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      Review: In ‘Prayer for the French Republic,’ Echoes of the Past

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      Joshua Harmon’s ambitious new play toggles between a contemporary Jewish family facing growing antisemitism and their relatives during World War II.The well of naïve young Americans being schooled in life, love, politics and croissants by effortlessly worldly French people is in no danger of running dry. The latest addition to this cohort is 20-year-old Molly, a New Yorker who has just met her distant cousins in Paris.Thankfully it is they, not sweet, passive Molly, who are the subjects of “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s ambitious and maddening, thought-provoking and schematic new play, directed by David Cromer at Manhattan Theater Club.At the very beginning, the matriarch, Marcelle Salomon Benhamou (an excellent Betsy Aidem), painstakingly explains her family’s genealogical ties to Molly (Molly Ranson). They are so complicated that Marcelle has to repeat them for the young woman’s benefit, and of course the audience’s as well. Even then, it takes much of the play’s three-hour running time and some toggling between 2016-17 and 1944-46 for the connections and their consequences to sink in.Harmon (“Significant Other,” “Admissions”) has set himself quite a challenge because Molly has arrived at a critical juncture for Marcelle; her husband, Charles (Jeff Seymour); and their 20-something children, Daniel (Yair Ben-Dor) and Elodie (Francis Benhamou). Daniel, who wears a kipa, has come home with a bloodied face after an antisemitic aggression. It is just another example of what Charles feels is an increasingly scary climate for Jews in France, a last straw that makes him want to move to Israel.Betsy Aidem, left, and Richard Topol as siblings in Joshua Harmon’s play, a Manhattan Theater Club production.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“It’s the suitcase, or the coffin,” he says, referring to his ancestors’ forced wandering as he may be about to emulate it. (One of the play’s most fascinating aspects, though an underexplored one, is how these characters represent two strands of French Judaism: Marcelle’s Ashkenazi ancestors have been rooted in France for centuries, while Charles’s are Sephardic Jews who lived in North Africa for generations before relocating from Algeria in the 1960s.)The Benhamous have spirited arguments that have the urgency of life-or-death decisions: Should they stay or should they go? What does it mean to be Jewish in France? (The play’s title refers to a prayer that has been said in French synagogues since the early 19th century.)Some of the show’s concerns, including the temptation of appeasement via assimilation — a position embodied by Marcelle’s brother, Patrick (Richard Topol) — echo those Harmon explored, in a much more comic vein, in his blistering debut, “Bad Jews,” from 2012. That show was dominated by a hurricane-like character named Daphna, and she now has a marginally milder-mannered relative in Elodie, who injects volatile energy every time she opens her mouth.Incidentally, Ranson was also in “Bad Jews” and once again finds herself on the receiving end of impassioned, and often wickedly funny, tirades and put-downs that have the biting rhythm of New York Jewish humor rather than a French sensibility. (A faux pas: The Benhamous buy croissants in an American-type cardboard box rather than the paper bags used in French boulangeries.)From left: Nancy Robinette, Kenneth Tigar, Peyton Lusk and Ari Brand in one of the scenes from the end of World War II.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAll of this would be enough to pack any story, but Harmon also transports us to the end of World War II for several scenes with Marcelle and Patrick’s older relatives — their grandparents, Irma and Adolphe Salomon (Nancy Robinette and Kenneth Tigar, both heart-wrenching), have somehow managed to survive in occupied Paris and held on to their piano store.The two narratives progressively start bleeding into each other, with Marcelle and Patrick’s father, Pierre (Peyton Lusk in the 1940s, Pierre Epstein in the 2010s), embodying the link, both literal and metaphorical, between past and present.Cromer, a technically astute and emotionally sensitive director, handles the back and forth as well as you might expect — he puts a stage turntable to evocative, if perhaps a little clichéd, use, for example. Still, it’s not hard to feel the show’s tension slacken when we leave the Benhamous. The play’s finale aims for the lofty and falls terribly short, but it does represent the family’s tragedy: they want to be part of a country that may never fully accept them.Prayer for the French RepublicThrough Feb. 27 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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      Danai Gurira Will Star as Richard III at Shakespeare in the Park

