Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      New Playwrights’ Voices, in the Land Where Directors Rule

      by

      Bold takes on classic works defined theater in Germany for decades. But many playhouses are turning to new works by international dramatists.BERLIN — Germany has a rich tradition of dramatists, from Goethe to Brecht, but ask people here to name a contemporary German playwright and you’ll probably draw a blank. Over the past few decades, the creative space once occupied by playwrights in Germany has largely been filled by directors, whose takes on the dramatic repertory — and notably the classics — are often so refreshingly different that their productions can be considered new works in their own right.This season, however, some of the country’s leading playhouses are putting a renewed emphasis on cultivating new literary voices, stories and approaches to drama. And because this is happening in globalized 21st-century Europe — or perhaps because of a paucity of A-list homegrown playwrights — a surprising amount of new work on German stages comes from the pens of international dramatists.One of the most prominent places where that’s happening is the Berlin Volksbühne, a rare German theater run by a playwright. After debuting three of his own works earlier this season, the Volksbühne’s new leader, René Pollesch, ushered in 2022 with the world premiere of Kata Weber’s “MiniMe.” Like many of this Hungarian writer’s works (she’s best known for the play and film “Pieces of a Woman”), the production was directed by Kornel Mundruczo, her artistic and romantic partner. Sadly, the couple, who also recently worked on the premiere of an opera at the nearby Staatsoper, failed to hit the mark with their latest collaboration — which, for better or worse, has nothing to do with the diminutive character played by Verne Troyer in the “Austin Powers” movies.With “MiniMe,” Weber and Mundruczo have fashioned a nasty 90-minute domestic horror sitcom about a preteen girl (the exceptional 10-year-old newcomer Maia Rae Domagala, whose performance is one of the evening’s few saving graces) and her mother, an ex-model who is grooming her as a JonBenét Ramsey-type child beauty queen. But Weber never entirely makes us buy the disturbing premise of a mother so intent on fashioning her daughter in her own image that — spoiler alert — she gives the child Botox injections.“Doughnuts,” by Toshiki Okada, at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. Fabian HammerlMini’s ineffectual father is a dead weight at the center of the play, which expends far too much time on the parents’ boring marital issues rather than exploring the perverse mother-daughter relationship.Things aren’t much enlivened by Mundruczo’s elegant production, featuring fluid video work and a live soundtrack as well as an underutilized onstage pool with a flamingo float. The handsome set of a slick yet sterile suburban house lends the production a degree of naturalistic detail uncommon on German stages, which generally favor abstract or stylized approaches; it underscores the materialism and superficiality that destroy the play’s characters.Realism is the last thing you would associate with Toshiki Okada, the prolific Japanese theater artist, whose newest work, “Doughnuts,” recently premiered at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. (“Doughnuts” will also play in Berlin in May, as part of Theatertreffen, an annual celebration of the best theater from around the German-speaking world.) Over 75 minutes, six actors inhabit a stranger and more claustrophobic world than that of “MiniMe,” and yet, paradoxically, it seems somehow truer and more in touch with now.The play’s absurd premise, in which a group of notables are trapped in the lobby of a fashionable hotel — perhaps they are academics, perhaps businesspeople — brings to mind the work of Beckett and Buñuel. As they converse with one another and a comically ineffectual receptionist, the actors perform precise movements that update traditional Japanese Noh theater techniques and seem to illustrate, interpret or even contradict their dialogue. The actors are pitch perfect as they accompany their precisely declaimed monologues, on subjects ranging from the hotel’s amenities to a bear terrorizing a nearby supermarket, with cryptic and often hilarious gestures.“Our Time,” by the Australian writer-director Simon Stone, at the Residenztheater in Munich.Birgit HupfeldIn Germany, Okada is one of several prominent playwrights who frequently stage their own works in aesthetically distinctive productions, allowing them to exert a rare measure of control. Another is the Australian writer-director Simon Stone.Stone’s latest play, “Our Time,” at the Residenztheater in Munich, is a sprawling five-and-a-half-hour contemporary saga loosely inspired by the works of Odon von Horvath. That Austrian writer vividly chronicled life in Europe shortly before World War II, but Stone’s drama plays out in our own troubled age.Over three acts, we follow 15 characters over the course of six years, from 2015, when Germany began welcoming over a million refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, up to the coronavirus pandemic. This makes for absorbing theater, despite a few soap-operatic touches, wild coincidences and some speechifying toward the end. Performed entirely in and around a hyper-realistic mock-up of a gas station convenience store, “Our Time” works best when the dialogue settles into a natural, unforced register. The impressive cast is drawn from the Residenztheater’s vast ensemble, which has been getting quite a workout in a series of marathon productions this season.“Our Time” currently shares the program at the Residenztheater with work by Shakespeare and Molière. A different Munich theater, however, has shown a more extensive commitment to new dramatists: The Münchner Kammerspiele, like the Volksbühne, is betting on new plays to form the backbone of its repertory under a new artistic director, Barbara Mundel.From left, Vincent Redetzki, Stefan Merki and Gro Swantje Kohlhof in “Jeeps,” written and directed by Nora Abdel-Maksoud, at the Kammerspiele in Munich.Armin SmailovicThe pandemic has complicated these efforts. Luring audiences into theaters has been difficult everywhere, but it’s a particular challenge when the playwrights are unfamiliar. Many recent Kammerspiele shows I’ve caught were poorly attended. So I was glad to see that Munich theater lovers turned up in droves for a recent performance of “Jeeps,” a new comedy from the young German writer and director Nora Abdel-Maksoud, which has one of the best premises of any play I’ve seen in a long while: In the not-too-distant future, inheritance has been abolished. Instead, estates are distributed by a lottery administered by the Job Center, a dreary office where both the unemployed and the recently disinherited gather in hopes of scoring a winning ticket.“Jeeps” is a smart, loopy and fast-paced farce, but the actual satire seems slight and, judging from the all the belly laughs, mostly harmless. Who or what exactly is being skewered here, I wondered. The audience was having too good a time to be provoked, let alone discomfited. Still, there is no doubt about the talents and charisma of the four actors who embellish Abdel-Maksoud’s firecracker dialogue and simple, unadorned staging — a far cry from Stone’s and Okada’s more stylish productions — with verbal and physical high jinks. The Kammerspiele clearly has a hit on its hands. That’s an encouraging sign for the direction that Mundel is charting for her house as an incubator of new dramatic voices.MiniMe. Directed by Kornel Mundruczo. Through March 28 at the Volksbühne.Doughnuts. Directed by Toshiki Okada. Through March 28 at the Thalia Theater.Unsere Zeit. Directed by Simon Stone. Through March 13 at the Residenztheater.Jeeps. Directed by Nora Abdel-Maksoud. Through March 29 at the Münchner Kammerspiele. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Barrow Group Announces New $4 Million Performing Arts Center

