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      Actors in ‘Waitress’ Tour Seek to Join Labor Union

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      Employees of a nonunion production are seeking improved compensation and safety protocols, saying a union version of the same musical pays better.A group of actors and stage managers employed by a nonunion touring production of the musical “Waitress” is seeking union representation, emboldened by a growing focus on working conditions in the theater business and by the labor movement’s recent successes in other industries.Actors’ Equity Association, a labor union representing 51,000 performers and stage managers, said it had collected signatures from more than the 30 percent of workers required to seek an election, and that on Tuesday it had submitted an election petition to the National Labor Relations Board, which conducts such elections.The number of people affected is small — there are 22 actors and stage managers employed by the tour, according to Equity — but the move is significant because it is the first time Equity has tried to organize a nonunion tour since an unsuccessful effort two decades ago to unionize a touring production of “The Music Man.” (The union also sought a boycott of that production.)Union officials said the “Waitress” tour was an obvious place for an organizing campaign because of an unusually clear comparison: There are currently two touring companies of that musical, one of which is represented by the union and one of which is not. The workers in the nonunion tour are being paid about one-third of what the workers in the union company are making, and have lesser safety protections, Equity said. (The minimum union actor salary is $2,244 per week.)“We thought it was not right and not fair, so we approached them to see if they were interested in us representing them,” said Stefanie Frey, the union’s director of organizing and mobilization. Frey said that the productions were so similar that some of the nonunion performers have been asked to teach performers in the union production, and that some have moved from the nonunion production to the union production. “It’s an obvious group of people getting exploited,” she said.Jennifer Ardizzone-West, the chief operating officer at NETworks Presentations, the company that is producing the nonunion “Waitress” tour, declined to offer an immediate reaction, saying, “Until we see the actual filing, it is premature for me to comment.”Tours are an important, and lucrative, part of the Broadway economy. During the 2018-19 theater season — the last full season before the pandemic — unionized touring shows grossed $1.6 billion and were attended by 18.5 million people, according to the Broadway League. Similar statistics are not readily available for nonunion tours, but Frey said, “The nonunion tour world has grown over the last 15 years.”Equity is in the process of hiring two additional organizers as it seeks to expand its efforts, according to a union spokesman, David Levy, who noted recent successful efforts to organize some employees at REI, Starbucks and Amazon. The National Labor Relations Board said last week that the number of union election petitions has been increasing dramatically.Frey said the long pandemic shutdown of theaters had also contributed to a new interest in organizing in the theater industry. “Workers are feeling a little bit more of their power and want to fight for what they deserve in a different way,” she said. More

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      Laurence Fishburne Cools Down With Classic Jazz and Cashmere Blankets

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      The actor is back on Broadway for a revival of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo.” He discusses his other must-haves, like a chef’s knife, trampolines and crystals.“I have a working knowledge of what my gifts are,” Laurence Fishburne said. “I’ve been blessed with a wonderful voice. And I have a real innate sense of the dramatic.”Fishburne, 60, was speaking, in that velvet baritone, a few hours before his call at Circle in the Square for the Broadway revival of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” a brisk study in hustle and flow.Though best known for his film work (the original “Matrix” trilogy, “Boyz N the Hood,” the “John Wick” series), which trades on his sleek looks and natural authority, Fishburne is a Tony-winning actor. He has rarely stayed away from theater for long.He last appeared on Broadway in 2008, in the one-man show “Thurgood.” And it took him more than a decade to find another stage role that he wanted: Donny, the avuncular owner of a shabby junk shop. With his friends Teach (Sam Rockwell) and Bobby (Darren Criss), Donny agrees to a plan to rob a wealthy customer of a valuable coin.“He’s the father figure in this triangle of these three men,” he said of Donny. “He’s trying to guide them and protect them and school them as best he can.”