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      The actress, known for “The Walking Dead” and “Black Panther,” will headline a return to semi-normal for the annual festival, which will also present “As You Like It.”The Public Theater, anticipating a semi-normal summer this year, is planning two full-scale productions for Free Shakespeare in the Park, including a run of “Richard III” starring Danai Gurira in the title role.The annual festival, ordinarily a highlight of summer in New York, took place via radio in 2020 (the play was “Richard II”), and then last year featured a single, small-cast show before a reduced-capacity audience (it was called “Merry Wives” — even the title was abbreviated) as the theater tried to adapt to shifting safety protocols necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic.Both pivots won praise, but this summer the Public is ready to go big again, with a two-show season and full-capacity audiences. “Richard III” will feature a cast of about two dozen, and it will be followed by a reprise of the Public’s 2017 production of “As You Like It,” which, by featuring New Yorkers from all five boroughs alongside professional actors, will have a cast of several hundred.“Last summer was a lifesaver, and this summer is going to be a huge shot of energy,” Oskar Eustis, the Public’s ebullient artistic director, pledged in an interview. “We are planning to have a full summer and to produce in as large and vibrant a scale as we ever have.”Of course, the pandemic’s not over, and there will be rules. At the moment, the Public is still planning to require patrons to show proof of vaccination, including a booster shot for those who are eligible, and to require mask wearing by patrons. Also, Eustis said the goal will be to keep both productions short enough that they can be performed without an intermission, which means some serious trimming for “Richard III,” originally one of Shakespeare’s longest plays.The production of “Richard III” will be directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”), who is no stranger to trimming — his halved production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is now running at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater downtown.Eustis said that he and O’Hara chose “Richard III” because it has not been seen at Shakespeare in the Park for many years, and because it felt relevant.“Let’s just say that ‘Richard III’ is the artistic work that for the first time really examined a political figure who utterly committed to the big lie — whose entire career is based on telling blatant falsehoods and somehow getting away with it,” Eustis said. “The idea that showmanship, devoid of content, has become a powerful political force makes it very germane for this moment.”Gurira, Eustis said, was an obvious choice to star: Best known for “The Walking Dead” and “Black Panther,” she is also an accomplished playwright (“Eclipsed”), a member of the Public’s board and a Shakespeare in the Park alumna (“Measure for Measure”).“She is a great actress who has become super-famous without people necessarily seeing the work she’s greatest at,” Eustis said. “Richard III is a spectacularly theatrical and rich character to play, and somebody with her ferocity and intelligence is going to make a spectacular Richard.”Darius de Haas, center, as a banished duke with a welcoming message in the 2017 Public Works production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd what will it mean to have a woman play Richard? “We are not going to re-gender the role, but what that means exactly we won’t know until we’re doing run-throughs,” Eustis said. “I know where we’re starting, but that doesn’t mean we know where we’re ending.”“Richard III” has been staged at Shakespeare in the Park four times previously, most recently in 1990, starring Denzel Washington.This summer’s production of “As You Like It” is a remounting of a production that had a short run in 2017, staged as part of the theater’s Public Works program, which integrates amateur performers from throughout New York City into musical adaptations of Shakespeare plays. In the years since it was created at the Public, this adaptation has been staged 35 times in school, community and professional theaters, including at the Dallas Theater Center, Seattle Repertory Theater, and the National Theater in London. The Public had hoped to give it a full run in 2020, but the pandemic prevented that.This “As You Like It” was adapted by Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery; Taub wrote the