      by

      The 35-year-old Off Broadway company and training center will open a new space, which will include a 60-seat theater and five studios, in April.At the outset of the pandemic, prospects looked bleak for the Barrow Group, the 35-year-old Off Broadway theater company known for its actor training programs. It pivoted its existing classes online, and then, in July 2020, vacated the space on West 36th Street that it had leased for 18 years.But now — as a result of Paycheck Protection Program funding, a Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, and a robust appetite for online training and artist development programs that generated over $1.9 million in earned revenue since the beginning of the pandemic — it’s preparing to open a $4 million performing arts center at 520 Eighth Avenue, just around the corner from its old space, in April.“Our brokers were able to negotiate a way-below market deal,” Robert Yu Serrell, the company’s executive director, said of the new space; the company entered into a 15-year lease in November, with two five-year options to renew. “It’s actually less than what we were paying at our former space, and we’ve got more space and more security,” he said, referring to the building’s security system.The Barrow Group, which has grown from offering 70 classes a year in 2010 to 661 online and in-person workshops since April 2020, was searching for a bigger space even before the pandemic, said Lee Brock, who founded the theater in 1986 with her co-artistic director and now husband, Seth Barrish.The new 13,155-square-foot-space — just over 3,000 square feet larger than the previous building — will feature a 60-seat theater, five sound-attenuated studios, offices and a community gathering space. Phased renovations are expected to begin this month.The company, which counts Anne Hathaway, Tony Hale and Noah Schnapp (“Stranger Things”) among the actors who have completed its training programs, has an annual budget of approximately $1.6 million. It has served more than 5,200 actors, writers and directors since the start of the pandemic, Serrell said.In the near future, its focus will remain on developmental programming and training, Barrish said, with a plan to eventually produce shows commercially as well. Some of the theater’s recent productions have included “Awake” by K. Lorrel Manning, a series of nine short plays that tackled topics like homophobia, police violence and immigration; and a revival of Martin Moran’s “The Tricky Part,” a memoir of sexual abuse that the New York Times critic Ben Brantley called “beautiful and harrowing.”“That will be Phase Two,” Barrish said. “When we get work that we feel wants to be shared commercially, we’ll do so. As to when we’ll have that project and when we’ll rent a theater, I’m not sure yet.” (The 60-seat theater, he said, is meant as a space for developmental work, not commercial productions.)The Barrow Group has raised about $2.5 million for the two-phase, $4 million renovation project, the first phase of which will cost about $800,000, Serrell said. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      ‘It Was a Crusade’: Karen Brooks Hopkins Revisits Her BAM Tenure