“American Buffalo” was in rehearsals when the pandemic hit. Fishburne and his colleagues kept working on the play for months afterward, which Fishburne said had allowed him to dig into his role more deeply and better present the precise rhythms of Mamet’s language.“He works with these seemingly simple words that are loaded with a lot of tension, a lot of subtext, a lot of nuance,” Fishburne said of Mamet’s script. “It’s like a beautiful piece of music.”From his home, an apartment on the Upper West Side where he keeps a mini trampoline and assorted crystals, he discussed the items, artworks and philosophies that help him shake that tension off. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. A chef’s knife I’m an only child and both my parents worked. Sometimes I had to fend for myself. So I did kind of grow up cooking. A chef’s knife with a great handle and a great edge, that’s what you need. It can chop your onions and your celery, smash your garlic, do all your prep work so you can eat well. I love to cook Caribbean-style food, Italian-style food, Asian-style food. There’s a fish I like to do with tomato and saffron, Cornish game hens, roasted with jam and port wine. I’m pretty good in the kitchen.2. James Allen’s “As a Man Thinketh” I was given this book when I was about 30, and it really changed my life. It’s a book about meditation and the power of thought and the reality of life and truth. I started meditating and my life got better. My life has improved.3. A good pair of shoes These feet, they carry us around. We’ve got to be good to them. It’s not a brand thing. The foot is as individual as the fingerprint. It’s just whatever feels right, whatever feels comfortable, whatever supports your foot well. Right now I’m wearing a pair of beautiful, lace-up wingtip boots. They fit great. And I have some shoes made by my friend Ozwald Boateng that are my dress shoes.4. My favorite music I listen to mostly music that was made in the last century. I’m not allergic to music that is being made today. I just need a booster. I need somebody young to introduce me to the music that’s happening now. Some of my favorite music would be Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue,” “John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman,” “Identity” by Airto Moreira, “Band of Gypsys,” Cassandra Wilson, the Beatles, the Stones. Howlin’ Wolf, Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson.5. A great neck pillow and a warm blanket I’m a good napper. Actors, we have to use our energy like cats — we lie around and sleep a lot and then we have to get up and perform. So having a little place to lay down with a pillow that cradles the neck, supports the head, keeps the spine in alignment, it’s all good. Cashmere makes a great blanket. I actually have one of those in my dressing room at the theater. It’s fantastic.6. Moroccan mint tea There’s a restaurant in Los Angeles that I’ve been eating at since I was a kid, Moun of Tunis. At the end of the meal, they serve mint tea and almond cakes. Mint is such a wonderful taste and smell, such a wonderful flavor. It just brightens everything up. Makes me happy.7. A mini trampoline It’s low impact, gets your blood going. Kind of like jumping rope, without jumping rope. You get to defy gravity, seconds at a time. I have a mini tramp at both my homes. I do a routine, but there’s nothing rigid about it.8. Crystals I got into crystals around 1988. My house in Los Angeles, I’ve got a bunch of crystals there. I only have a few here in New York. But I have a medicine bag of them that I sleep with. There’s a Herkimer diamond in it. There’s a piece of moldavite in it, a piece of smoky quartz, a piece of tourmaline. I get a good sound sleep every night. And my dreams can be very vivid. Crystals are medicine, man.9. Meditation A calm and serene mind is the product of calm and serene thoughts, positive thoughts. You can train the mind like you can train a muscle. I try to meditate daily for at least 15 minutes. I generally sit down in a sort of lotus position. Sometimes I lie down. When I started meditating, I became very centered and very grounded. I began to take responsibility for my life, for my thoughts, my words and my deeds. I’ve just gotten an Oculus and there’s a wonderful meditation app on it called Trip that’s just out of this world fun.10. Movies of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s In my library I have “Lawrence of Arabia,” “To Sir, With Love.” Another movie with Mr. Poitier, called “Brother John.” Another O’Toole film called “The Lion in Winter.” What else do I have? Oh, “The Man Who Would Be King.” Great movie. “The Fugitive Kind.” That’s with Marlon Brando. “My Favorite Year.” Seeing these movies makes me hungry. Makes me happy. Makes me hungry. More

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      Review: ‘The Little Prince,’ a Lumbering Circus

