantly butch and frankly criminal sister. The only country you could imagine her as president of would be a despotic narcostate, the kind that DeLaria, having a ball in the role, suggests is not much different than ours.From left: Cooper, White, Dratch and Vanessa Williams on Beowulf Boritt’s turntable set.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf Dusty and Bernadette, as outside forces, are necessary for forwarding the farce, they gnaw at its underpinnings. The point of the satire, so perfectly sharp in the initial confrontations — with White and Nakamura making a terrific comedy team — begins to dull as the emphasis shifts from verbal to physical humor.That physical humor is not always expertly rendered. (Dratch does it wonderfully, but the fight choreography is unconvincing.) And the turntable set (by Beowulf Boritt) that efficiently rotates the early action from room to room, like a White House Lazy Susan, seems by the second act to be spinning of its own accord, signifying hysteria but not giving us much chance to absorb it. (The sitcom bright lighting is by Sonoyo Nishikawa.) As the women move from cleaning up men’s messes to making messes of their own, you may feel some of the air, or perhaps the milk, leaking out of the comedy.In a way, that’s a faithful expression of Fillinger’s belief, as she told Amanda Hess in The Times, that “if you take the man out of the room, patriarchy still exists and we still play by its rules.”But in extending that idea to comedy, Fillinger, like a politician, is trying to have it both ways. In this, her Broadway debut, the ways aren’t always working together. As a farce, “POTUS” still plays by old and almost definitionally male rules; farce is built on tropes of domination and violence. On the other hand, and more happily, “POTUS” lets us experience the double-bind of exceptional women unmediated by the men who depend on their complicity. “He’s the pyromaniac, but you gave him kindling,” Chris, the journalist, tells the others.Or as Harriet, the chief of staff, puts it in a line that Alice Paul might have appreciated: “He can’t last if you stop saving him.” Maybe that’s true of male-dominated farces as well.POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him AliveThrough Aug. 14 at the Shubert Theater, Manhattan; potusbway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More