      by

      In a new memoir, the former president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music reflects on some of the organization’s most memorable stagings and artists.“Fund-raising is like a military operation,” Karen Brooks Hopkins writes in her new memoir, “BAM … and Then It Hit Me,” an account of the 36 years she spent at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “The odds are always against you. It’s going to be 90 percent rejection with many ‘casualties’ along the way, and you must constantly shift your strategy to find new ways forward.”Hopkins, 70, who joined the organization as a 29-year-old development officer in 1979, became its president in 1999, and discovered early on she had “the fund-raising gene.” During a long tenure (she retired in 2015), her tenacity and ability to raise money for ambitious experimental projects was a vital element in establishing the academy as a cultural force and a hub for must-see work by artists like Peter Brook, Laurie Anderson, Ivo van Hove and Pina Bausch.Her memoir, which will be published by powerHouse Books on March 1, combines personal history, fund-raising strategies and an informal account of some of the academy’s most memorable stagings and artists. It will have its official book launch on Feb. 17 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Hopkins will discuss her career with Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director.Hopkins, second from right, with, from left, Bruce Ratner, Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson around 1984. BAM Hamm ArchivesHopkins recounts her early years spent working with the visionary arts programmer Harvey Lichtenstein and — after he retired — her extensive tenure as president alongside Joseph V. Melillo, the academy’s executive producer.“Karen was the person standing right behind Harvey, who took up a lot of space, quietly doing a lot of very crucial things,” Anderson said in a phone interview. “Not just with presenting work, but in the initiatives with the neighborhood and the audience.”Together, Melillo and Hopkins extended Lichtenstein’s uncompromising legacy.“We had a shared vision for BAM,” Melillo wrote in an email. “I had the confidence as I curated the artists and their works for the three stages that she would identify the financial resources.”During their tenure (Melillo retired from the position in 2018), the academy’s artistic budget grew from $21 million to $52 million; Hopkins established an endowment that now stands at $100 million; and the BAM campus expanded to include a new theater, the Richard B. Fisher Building, and a new building project, BAM Strong, to link three of its spaces.Hopkins, who has an MFA in directing, said her theater background meant that she had always remained profoundly connected to the work onstage and to the priority of an artistic vision.“I have been so lucky to have these great artistic partners, Harvey and Joe,” she said in a recent video interview. “We were all in it together. For us, BAM wasn’t a job, it was a crusade.”Over a two-hour anecdote-filled conversation, Hopkins — now a senior adviser to the Onassis Foundation — picked out some highlights of her time at the academy. “I love talking about BAM,” she said.‘The Mahabharata’Lichtenstein “would do anything,” Hopkins said, for the British born, France-based director Peter Brook. So when Brook, in 1986, suggested a nine-hour adaptation of an ancient Hindu epic, which he had developed with Jean-Claude Carrière, the answer, naturally, was an immediate yes. “The Mahabharata” was produced by the academy the following year.Peter Brook’s nine-hour production of “The Mahabharata” in 1987.Gilles Abegg“We created a new theater just for that show,” she recounted, describing the renovation of the dilapidated Majestic Theater into what is now called the BAM Harvey, a block away from the main theater, which Brook felt was too formal a space for the work.“It was like moving a small country to New York and having them live here for a month,” Hopkins said. “And we had no money to do it.” But after she heard Brook describe the genesis of the work she decided “this was the greatest fund-raising story of all time.” She took the director and a group of donors to see the play in Paris, where it had been staged at Brook’s home theater, the Bouffes du Nord, raising the money in a relatively short time.“In the world of Brook, there is no real separation between spectator and performer, between the past and the present; they exist side by side in the theater and in life,” Hopkins said. “What you saw was the most profound combination of theatricality and the human condition finding an expression that was mind-blowing.”‘United States Parts I-IV’The pioneering, avant-garde work of the composer Laurie Anderson came to the academy soon after Lichtenstein started the Next Wave Series (which became the Next Wave Festival in 1983). “In 1982, we did ‘United States,’ Hopkins recounted. “It was risky to put an artist who wasn’t that well-known in a 2,000-seat opera house, but the work was a masterpiece. She held the stage for hours as a musician, a storyteller and a visual artist, and the entire show, a remarkable comment on America, was her conception. You felt you were watching an artist really come into her own.”A poster advertising what Hopkins called Laurie Anderson’s “masterpiece.”BAM Hamm ArchivesAnderson’s work was everything Lichtenstein wanted: “genre-bending, breaking forms, offering new ways of bringing shows to the stage,” Hopkins said.‘The Island’Many South African plays were presented at the academy over the years, but one that resonated most forcefully for Hopkins was “The Island,” in 2003, starring John Kani and Winston Ntshona, who wrote the play with Athol Fugard.“‘The Island’ was a piece that was like an arrow to your heart,” Hopkins said, “like the most intense short story you ever read.” She added: “It was simple, dark and profound. You were on the island with them, and in an hour you understood what they had been through for so long. Of course, it was really about Mandela, and you understood that when people are confined in an utterly inhospitable place, yet find each other and are committed to the same cause, there is a beauty and purity to the friendship that is a life bond.”Winston Ntshona, left, and John Kani in “The Island” in 2003.Richard TermineKani and Ntshona were “a partnership, a chemistry made in heaven,” she said.Watching a post-apartheid play by Nicholas Wright, “A Human Being Died That Night,” at BAM in 2015, offered “a remarkable historical trajectory told by theater,” she added. “When you stay in a place for 36 years, you realize it’s not about one season, even 10 seasons. It’s about generations of artists, and about history.”The Work of Pina BauschWhen Lichtenstein, who was a dancer before becoming an arts administrator, saw the work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch, “he absolutely went berserk,” Hopkins said.“Café Müller,” one of the first shows Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble presented at the academy in 1984, was a revelation, Hopkins said. “Each artist had a distinctive personality and role, and you knew them like you knew actors.”The works were often “crazily difficult” to stage, she added. “For ‘Arien,’ we needed tons of water to rain on the stage, and by mistake toxic waste was delivered and had to be removed from our parking lot by guys in hazmat suits.” In “Palermo Palermo,” a wall stretching across the stage had to fall; in “Nelken” thousands of carnations had to be installed over the whole stage.Pina Bausch’s “Palermo Palermo” in 1991.Martha Swope/The New York Public Library“One year we did ‘Bluebeard,’ which had a million dead leaves onstage,” Hopkins added. “It was June, 90 degrees and we had no air conditioning. One critic said it smelled like a compost heap.”The Tanztheater Wuppertal was a huge audience draw for the academy. “Pina was a discovery who became a blockbuster,” Hopkins said.‘Happy Days’ and ‘Endgame’Samuel Beckett’s experimental, difficult and poetic work was a natural fit for the academy, Hopkins said, and Melillo was particularly keen on finding new productions of his work. Two in particular, stand out for her.In “Happy Days,” directed by Deborah Warner, “the great Fiona Shaw found the yin and yang of that role in a way I had never seen,” Hopkins said. “It’s not every actress who can be buried up to her neck, and communicate both the desperation of her circumstances and an optimism despite them. You were laughing and crying at the same time.”Fiona Shaw in Deborah Warner’s 2008 production of Beckett’s “Happy Days.”Brooklyn Academy of Music The other enduring memory, she said, was of John Turturro playing Hamm in a wheelchair, with Max Casella as Clov, in the “unrelenting and unforgiving” play “Endgame.”One night, she recalled, the wheelchair collapsed, sending Turturro flying through the air. “He never broke character, even when the stagehands came on to pick him and the wheelchair off the floor,” Hopkins said. “The audience went nuts that night.”‘Einstein on the Beach’Lichtenstein discovered the work of the American director Robert Wilson, who was making a name for himself in Europe, around the time he took over at the Academy in 1967. “Harvey, in his most avant-garde heart, loved Robert Wilson, and felt he was on a divine mission to make sure that Bob’s large-scale work was seen in the U.S.,” Hopkins said. “There was almost no one in the audience for early pieces like ‘Deafman Glance,’” she said. “Or they would go home, do some laundry, come back; the pieces went on for hours!”In 1984, Lichtenstein told his team that they needed to raise $300,000 to present a Wilson collaboration with the composer Philip Glass, called “Einstein on the Beach.” Hopkins agreed. “I don’t know how, but we’ll do it,” she said.“Einstein” was a success. “After that the legend just grew and grew,” she said; the show returned to the Academy in 1992 and in 2012. “Bob works in a very inside-out way, not traditionally theatrical and very stylized,” Hopkins said. “But it comes from the gut and although the pieces can look cold, they are not. The heat comes from the ice around it; it’s an artistic trip.”She added that she particularly loved his 2014 adaptation of the Soviet writer Daniil Kharms’s “The Old Woman” with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe. “It was devastating, about someone starving to death, and you felt it,” she said. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      How Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster and ‘The Music Man’ Withstood Covid