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      A stage version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic of children’s literature lands on Broadway but remains stubbornly earthbound.Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince,” a megaselling classic of children’s literature first published in 1943, begins with a crash landing. Now, an adaptation of the beloved tale has made a similarly unfortunate entrance on Broadway.The show is trying to juggle theater, dancical, circus, cabaret and everybody’s favorite: philosophical musing. It’s a mix that Cirque du Soleil, especially with the shows directed by the mastermind Franco Dragone, has fine-tuned into cohesive spectacles. And the company’s achievements seem even more remarkable in comparison to this underwhelming mishmash, which opened on Monday at the Broadway Theater.This “Little Prince” is an uncomfortable hybrid, neither fish nor fowl nor sheep. When the childlike being (his age is unclear in the book, which is part of the point) runs into a stranded aviator at the start of the show, he asks, “Please, draw me a sheep.” Enter a flock of actors, prancing and dancing in shapeless outfits, and bleating like the sweet, lovable animals. This is when, a few minutes into a nearly two-hour-long production, the realization hits that this “Little Prince” is going to be a long day’s journey into whimsy.Saint-Exupéry, a Frenchman who doubled as a pilot in the 1920s and ’30s, wrote and illustrated “The Little Prince” while exiled in New York during World War II. The book was first published here in 1943, which is why the manuscript is in the Morgan Library & Museum’s collection. Well, except for right now because it is on loan to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs for an exhibition, the precious artifact’s first trip to France in almost eight decades.New York, for its part, is getting this stage version, which premiered in Paris in 2019 and has toured extensively since. It’s hard to fight the sneaking suspicion that we have been shortchanged.Zalachas, left, and Aurélien Bednarek as the Aviator in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe aviator (Aurélien Bednarek) and the Little Prince (the adult Lionel Zalachas, his blond, spiky hair making him look like Sting in the original “Dune” film) meet cute in the Sahara: one’s plane went down and the other is visiting from a tiny asteroid. As the aviator tries to repair his engine, the Little Prince tells him of his surreal encounters with a series of creatures on various intergalactic worlds, including a fetching rose (Laurisse Sulty), a number-crunching businessman (Adrien Picaut), a manipulative snake (Srilata Ray) and a wise fox (Dylan Barone), who delivers one of the story’s most famous lines: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”The book is a parable so rich in flights, ahem, of fancy that it has been adapted over the decades into plays, musicals, movies, operas, graphic novels and games. (Connoisseurs of Hollywood kitsch may fondly remember Stanley Donen’s film, from 1974, in which Bob Fosse conclusively established that a snake can smoke and do jazz hands.)The structure lends itself well to a circus-like, vignette-based show because each encounter can become a number, and you can string one after another with minimal interference from a traditional plot. Still, those who have not read the book — and even those who have — may wonder what the heck is going on, and the staging and performances are not strong enough to prevent the mind from wandering to such questions.Zalachas, left, and Laurisse Sulty as the Rose he leaves behind.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA central issue is the leaden onstage narration by Chris Mouron, who also wrote the adaptation and is a co-director with the choreographer Anne Tournié. Cutting an androgynous figure in a green do and a steampunk-butler suit, Mouron haltingly declaims her lines (in English) as if delivering Racine monologues, and effectively sucks all of the potential levity from the show. Like the best children’s literature, Saint-Exupéry’s book is bittersweet, and even touches upon tragedy, but it also has a poetic grace and many touches of surreal humor — few of which are in evidence here.Instead the show lumbers from one scene to the next, with a few aerial feats and a too-brief apparition by the ring-like apparatus known as a Cyr wheel drowned out by too much bland dancing and way too much of Terry Truck’s recorded neo-Classical, New Agey score. Contributing to the mood — make of that what you wish — are Peggy Housset’s merely serviceable costumes and video design by Marie Jumelin that looks like a Photoshopped jumble of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte paintings, the head-trippy 1970s animated film “Fantastic Planet” and Roger Dean’s illustrations for Yes album covers.Despite the performers spending time suspended about the stage, the production remains stubbornly earthbound. Until, that is, what turns out to be a somewhat perverse move: the single showstopping scene, in which Antony Cesar flies over the audience, happens after the curtain call, when there is no show to stop anymore.The Little PrinceThrough Aug. 14 at Broadway Theater, Manhattan; thelittleprincebroadway.com; Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      Benedict Lombe Wins the Blackburn Prize for ‘Lava’