music and lyrics, and Woolery is the director, with choreography by Sonya Tayeh (“Moulin Rouge!”). As with the earlier version, this summer’s production will feature Darius de Haas, Joel Perez and Taub.The dates for the two productions, as well as the full casts, will be announced later.Shakespeare in the Park has since 1962 been staged at the 1,830-seat Delacorte Theater in Central Park, and last week the city Landmarks Preservation Commission approved plans for a $77 million renovation of the theater. Construction is expected to begin this fall, after the summer season ends; Eustis said that he is hopeful that construction can be phased and contained to off-season periods, so that Shakespeare in the Park can continue without further interruptions. More

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      ‘MJ’ Review: Michael Jackson Musical Won’t Look in the Mirror

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      A new jukebox musical tells the story of Michael Jackson. Except for the big story.“There are a lot of strange stories making the rounds,” says a documentary filmmaker interviewing Michael Jackson.Understate much?Michael Jackson was such a magnet for strange stories that they nearly obliterated his gift. Yet in defensively brushing off the ones that don’t matter while pointedly ignoring the one that does, the new musical “MJ,” which opened on Tuesday at the Neil Simon Theater, may be the strangest Michael Jackson story yet.Not all strangeness is bad, of course, and within the confines of the biographical jukebox genre, “MJ,” with a book by Lynn Nottage, is actually pretty good — for a while. Directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, whose ballet background has found a natural outlet in dance musicals like “An American in Paris,” the show starts with confidence and verve in a natural setting: the rehearsal room. There, Jackson, along with his dancers, backup singers and band, is in the final stages of preparation for his 1992 Dangerous tour, a four-continent, 15-month marathon.That framing means that our first look at the musical’s version of Jackson is as a man at work, without the distraction of Bubbles the chimp, the Elephant Man bones, the hyperbaric chamber, the fading skin color, the disappearing nose — or the accusations of pedophilia that would begin to emerge a year later, at first in tabloids and then in lawsuits and eventually in police investigations.As such, we get the joy of discovery, both of Jackson before the fall and of Myles Frost, a real find in the role. Singing “Beat It” as he enters, Frost offers not just a willowy simulacrum of the star in perfect copies (by the designer Paul Tazewell) of his classic regalia — black jacket, gold brocade, tilted fedora, white socks scrunched to the ankles — but an eerie mimicry of his mannerisms. The breathy voice; the head-down, eyes-up gaze; the interjectory squeals and yelps: Frost has them down cold.Perhaps too cold. Absent any deeper revelation of the singer’s character, Frost’s performance of the songs — which include MTV-era chartbusters like “Bad,” “Billie Jean,” “Man in the Mirror” and “Thriller” as well as less-familiar numbers — soon begins to seem animatronic, as if he were created by Disney imagineers. It doesn’t help that there are so many of them; 37 titles are listed in the program, some barely one-verse samples.But Wheeldon’s choreography — performed by Frost along with a superb if amazingly jacked ensemble — remains compelling longer, offering a three-dimensional version of what most of us have seen only from distant arena seats or in dark videos on depthless screens. (The show’s “Michael Jackson movement” is credited to two additional choreographers, Rich + Tone Talauega.) The stage patterns are far more varied and expressive than in similar musicals, scoring points without words as they deliver the thrills and, following the biomusical road map, pave the way between present and past.Christian Wilson as the preteen Michael and Ayana George as his mother, Katherine, in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTake the sequence in which the Jackson 5 makes a smash appearance singing “ABC” at an Apollo Theater amateur night in 1969. Seamlessly Wheeldon swirls the giddy brothers from the stage to a scene of celebration in their hotel room, at least until their perfectionist father (Quentin Earl Darrington) demands, with the warmth of a cult leader, that despite their exhaustion they rehearse into the night. When the preteen Michael (Christian Wilson at the performance I saw) stands up to him and gets slapped so hard he falls to the floor, his mother (Ayana George) comforts him by singing “I’ll Be There” as he goes to bed.What Katherine Jackson’s responsibility might have been, besides