      by

      Nearly 60 cast and crew members have tested positive since rehearsals began. Now, following a 10-day shutdown during previews, opening night is near.As soon as Hugh Jackman learned that the leading lady of “The Music Man,” Sutton Foster — whom he spent a substantial portion of every night breathing on, sweating on and locking lips with onstage — had tested positive for the coronavirus, he knew it was just a matter of time.“I’m pretty sure on every C.D.C. guideline, making out with someone with Covid is not recommended,” Jackman, 53, said in a phone conversation in late January. He is starring opposite Foster as the scam artist Harold Hill in the high-profile revival of Meredith Willson’s 1957 musical, which is scheduled to open Feb. 10 at the Winter Garden Theater.And, sure enough, five days later, came the positive proof on his at-home Covid test. Already down about a third of the show’s 46-person cast, and with both leads out, the producers canceled the next 11 performances. (The cast and crew were still paid during the shutdown, Kate Horton, one of the musical’s producers, said.)Though performances resumed a little over a week later, it was just the latest setback for a starry, star-crossed revival of the feel-good comedy, which won the Tony Award for best new musical in 1958. Originally scheduled to begin previews in September 2020, the show had already pushed back its opening night twice and weathered the departure of its lead producer, Scott Rudin, amid renewed scrutiny of his bullying behavior.The production, which is capitalized for up to $24 million, reunites much of the creative team behind the Tony-winning 2017 revival of “Hello, Dolly!,” including the director, Jerry Zaks. Its cast includes six Tony winners: Jackman; Foster, who plays the librarian Marian Paroo; Shuler Hensley; Jefferson Mays; Jayne Houdyshell; and Marie Mullen.In phone interviews last month, six members of the show’s cast and creative team outlined the measures they took to keep the show going amid a coronavirus outbreak; the vital role of actors known as swings, who have no regular role in a show and cover up to a dozen ensemble parts; and how they kept their spirits up amid a challenging preview period. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.When the “Music Man” revival was announced in March 2019, it looked as if it would be the marquee event of the fall 2020 Broadway season. Amid the industrywide shutdown, opening night was pushed to May 2021, and then again to Feb. 10, 2022. Finally, this past October, the show started rehearsals.The show’s director, Jerry Zaks, left, and its choreographer, Warren Carlyle, overseeing rehearsals.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesJERRY ZAKS (director) We felt we had gotten past Covid, and we were just happy to be there. We dived in and went nonstop.HUGH JACKMAN (Professor Harold Hill) It was so great to be back in the room.KATHY VOYTKO (swing/Marian understudy) It was a thrill to test negative every day.On Dec. 20, amid the Omicron surge, “The Music Man” had its first preview. Four covers — an actor who goes on for another actor who calls out of a show — were onstage.KATE HORTON (producer) I would look at the situation we were facing each day, and I would have conversations with stage management and the creative team and we would decide what to do.SUTTON FOSTER (Marian Paroo) At one point, there were 14 people out of the show. We had swings covering seven roles and trying to hold up that show. And they did. It was remarkable. One of our swings, Emily Hoder, is 10 years old, and she was covering three tracks.ZAKS I couldn’t do the critical work of addressing the material, making changes in the lighting, fixing the sound, because we had so may people out. There was a moment when we asked ourselves if we’d have to push opening night.Then it happened: On Thursday, Dec. 23, the morning of the fourth preview, Foster tested positive.FOSTER We’ve been vigilant, but I have a 4 ½-year-old daughter who goes to preschool. On December 20, the night of our first preview, she hadn’t been feeling good, and my husband took her to the doctor and she tested positive. But every day I was testing negative, negative, negative. Then on Thursday morning, I did a rapid test at home, and it immediately was just this rude red line. And I was like, “OK, here we go.”But the show still went on that night, thanks to Voytko, a swing and an understudy for Marian, who mainlined the role in eight hours.VOYTKO I had an 11 o’clock costume fitting, and, just before noon, our costume designer, Santo [Loquasto], said “Kathy, call Thomas [Recktenwald],” who’s our production stage manager. And I sort of had that sinking feeling. And sure enough, he said, “You’re on.” I voice-texted my husband because my hands were shaking so much that I couldn’t possibly have used my phone. Then I put my phone on silent, and I grabbed my emergency cheat sheet I had made.“I want people to understand that these are unprecedented times in theater,” said Jackman, who plays the scam artist Harold Hill opposite Foster’s Marian Paroo.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesJACKMAN She had her first rehearsal as Marian at 1; we had until 5. We got through every scene once. I think maybe she got to redo something twice.WARREN CARLYLE (choreographer) There are three really tricky sequences that could take an actress down: the finale; “Shipoopi” at the top of Act II because there’s a lot of dance for her there; and the library sequence, which is very prop heavy. There are something like 75 library books and a million different things that have to go in a million different places.VOYTKO A big goal post was getting through “My White Knight” because the lyrics have a patter section, which is a bit of a tongue twister. And I only had two shots at the dance for “Shipoopi” with Hugh and the tap finale before we had to do them in front of an audience.And she did. She got a standing ovation, and Jackman delivered a curtain speech praising understudies and swings that went viral.JACKMAN I want people to understand that these are unprecedented times in theater. I was so moved by what Kathy had gone through. I’ve never seen anything like that.After other breakthrough cases, the production canceled its Saturday evening and Sunday matinee performances on Dec. 25 and 26. On Tuesday, Dec. 28, Jackman tested positive.JACKMAN I was already feeling a bit funky when I was doing the show the night before, even though I was testing negative at the time, so it wasn’t a surprise. I was pretty nauseated, with a scratchy throat and a runny nose. My wife was amazing — we’d been sleeping in the same bed together, obviously, so I think she expected to get it too, which she did. But I’m vaccinated and boosted, so I was fine after a few days.The show eventually canceled its next 11 performances, through Wednesday, Jan. 5.HORTON Every time somebody is out when you’re so early in the life of the show, you need to do a technical rehearsal with the stand-in. But when you get to a certain number of people being out, there isn’t enough time to do that and make sure everyone onstage is safe. We got to a point where there were over 10 people off, so it was a very straightforward decision, actually.But the production never considered postponing its opening or following in the footsteps of “Mrs. Doubtfire,” whose producer, Kevin McCollum, decided in January to pause performances for nine weeks, with plans to resume in March (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” like “The Music Man” co-produced by Barry Diller, announced a hiatus later that month).And there was music: The show is scheduled to open on Feb. 10 at the Winter Garden Theater.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesHORTON We knew mathematically we would get through it. Once a certain number of people are out and you know they’re coming back, it was just a revolving-door situation, like who was going to be back when. And the demand for the show is so huge that we knew we had audiences waiting for us.Previews resumed on Thursday, Jan. 6. Finally, the full company was onstage together for the first time, with no covers or swings.ZAKS It wasn’t until the end of January that I was able to make the changes and cuts that I wanted to make.FOSTER We had an extraordinarily long preview process — over six weeks. In shows I’ve done in the past, the preview period has been about four weeks. So even though we lost 10 days, we’re still in good shape.HORTON Things have stabilized hugely. Advance sales have been fantastic. We’ve gone a couple of weeks now with no positive tests.VOYTKO I did three shows in a row with Hugh — smooching, panting under dance numbers in each other’s faces — but I never tested positive! We were joking that an epidemiologist should do some sort of study.Now, with opening night in less than a week, the cast, crew and creative team are ready to celebrate.JACKMAN It’s amazing to be on a stage with a cast that’s near 50 people and a 25-piece orchestra. It’s a story about faith, belief and community that’s so timely. It’s one of those perfect musicals.VOYTKO Nothing will ever be as stressful as going on in a fourth preview as Marian. My greatest hope is that everyone is healthy on opening night, and I can cheer them on from the audience! More