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      The British Congolese playwright earned the $25,000 prize for her memoir-monologue that deals with Black identity and displacement.For the first time in the 44-year history of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, awarded annually to a female, transgender or nonbinary playwright who writes for the English-language theater, the honor has gone to the writer of a debut play.Benedict Lombe, 30, a British Congolese playwright based in London, received the award on Monday for “Lava,” a one-woman memoir-monologue that deals with Black identity and displacement.“It feels incredible,” Lombe said in a phone conversation on Monday evening en route to the award ceremony at the Globe theater in London. “It’s a huge play that allows me to create a space where Black people can leave taller than when they walked in.”The Blackburn Prize comes with $25,000, as well as a signed print by the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. Many of its recipients have gone on to great acclaim (among them, the Pulitzer Prize winners Annie Baker, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Paula Vogel and Wendy Wasserstein).Lombe’s “Lava” was commissioned by the Bush Theater in London, and debuted there in July 2021. Ronke Adékoluejo starred in the one-woman show, directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike. In reviewing the work for The Guardian, Kate Wyver praised Adékoluejo’s indefatigable charisma, writing that she “controls the stage with such ease, oozing charm and confidence.”But under the bright joy of Adékoluejo’s performance, Wyver wrote, “fury rumbles in Lombe’s text.”“With hindsight, she takes us through incidents and aggressions from her life, each one being pushed into the pit of her stomach, gnawing at her, getting heavier as she carries the cumulative weight,” Wyver wrote.“Lava,” which Andrzej Lukowski of Time Out London characterized as a “freeform poetic eruption,” tells the story of a British Congolese woman who discovers a tale of quiet rebellion when she has to renew her British passport and wonders why her South African passport — a country she is also a citizen of — does not carry her first name. It takes place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during the time of Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship; post-apartheid South Africa; Ireland; and London.“It was gratifying to be able to celebrate Black people in fullness,” said Lombe, who wrote the play in the summer of 2020, “and to uplift us when so many people were feeling the opposite when they walked in.”Along with Lombe, the nine other finalists for the Blackburn Prize were honored. They received $5,000 each, and included Zora Howard, who was honored for her play “Bust.” One of Howard’s previous works, “Stew,” was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.Last year, Erika Dickerson-Despenza won the Blackburn Prize for her play “cullud wattah,” a look at the water crisis in Flint, Mich., through the lens of one family. It went on to be produced at the Public Theater last fall.Is a New York run also in the cards for “Lava”?“I mean, fingers crossed,” said Lombe, who is in residence with the National Theater Studio in London and working on new commissions. “I hope so. We’ll see what happens.” More

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      ‘Birthday Candles’ Review: Another Year, Another Cake, Another Profundity

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      Debra Messing expounds on the preciousness of life in a production that aspires to convey eloquent whimsy, but too often feels methodically sentimental.Repetition can make magic happen: repeat a word or a phrase enough times and it breathes new life, fresh meaning. Or repetition can strip language until all that’s left are empty rhythms and sounds. Words are funny like that.Noah Haidle’s “Birthday Candles,” which opened on Broadway Sunday night at the American Airlines Theater, tries to build poignancy and depth through moments that repeat like a record needle stuck in a groove. Instead, this Roundabout Theater Company production gets caught in a superficial cycle of wannabe profundities and emotional pantomimes.“I am a rebel against the universe. I will wage war with the everyday. I am going to surprise God!” So declares the precocious 17-year-old Ernestine (Debra Messing) as the show opens. It’s her birthday, and her mother (Susannah Flood) is making golden butter cake; it’s a tradition, one that Ernestine clings to for years, baking the same cake for herself over 90 birthdays, which we live through with her in the course of the 90-minute play.Messing, center, as the teenage Ernestine and Susannah Flood as her mother.