providing a lullaby, is not considered; she is still alive. In any case, after all this, Wheeldon returns us to the 1992 rehearsal room with a trenchant gesture: The dancers pull the linens away to reveal the bed as a bunch of tour trunks.Jackson’s was undoubtedly a hard childhood. Though Nottage uses clichés from the jukebox playbook to dramatize that story — including an interviewer to prompt the reminiscences (Whitney Bashor) and three actors to divvy up the role at different ages (Tavon Olds-Sample is delightful as the teenage Michael) — she does so crisply and in a format that makes it seem almost natural. Having members of the 1992 entourage take all the supporting roles in the flashback scenes is both efficient and convincing.But the tale is mostly humorless, a problem not alleviated by Jackson’s occasional impish antics (he shoots a water pistol at his business manager) or the constant underlining of the emotional argument. (“You sang that song like you’ve been living with heartbreak all of your life,” Berry Gordy tells the preteen Michael after he performs “I Want You Back.”) As the joys of the early scenes begin to fade, “MJ” settles for baldly providing, in the relatively small space allotted to words, an avalanche of astonishing and sorrowful facts.Which is why the absence of the biggest one is so jarring.In agreeing to write what is essentially an authorized biography — the show has been produced “by special arrangement with the Michael Jackson estate” — Nottage apparently made a compromise: She would note his minor oddities while avoiding the most troubling accusations against him. Even so, there are pat explanations for every peccadillo, from the plastic surgeries (“This is Hollywood,” Jackson says. “Who hasn’t gotten a new nose?”) to the hyperbaric chamber (“I started that rumor. I thought it would be funny”). His father’s viciousness is likewise given a gloss coat of justification: “My hand ain’t nearly as heavy as the world’s gonna be on your Black ass if you step outta line,” he says.Frost, center, amid the zombies, in “Thriller.” Nearly 40 songs are listed in the program, including his biggest hits.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn this, “MJ” is trying to have it both ways. It wants to blame everything sad and weird about Jackson on others (especially the press, who are equated with the zombies in “Thriller”) but credit him alone for his every good deed and success. Acknowledgment of the choreographers and songwriters he collaborated with is mostly saved for the program.This defensiveness, constantly asserting his genius as if it were in question, eventually becomes dulling, like any act of bad faith. And so as the show, anticipating its star’s trajectory, disintegrates in the second half, the pleasure that compensated for its inherent ickiness can no longer do the job. “MJ” becomes a grind of obfuscation, a case of willfully not looking at the man in the mirror.Would it have been possible to make this musical otherwise? Could you successfully market as a family-friendly Broadway extravaganza a show whose main character, though never convicted of a crime, settles two sexual abuse cases out of court and dies before two others are dismissed because the statute of limitations has run out?Unlikely — and perhaps you could argue that Broadway is not in any case the place to interrogate such questions. Musicals based on real people have always elided their worst traits. Even that fascist enabler Eva Perón was sugarcoated and sanctified. Of course, her estate did not have a “special arrangement” with the producers of “Evita.”Ultimately, the problem with “MJ” is not its ethical stance but the way that stance distorts its value as entertainment. Even the combined power of Jackson’s material and Wheeldon’s reanimation of it cannot make up for the emptiness at its center; we cannot understand or accept the main character if he’s deliberately kept from us.A line from “Man in the Mirror” applies here as well: “If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then make a change.” What “MJ” needed was either a lot more time to pass before daring to mount it — or a different, deeper, more considered main character.MJAt the Neil Simon Theater, Manhattan; mjthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Calling All Tap Dance Kids (It’s Not the Acting Kid or the Singing Kid)