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Clue’ Review: A Whodunit That Looks a Lot Like a Board Game

      by

      This Paper Mill Playhouse production is a welcome throwback to an era of physical comedy.“Clue,” the campy 1985 film based on the popular board game, became a cult classic because of an all-star cast delivering delicious mile-a-minute quips. A new stage production, adapted by Sandy Rustin from Jonathan Lynn’s screenplay, with additional material by Hunter Foster and Eric Price, may not be the out-and-out hoot the film is, but the show is a very fun, very silly 1950s-set whodunit that strikes some contemporary parallels on the way to its grand reveal.As the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings drone on a television set, the eager-to-please butler, Wadsworth (an agile Mark Price), prepares for the arrival of his boss’s six guests, invited under undisclosed circumstances and each assigned aliases for the night.There’s a handsy shrink, Professor Plum (Michael Kostroff); the vivacious madame, Miss Scarlet (Sarah Hollis); and Mr. Green (Alex Mandell), a gay Republican who is hiding the fact that he didn’t vote for Eisenhower in the last election. These three play straight against the production’s broader comics: the dimwitted Col. Mustard (John Treacy Egan, with excellent timing); Mrs. White (Donna English), a multiple divorcée; and Mrs. Peacock (Kathy Fitzgerald, hilarious), a senator’s wife with a drinking problem who dresses like an American Girl doll. (Jen Caprio did the costumes.)They soon discover that their ties to Washington, ranging from the morally murky to the criminal, have landed them on the wrong end of a blackmailing scheme. After their host, Mr. Boddy (Graham Stevens), arrives, he adds McCarthyism blacklisting to their worries. The lights turn off, things — specifically a candlestick, a wrench, a lead pipe, a revolver, a rope and a dagger — go bump in the night, and Mr. Boddy winds up dead, with the dwindling survivors scrambling to make sense of it all.“Is this about the Red Scare?” Mr. Green whimpers. Released in the Reagan era, the film was a pointed satire of conservative hypocrisy. Though the stage version begins with a strong undercurrent of paranoia, which reads believably as both Covid-19 apprehensions and a paralyzing fear of outing yourself as possibly cancelable, it mostly drops politics once the “big scary mansion” high jinks get underway. The plot’s whodunit structure is a surefire farce setup, but given the state of U.S. affairs, the production could have used a stronger political backbone.Casey Hushion directs with a steady eye toward possible laughs, and Lee Savage’s set conveys an appropriately stuffy mansion, with hidden passages and falling chandeliers. The finely tuned cast scurrying about to convince a stray cop (Kolby Kindle) that the propped-up corpses are merely having a good time is a welcome throwback to an era of physical comedy that’s been mostly usurped by sarcasm.Wadsworth’s conclusive explanations — a clever take on the film’s notorious alternate endings, which played at different theaters — make a case that what was then dismissed as a marketing gimmick was actually an early predecessor of today’s multiverses. As those left standing rush to blame one another, in different possible scenarios, they mirror our own increasingly selfish desire to think our perception as being the correct one. Like the board game, and life itself, the play winds up making only one perception true — but thank goodness this one’s fun.ClueThrough Feb. 20 at the Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, N.J.; papermill.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Tambo & Bones,’ a Minstrel’s Guide to Making Money