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith a fanciful offstage chime Ernestine instantly skips from one age to the next, though at an inconsistent clip — sometimes a year, sometimes a decade, but we’re always on her birthday, and she’s always baking her cake. (Messing beats the eggs, creams the butter and mixes the batter in real time, making this sugar-addicted critic wonder: Where are our slices?)As she bakes, the details of her life fill in around her: Family members and friends enter and exit, are born and die. With a chime her high school crush, Matt (John Earl Jelks), becomes her husband. Another and they have a teenage son, Billy (Christopher Livingston), and a daughter in college, Madeline (Flood, heartachingly tragic), and before Ernestine knows it Billy is ready to propose to his hopelessly neurotic girlfriend, Joan (a delightful Crystal Finn).All the while Ernestine’s lovesick friend Kenneth (Enrico Colantoni, adorable at any age) casually strolls in unannounced, carrying a torch for her for decades.With ordinary characters expounding on the preciousness of life, “Birthday Candles” aspires to convey eloquent whimsy — births, deaths, love, despair, whole constellations of human feelings and thoughts — but it’s Christine Jones’ wondrous set design that wordlessly manages the trick.A homey powder-blue kitchen is framed by three door-less thresholds on the left, right and center — each one representing passage into the house or the outside world, or a more metaphysical passage into the afterlife. Dwarfing the kitchen is a night sky messy with floating objects — keyboard, tricycle, dollhouse, umbrella, soccer ball, a teddy bear with his right arm extended, left paw positioned over his face as though in embarrassment or fear.It’s there that we neatly see how the personal can meet the universal. Down below, though, we are dutifully following an unrelenting parade of progeny embodied, “Lehman Trilogy”-style, by Flood, Finn, Jelks and Livingston. At some points it becomes a hassle to see the view from Ernestine’s family tree, given how quickly figures in her life disappear, and how children transform into grandchildren, then great-grandchildren.These shifts are tough work for the actors, who must often convey their characters’ varied ages in succinct lines: a lifetime in just a few minutes. Most of the cast, particularly Messing, who delivers an awkward caricature of a teen and then the exaggerated hand-wringing and dithering warble of an old woman, struggle in the sunrise and sunset years.Vivienne Benesch’s direction exaggerates the methodical sentimentality of Haidle’s script, allowing broad, clichéd gestures to do shorthand work. The teens, slouching from one end of the stage to the next, are unbearably self-righteous. (“You’re a shadow in a suit posing as a human, you should be ashamed of yourself,” sneer the teenage avatars of two generations, in one of the play’s funnier repetitions.) And the middle-aged adults wilt into the weary postures of seniors, with their sighs and ailments, right before our eyes.The shifts are tough work for the actors, who must often convey their aging characters in a few lines. Late in life, Messing’s Ernesteine is flanked by (from left) Flood, Enrico Colantoni, Christopher Livingston, Jelks and Crystal Finn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs Ernestine shuffles closer to a century of birthdays, the metamorphoses lean into emotional manipulation. We watch one character suddenly going slack, his face twisting and his hands stiffening in place, as if suffering a stroke. It’s unsettling, but for anyone who has seen family affected by illness, such transitions feel gauche; a quick change in posture and a handful of lines meant to represent the monumental losses we reckon with in, as Ernestine calls it, “the daily human errand.”“Birthday Candles” nearly suffocates in such grandiloquent pronouncements and existential metaphors. Ingredients for the birthday cake include not just the usual pantry staples but “stardust, the machinery of the cosmos” and “atoms left over from creation.” Characters recite lines from “King Lear” so as to share the mad monarch’s rantings about the nature of life and the passage of time.Even a poor goldfish, a nonunion actor in a round bowl on the kitchen table, works his tail off as a stand-in for what Kenneth calls “the divinity within yourself.”In some ways this reach for the cosmic comes with the territory. In surreal plays like his 2016 “Smokefall,” Haidle aspires to mix multigenerational family drama and poetic musings. And he acknowledges that this work, his Broadway debut, is inspired by Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner,” which, like his classic “Our Town,” employs chronological jumps as a means of considering love, life and death in the stories of everyday people.At its most strained, “Birthday Candles” feels like an imitation of a superior work. The time-hopping conceit doesn’t allow us to get a real sense of the world beyond Ernestine’s kitchen. That said, there were plenty of empathetic sniffles and sighs in the audience during the performance. The most moving moments to me were those quiet exchanges that functioned as silhouettes for unspoken griefs. After one devastating loss, Ernestine and Matt bake a cake together in a weighty silence; after a few seconds he walks away, head hanging like a half-mast flag on a windless day.Ernestine’s story predictably finishes by circling back to the beginning — cake, stardust and atoms. Allow me to end with my own dose of carefully administered déjà vu: repetition can make magic happen. But real magic comes from the forward-march of a life whose everyday rhythms may repeat, sure, but still leave room for accident and chance — the most sensational improvisation.Birthday CandlesThrough May 29 at American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org; Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. 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      ‘Cabaret,’ Starring Eddie Redmayne, Sweeps Olivier Awards

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      The musical won seven awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys. A puppet-filled adaptation of “Life of Pi” and a “Back to the Future” musical also won big.LONDON — A revival of “Cabaret” that has been the talk of London’s theater world since opening in December, on Sunday swept the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.Starring Eddie Redmayne in his first London role in a decade, “Cabaret” collected seven awards during a ceremony at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Its haul included best musical revival, best actor in a musical (Redmayne), best actress in a musical for Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles, and best director for Rebecca Frecknall.Britain’s newspaper reviewers sometimes struggled for superlatives to describe “Cabaret.” Nick Curtis, writing in The Evening Standard, summed it up with a simple: “Wow. Just wow.”Matt Wolf, reviewing the show for The New York Times, said that Frecknall had made a “remarkable entry into musical theater” after several lauded stage productions here, including of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke.” “Frecknall pulls us into a hedonistic milieu, only to send us out nearly three hours later reminded of life’s horrors,” he added.The musical has gained as much attention for its staging as its performances, with audiences made to enter the Playhouse Theater through a side door, only to discover the building has been transformed to look like a 1920s Berlin nightclub. Ticketholders — some of whom criticized sky-high ticket prices — have to work their way through a labyrinth of corridors filled with dancers and drinks to get to their seats.Redmayne, center, as Master of Ceremonies with the company of “Cabaret.”Marc BrennerOf the actors in its original cast, Redmayne won particular plaudits. Arifa Akbar, writing in The Guardian, said he was “electric,” adding: “He gives an immense, physicalized performance, both muscular and delicate, from his curled limbs to his tautly expressive fingertips.”The other big winner on Sunday was “Life of Pi” at Wyndham’s Theater, Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel about a zookeeper’s son who, after a shipping accident, is stuck on a lifeboat at sea with only animals for company. It took five awards including best new play and best actor for Hiran Abeysekera, as well as a crowd-pleasing best supporting actor award for the seven puppeteers who bring a 44-pound puppet tiger to life onstage. Hiran Abeysekera won best actor for “Life of Pi,” and a best supporting actor award went to the puppeteers who bring the tiger to life onstage.Jeff Spicer/Getty Images For SoltReviewers had often singled out those puppeteers for praise. Dominic Cavendish, writing in The Daily Telegraph, said they made the tiger exude “a watchful malevolence and innate magnificence,” as he “moves from brute prowling threat to personality in his own right.”Some other shows did manage to get prizes at the Oliviers. “Back to the Future: the Musical” at the Adelphi Theater, a show that has grabbed attention for its flying car as much as its songs, won best new musical, beating shows including “Get Up! Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical” and the London debut of “Frozen.”The best comedy play went to “Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of)” at the Criterion Theater, a fast and loose retelling of Jane Austen’s novel, which closed in February citing a lack of audiences returning to the West End.The other notable winner was a revival of “Constellations” by the Donmar Warehouse at the Vaudeville Theater, which took awards for best revival and best actress in a play for Sheila Atim. That 70-minute, one-act play, about a couple falling in and out of love, was a hit last summer as British theater came back to life after multiple lockdowns. More

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      ‘Penelope’ Review: Adrift Between Ithaca and Progress