      by

      Dave Harris’s hip-hop triptych exploring racism and capitalism is meant to be a biting satire, but it has little force behind it.The minstrel show — that racist brand of theater that perpetuated stereotypes about Black people — was all the rage in the 1800s and hung around until the rise of the civil rights movement put the genre in its grave. And yet, I bet that even today, most Black Americans have witnessed or participated in a minstrel show of some sort — a performance of Blackness that simplifies and debases it.If that performance makes a profit — well, that’s capitalism for you, right? Even a young playwright with a new Off Broadway production may fall into that trap — and he knows it.This scourge of capitalism — as the engine of slavery, as a shaper of Black art and identity — is what the two characters in “Tambo & Bones” must grapple with. The play, which opened at Playwrights Horizons on Monday in a coproduction with the Center Theater Group, aims to be a sharp satire about the intersection of race and performance, especially when money is in the picture — as it always is in our country of wealth and opportunity.Written by the poet and playwright Dave Harris, “Tambo & Bones” begins by introducing us to two minstrel characters, Tambo (W. Tré Davis) and Bones (Tyler Fauntleroy). Dressed in tattered period attire, they mill around in an artificial pastoral scene, alongside fake trees and grass designed like paper cutouts from a children’s storybook. Tambo just wants to nap under his cardboard tree, and Bones is doing all he can to hustle up some quarters. (After all, their pipeline to success is “quarters to dollars to dreams.”)The setup of two friends waiting around for something to happen, discussing what they most crave and value, recalls the story of two old goats who famously waited for some guy named Godot — or, more recently, the play “Pass Over.” Though here it lacks the lyrical dexterity and layered meanings of either.In the lengthy second part of the show, which is described as a “hip-hop triptych,” we hear the promised music in the form of a concert, though songs are limited to this middle section. Tambo and Bones, dripping in diamonds and gold chains, come out on a platform surrounded by the hard lights and scaffolding of a stadium; they’re now contemporary rappers who trade lyrics, Tambo more Nas or Chance the Rapper to Bones’s 50 Cent. Their different rap styles, however, aren’t the only ways the two are at odds: Bones wants to game the system to achieve the same amount of wealth as his white peers, while Tambo thinks the system is broken and must be brought down completely.I won’t spoil the third part, but it jumps to the future, in a changed society where the story of Tambo and Bones has become a vital part of history.In the play’s second part, Fauntleroy, left, and Davis assume the roles of rappers. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHarris’s concept is promising. It brings to mind plays like “Underground Railroad Game,” “3/Fifths” and “Black History Museum,” which used music, games and immersive art installations to deliver biting satire on subjects like minstrelsy and the effects of institutional racism. But “Tambo & Bones” drops its two characters — actually, more like archetypes (the Black activist, the Black businessman) — into the supposedly satirical world of the play and shuffles them around with little development of the central themes and progression of the main ideas.The director, Taylor Reynolds, doesn’t help clarify or illuminate Harris’s shallow script, defaulting to only one mode: loud and emphatic. And the transitions between sections do little to connect the parts in service of a grand thesis. A satire and a concert and an off-road turn into speculative fiction: “Tambo & Bones” is a lot of things, but nuanced is not one of them.Harris tries to have it both ways when it comes to his play’s stance, critiquing how some creators, producers and audiences capitalize on Black trauma, while self-consciously acknowledging that he, too, is part of that practice. (In an essay in the program, Harris writes about how performances of trauma are often rewarded in the world of poetry slams.) In one scene in particular, he has his characters explicitly call him out: As if by addressing the issue head on, he can absolve himself of it.At the very least, the costumes (by Dominique Fawn Hill) and lighting (by Amith Chandrashaker and Mextly Couzin) have a clear execution and purpose, as the show shifts from the affected sunniness of the minstrel setting to the aggressive reds and roving spotlights of the concert. The scenic design, by Stephanie Osin Cohen, however, feels more functional than finessed; the bucolic setting of the first part is quickly swapped for the Madison Square Garden-style arena, and unsightly orange panels are rolled out and lined up in a row to form a makeshift wall for the final part.And even though the 90-minute show may not always be entertaining for the audience, at least the actors have fun. Davis keeps up with the sudden turns of the production but is stuck with an unremarkable character. Fauntleroy, as the more interesting Bones, brings an infectious sense of play to the production; his blithe performance in fact feels unmatched by the material, which even Fauntleroy’s enthusiasm can’t elevate.“Tambo & Bones” ends abruptly, with no bows. It’s an attempted mic drop but with no force behind it, an ineffectual grab not for the quarters or dollars that Bones seeks but for the greatest currency of any stage, minstrel or otherwise: an audience’s attention.Tambo & BonesThrough Feb. 27 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Kenneth H. Brown, Playwright Best Known for ‘The Brig,’ Dies at 85