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      A new musical-comedy retelling of “The Odyssey” from the York Theater Company tries to center a powerful woman but feels like a show about and for men.For 20 long years, Penelope has waited for her husband, Odysseus, to sail home to Ithaca from the Trojan War. He was forced to go in the first place, but now the fighting has been finished for a decade and still he stays away — a king seemingly forsaking his kingdom and his queen.The mob of creeps who began sniffing around seven years ago, salivating at the prospect of the cushy life that marriage to Penelope would bring, think it is well past time for her to choose one of them as her new husband. And, hey, who wouldn’t be drawn to these guys, really, what with their demonstrated ability to show up where they aren’t wanted, become live-in guests and spend lazy days consuming copious amounts of their hostess’s food and drink.Also, they sing a cappella harmonies together. Relentlessly.Penelope would like them gone, but in the meantime, she has to stave off any trip to the altar. And in “Penelope, or How the Odyssey Was Really Written,” Peter Kellogg and Stephen Weiner’s new musical-comedy retelling of the epic poem traditionally credited to Homer, she does so by concocting letters from her husband.In them, Odysseus recounts the misadventures that delay him: a Cyclops, a shipwreck, the wrath of Poseidon — the usual spousal excuses. She reads these gripping inventions aloud to her freeloading suitors as proof that her king is en route.“Hope to see you soon,” she has him sign off, affectionately. “Your Odysseus.”Directed by Emily Maltby for the York Theater Company, with music direction and orchestrations by David Hancock Turner, “Penelope” paints its title character as the author of “The Odyssey.” It’s a promising twist, and it builds on an established idea that “The Odyssey,” a work abundant with substantial female characters — Penelope, Athena, Calypso, Circe, even the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis — is not a male creation.The novelist and critic Samuel Butler, in the 1890s, theorized that a woman must have written it. The classicist Robert Graves — whose Butler-inspired 1955 novel, “Homer’s Daughter,” imagines a Sicilian princess as the author of “The Odyssey” — called it “a poem about and for women,” its hero notwithstanding.“Penelope,” at the Theater at St. Jean’s on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, feels like a musical about and for men. In its cast of 10, there are just three women, including Britney Nicole Simpson, who makes a lovely Off Broadway debut in the title role. It is not through any shortcoming of hers that this ostensibly “female-centric” show, as a program note puts it, is so enamored of its male characters: the five tiresome suitors; Penelope and Odysseus’s son, Telemachus; and especially Odysseus. “Penelope” snaps into focus only in Act 2, when the wandering king returns and takes over a plot that had always been about his absence anyway.If you are looking for a vividly written Penelope, you would do better with Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel “Circe,” in which Penelope is indelible, and surprising, in a small supporting role. Here, though, the story that Kellogg (book and lyrics) and Weiner (music) tell suffers from a failure of imagination, as if making her a weaver of tales rather than of cloth gives her definition enough. (In “The Odyssey,” she promises to wed as soon as she finishes a weaving project, then unravels her work each night.) She does have Odysseus’s nurse, Eurycleia (an expert Leah Hocking), to conspire with, but where’s the rest of her orbit?If, on the other hand, you are looking for an old-fashioned, comfort-food kind of musical with goofball humor, unpretentious songs and a heroine who is just fine with the world never knowing that she wrote one of its classics (I, for one, had trouble swallowing that concession), “Penelope” may be a good fit.Ben Jacoby makes a likable Odysseus, who enjoys a sweet reunion with Telemachus (a charming Philippe Arroyo, in his Off Broadway debut), and has instant sexual chemistry with Penelope — a shock to her chaste system that Simpson conveys with tender, comic nuance. Maria Wirries is also funny as Daphne, Telemachus’s cleareyed, pig-slaughtering love interest.This is the kind of show, though, that gestures toward open-mindedness by having the women explain to the men that they must abandon some of their entitled ways.“I’ll adapt,” Odysseus vows.But “Penelope” itself? It’s a bit of a throwback, in the guise of change.Penelope, or How the Odyssey Was Really WrittenThrough April 24 at the Theater at St. Jean’s, Manhattan; yorktheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      in Television

      Rae Allen, Tony Winner and TV Mainstay, Dies at 95

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      In a varied career, she had memorable roles in “Damn Yankees” and on “Seinfeld” and was nominated for three Tonys. She later became a director.Rae Allen, a Tony Award-winning actress who was seen in both the stage and film versions of the hit musical comedy “Damn Yankees,” and whose many television roles included a world-weary unemployment counselor to the jobless George Costanza on “Seinfeld” and Tony Soprano’s aunt on “The Sopranos,” died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 95.Her death, at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home, was confirmed by her niece Betty Cosgrove.Ms. Allen made her Broadway debut in 1948 and her big splash seven years later, when she was cast as the sports reporter Gloria Thorpe in “Damn Yankees, the story of a middle-aged Washington Senators fan who makes a Faustian bargain to become a slugger named Joe Hardy and help his team keep the hated Yankees from winning the pennant. She led a group of nimbly dancing Senators in celebration of Hardy’s beneficial impact on the team with the showstopping song “Shoeless Joe From Hannibal, Mo.” (“Who came along in a puff of smoke? Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo.”)Ms. Allen earned her first Tony Award nomination for that performance, which she reprised in the 1958 movie version, her first film. She received her second Tony nomination in 1965 for Jean Anouilh’s play “Traveller Without Luggage,” and won the Tony six years later, as best featured actress, for Paul Zindel’s “And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little,” in which she played a neighbor in a story about the relationship between three neurotic sisters.“The awful neighbors are also given precisely the right clumsy boorishness by Rae Allen and Bill Macy,” Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The New York Times. He called their scenes “among the most entertaining of the evening.”Her comedic skills were also on display in a memorable two-part episode of “Seinfeld.” She played Lenore Sokol, a deadpan counselor skeptical about George Costanza’s attempts to get an extension on his unemployment benefits, including his claim to have interviewed for a job as a latex salesman for a phony company, Vandelay Industries. She softens when he sees a photograph of her plain-looking daughter on her desk.Ms. Allen and Roberts Blossom in the 1961 Off Broadway production of Edward Albee’s “The Death of Bessie Smith.” Leo Friedman“This is your daughter? George says. “My God! My God! I hope you don’t mind my saying. She is breathtaking.”She asks if he wants her phone number, but after they briefly date, her daughter dumps him because he has no prospects.Ms. Allen later had roles in “A League of Their Own” (1992), as the mother of the baseball players portrayed by Geena Davis and Lori Petty,” and the science-fiction film “Stargate” (1994), as a researcher. She was also seen on TV series including “Brooklyn Bridge” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”In four episodes of “The Sopranos” in 2004, she played Quintina Blundetto, the aunt of Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and the mother of the mobster Tony Blundetto, played by Steve Buscemi.Steven Schirripa, who played Bobby Baccalieri on “The Sopranos,” wrote in an email that Ms. Allen was “acting royalty” who was “respected by everyone in the cast.”Rae Julia Abruzzo was born on July 3, 1926, in Brooklyn. Her mother, Julia (Riccio) Abruzzo, was a seamstress and hairdresser. Her father, Joseph, was a chauffeur and an opera singer whose brothers performed in vaudeville. At 15, Rae played Buttercup in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore” in Greenwich Village.After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1947, Ms. Allen started her Broadway career as a singer in the musical “Where’s Charley?” She followed that with a role in another musical, “Alive and Kicking.” Her next three shows, also musicals, were “Call Me Madam,” “The Pajama Game” and “Damn Yankees,” all directed by the Broadway luminary George Abbott, who became a mentor and father figure.In the 1960s, Ms. Allen was in the Broadway productions of “Oliver!,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.”From left, June Lockhart, Betty Garrett and Ms. Allen in a 2006 episode of “Grey’s Anatomy.”Ron Tom / © ABC /Everett CollectionBy then, her television and film career had begun to take off; in the 1970s, she also started directing. In 1975 she was named director of the Stage West Theater Company in Springfield, Mass., and in 1991 she directed a revival of “And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little” at the Zephyr Theater in Los Angeles.She twice directed productions of “Cyrano de Bergerac” — the first in 1978 at the Long Beach Center Theater, in Long Beach, Calif., starring Stacy Keach, and the second in 2010 at the Ruskin Group Theater in Santa Monica, starring John Colella.Reviewing Ms. Allen’s staging of Ibsen’s “When We Dead Awaken” at Stage West in 1977, Mr. Barnes wrote that it had “speed, conviction and perception.”She also ran acting workshops and was a personal coach. In her 40s, she received bachelor’s and master’s of fine arts degrees in directing from New York University.Ms. Allen’s marriages to John Allen and Herbert Harris ended in divorce. No immediate family members survive. More