      by

      He drew on his own experiences in the Marines to depict brutality within the corps, drawing acclaim Off Off Broadway.Kenneth H. Brown, a New York playwright whose acclaimed 1963 Off Off Broadway play “The Brig,” based on his experiences as a Marine, portrayed dehumanization inside a military prison during the Korean War, died on Feb. 5 at a hospice in Queens. He was 85. A friend, the performance artist and writer Penny Arcade, said the cause was cancer.After growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s as something of a street tough, Mr. Brown, eager to serve his country, enlisted in the Marines at 18. But stationed in Japan, he found himself rattled by military life and was thrown into the brig for insubordination.There, by his account, he was humiliated and abused. Guards called him “maggot”; he was punched in the gut for even minor infractions. Mornings started with garbage-can lids being banged on bunk beds, and he and his fellow inmates were ordered to jog around their claustrophobic quarters for hours until they were breathless.“I was always in trouble in the Marines,” he said in an interview with the Lower East Side Biography Project. “I went to the brig twice. The first time I did 25 days.” Of his military service, he said, “By the time I got out, I was a complete pacifist.”Back in New York, Mr. Brown worked as a bartender and studied at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill. In his spare time he wrote “The Brig,” a hyper-realistic play depicting a grueling day in the life of 10 imprisoned Marines and the guards who brutalize them.Mr. Brown, left, with Judith Malina and Julian Beck, founders of the Manhattan avant-garde troupe the Living Theater, in 1964. The company had given “The Brig” its premiere.Mr. Brown didn’t have any theater connections. But through a friend his manuscript made its way to the Living Theater, the revered avant-garde repertory company founded in the 1940s by Julian Beck and Judith Malina. They were captivated by “The Brig” and decided to produce it.“I was a guy from the neighborhood,” Mr. Brown said. “I never met people like Julian and Judith.”“The Brig” made waves when it opened in 1963 at the Living Theater in Greenwich Village.“If what happens on the stage of the Living Theater is a true representation of conditions in the brig, the president or his secretary of defense ought to order an investigation,” Howard Taubman wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Mr. Brown’s obsessive script does not spare a detail of the devastating indictment.”The play won three Obie Awards and toured Europe. Jonas Mekas directed a film version.“The Brig” became one of the Living Theater’s great successes, but it also became inextricably linked to the company because of its anarchic last performance there. During the play’s run, the authorities shut down the playhouse for delinquent taxes, but the cast and an audience broke into the padlocked theater for one final show.“The play accomplished what I wanted it to accomplish,” Mr. Brown said. “It revealed the horror of this condition, and it revealed it very clearly not through commenting on it, but doing it. Actually performing the ritual of sadism that was the Marine Corps.”A scene from the film version of “The Brig,” directed by Jonas Mekas, in 1964Harvard Film ArchiveKenneth Howard Brown was born in Brooklyn on March, 9, 1936, to Kenneth and Helen (Bella) Brown. His mother was a bank officer, his father a police officer.Growing up in the Bay Ridge section, Ken was known to brawl with youths in the neighborhood. But he also wrote poems and short stories in his teens while attending the Jesuit-run Brooklyn Prep.After the success of “The Brig,” Mr. Brown enjoyed the life of a celebrated young playwright. “I was off and running, with grants and fellowships, teaching jobs and jaunts to faraway places,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1986. “Maybe I could make a go of it in the rarefied atmosphere of literature.”But “by the time the smoke cleared,” he continued, “I was broke.”He went back to tending bar. He worked at Bradley’s, a jazz club on University Place, and helped run Phebe’s, a Bowery haunt for the downtown theater crowd. In an essay published in the Times in 1972, he wryly addressed the realities of a writer’s life in the city:“That’s right, I’m the guy who wrote ‘The Brig.’ What am I doing here running this restaurant? Well, I’ve got to pay the rent, you know. No, I can’t get any fellowships and grants. I’ve had them all, and nobody will renew them until I make theater history again. Oh, yes, you have to do it again and again.”But Mr. Brown kept writing. In 1970, he published “The Narrows,” an autobiographical novel about high schoolers growing up in Bay Ridge in the 1950s. “Nightlight,” a drama set in a bleak city apartment, was staged in 1973. “Hitler’s Analyst,” a novel about a Park Avenue psychiatrist who treats a couple who believe they are Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, was published in 2000.Mr. Brown grew old in Bay Ridge, living in a rent-controlled apartment passed down to him by his parents, and for years he headed into Manhattan to tend bar. He kept busy writing a sequel to “The Great Gatsby” titled “Carraway,” based on the character who narrates the Fitzgerald novel. (Information on survivors was not immediately available.)In 2007, long after the Living Theater’s playhouse was closed and years after the company began moving from place to place, it settled into a new home on the Lower East Side. To Mr. Brown’s surprise, he received a call from Ms. Judith Malina, then 80, who told him that “The Brig” would be the inaugural production.The play’s revival was widely publicized, and Mr. Brown savored the triumph. But as Americans were still reckoning with reports of torture at the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the revival was starkly timely. The coincidence wasn’t lost on Mr. Brown.“‘The Brig’ has always been relevant,” he said in an interview in 2010. “I guess as long as there’s war and as long as there’s a military and especially as long as one questions the ethical right to wage war.”“It’s going to stay relevant,” he added, “until there’s peace throughout the world.” More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘The Tap Dance Kid,’ Still Out of Step With the Times

      by

      The Encores! series returns with a 1983 musical that, despite its pleasures, wasn’t quite right then and isn’t quite right now.When 8:30 p.m. was a typical curtain time for Broadway musicals, the main character’s biggest number, crystallizing the crisis and ensuring an ovation — think “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy” — often came at 11.The curtain for Wednesday night’s opening of the Encores! revival of “The Tap Dance Kid” went up at 7:30, so the so-called 11 o’clock number came closer to 10, but it was still recognizably the main event. That’s when Joshua Henry, playing William Sheridan, the conservative father of a Black family thrown into chaos by a son who wants to be a dancer, let loose with a tirade that ripped the fabric of the rest of the show to pieces, expressing with fury and unbridled terror the character’s disdain for what he sees as the performative Blackness of tap.“I keep on smilin’ through the worst of times,” he snarls while shucking and jiving monstrously. “Lettin’ the white man toss me his nickels and dimes.”It’s an astonishing performance, in the best way hard to watch. If only William were the main character it might even make sense at the end of a mostly lighter-hearted story. But he’s not, and it doesn’t, and the biggest number, whenever it comes, should not be his.That “The Tap Dance Kid” is never sure which of the members of the Sheridan family it’s about — the focus seems to change every 10 minutes — is just one of the oddities afflicting this tonally bewildering but intermittently appealing 1983 musical, which Encores!, in its return to live production after a two-year pandemic hiatus, is offering through Sunday at New York City Center.Is the main character, as the title leads you to expect, William’s 10-year-old son, Willie (Alexander Bello), the one who wants to dance despite his father’s prohibitions? Or is it Emma (Shahadi Wright Joseph), William’s 14-year-old daughter, who wants to be a lawyer like him but can barely get his attention because she’s a girl?Bello, left, with Adrienne Walker, who plays his mother, Ginnie.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat about William’s wife, Ginnie (Adrienne Walker), who must “tap dance” around her husband’s temper while trying to make things right for her children? Or Ginnie’s brother, Uncle Dipsey (Trevor Jackson), a dancer and choreographer? Dipsey, depending on your point of view, is either leading Willie astray by teaching him the “shim-sham-shimmy” or upholding the joyful traditions of an art form mastered by men like his late father, Daddy Bates (DeWitt Fleming Jr.).Yes, even a ghost gets two big numbers.The musical was always something of a hodgepodge. The original book, by Charles Blackwell, based on the bracingly dour young adult novel “Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change” by Louise Fitzhugh of “Harriet the Spy” fame, never resolved the problem of making peppy entertainment out of such downbeat material.The score — by Henry Krieger and Robert Lorick — fully absorbed that confusion of tone, offering songs that are either purely high-spirited (“Fabulous Feet”) or baldly prosaic (“Four Strikes Against Me”) with little in between. There are times when you don’t know why someone is singing or dancing and other times when you do but wish you didn’t.The Encores! production, directed by Kenny Leon, does not solve those problems. Lydia Diamond’s “concert adaptation” (though the production is amply staged) does make some improvements, moving the story, which in the 1983 production was said to take place in “the present,” to 1956, where it in some ways makes more sense. The family’s interpersonal and often gender-based conflicts — Emma wants to wear pants, Ginnie chafes under her husband’s authority — feel more apt in the earlier period, as does Krieger’s swingy music, which is oddly retro for the composer of “Dreamgirls.” Still, it’s beautifully performed by the 24-piece Encores! orchestra under the direction of Joseph Joubert.But in further revising the jumbled tunestack used for the original production’s national tour, Diamond’s adaptation exacerbates the show’s scattershot approach. (At the start, we get three establishing numbers in a row, for Willie, Dipsey and Emma, thus establishing little.) And the heavy cutting of spoken scenes that is part of the Encores! brief is especially detrimental to such a busy yet unfocused story. In one scene, I realized that Willie was on a bus only after checking the program to find that the number was called “Crosstown.” I’d thought he was in a dream sequence.Foreground from left: Kurt Csolak, Jodeci Milhouse and Justin Prescott. The show’s ensemble numbers, choreographed by Jared Grimes, are suitably spectacular, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe choreography by Jared Grimes is suitably spectacular in the ensemble numbers, and the demonstration of the changing styles of tap as they pass from Daddy Bates to his children and then, via Dipsey, to more familiar Broadway versions, is fascinating to watch. Jackson (along with Tracee Beazer as his girlfriend, Carole) is an especially exciting dancer, and an appealing crooner as well. And Bello, in a tradition of Willies that includes Alfonso Ribeiro, Dulé Hill and Savion Glover, makes a charming show of learning and then quickly personalizing the steps that are part of his heritage.I wish that were the focus of the story — or that there were a focus at all. If the musical numbers are sometimes hard to grasp visually, the staging of the book scenes is too often undifferentiated. And at least on opening night, after just 11 days of rehearsal, the technical elements were not yet cohering. For a show about the excitement of dance, the pace is strangely languid.That’s partly built into the haziness of the original material. And though one of the things Encores! is designed to show us is what musicals, for better or worse, felt like when they first opened, I’m not sure this production, the first under Lear deBessonet, the new artistic director, succeeds.Perhaps it shouldn’t. That “The Tap Dance Kid” tells the story of an upper-middle-class Black family (“Don’t you buy all of your clothes on the Upper East Side?” William asks his wife rhetorically) made it somewhat ahead of its time in 1983. That it was mostly the work of a white creative team makes it somewhat behind the time now. Letting Black artists take a new look is the only sensible thing to do — except for leaving it be. Not every historical relic needs to be on display.The Tap Dance KidThrough Feb. 6 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More