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      The challenge of casting the Encores! revival of “The Tap Dance Kid” exposes some of the complications of tap, show business and Black history.If you’re going to stage a revival of the seldom performed but dearly remembered 1983 Broadway musical “The Tap Dance Kid” — as Encores! at New York City Center is doing, Wednesday through Sunday — one of the main challenges is to find someone to play the title role.That character is Willie Sheridan, a 10-year-old boy whose dream is to become a Broadway tap dancer and who has the talent to do it. The performer who plays him has to be like Willie: a young Black boy who can act and sing and tap dance at the center of an old-fashioned musical. And in recent decades that particular combination hasn’t been very common.Some reasons are right there in the show’s story. It’s about a family — an upper-middle-class Black one, groundbreaking for a Broadway musical in 1983 — and the main conflicts are generational. The principal obstacle to Willie’s dream is his father.Hinton Battle in a scene from “The Tap Dance Kid” in 1984.Martha Swope/New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsTo the father, a lawyer, tap is not just antiquated but also shameful, tied to slavery and the racial humiliations from which he has worked to insulate those he loves. To the boy and his dancing uncle and the ghost of his dancing grandfather, tap is beautiful, something to be proud of.This is an argument about the past and progress, and it reflects some of the real-life attitudes that continue to affect the popularity of tap, especially among Black people, and the potential pool of tap dance kids.“I knew that it was going to be tough to find a Willie,” Jared Grimes, the choreographer of the Encores! revival, said in an interview.“I knew that it was going to be tough to find a Willie”: Bello and Grimes, rehearsing at City Center. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesDuring auditions, Alexander Bello stood out — for his acting and singing. His tap skills weren’t quite up to the level that Grimes was expecting. “I was not going to settle,” Grimes said. “This show isn’t called Acting Kid or Singing Kid.”But Bello — who once put “Broadway audition” on his Christmas list and is already a Broadway veteran at 13 — was determined to get the part. “I was amazed that almost all the creatives were Black,” he said. “I had never seen a room so melanated and I wanted to be in that room.” And so, while attending school and doing eight shows a week of “Caroline or Change” on Broadway, he squeezed in a month of tap boot camp with DeWitt Fleming Jr. (who plays Willie’s grandfather).“Alex earned that role,” said Kenny Leon, the director of the Encores! production.Bello, here with Trevor Jackson, squeezed in a month of tap boot camp. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesIn certain ways, this was an echo of the 1980s. Danny Daniels — who won a Tony Award for choreographing the original production and who, like most of the original creative team, was white — once told me about the trouble that team had finding a Willie.“I asked the producers, ‘Where are you going to find the Black kids? Black kids don’t tap anymore,’” said Daniels, who died in 2017. “So we put out a call for Black kid tap dancers. Nobody showed up.’”More precisely, nobody showed up who didn’t need tap training. Daniels started a tap boot camp. The first Willie it produced was Alfonso Ribeiro, who soon left for a successful TV career (and later showed off his tap skills as Carlton on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”). Among the many to follow during the show’s two-year run and national tour was Dulé Hill, whose own successful TV career, most recently in “The Wonder Years” reboot, is keeping him too busy to appear in the Encores! revival.Savion Glover in the 1980s Broadway production of “The Tap Dance Kid.” PhotofestAnother Willie was Savion Glover, the tap dance kid who most changed what it meant to be one. Under the guidance of Gregory Hines and older Black tap dancers, Glover became the heir apparent to their tradition in the Broadway shows “Black and Blue” and “Jelly’s Last Jam.”The 1996 show “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk,” which Glover choreographed and starred in, reclaimed tap as Black history, both polemically and rhythmically, and brought it into a hip-hop present that people his age could see as their own. In a monologue, when Glover rejected Broadway styles as “not even tap dancing” but “arms and legs and a big ol’ smile,” he could have been describing Daniels’s choreography for “Tap Dance Kid”: the sequins and high kicks, more razzle-dazzle than rhythm.After “Bring in ‘da Noise” closed, tap on Broadway mostly reverted to its old ways. But Glover, with his unsurpassed virtuosity and more streetwise image, had inspired a generation of young hoofers. While deeply connected to tap’s roots in jazz, they made the form contemporary and pushed it to new technical heights — and largely away from the singing and acting of “Tap Dance Kid.” Among this cohort was Grimes, now 36.Bello, rehearsing with the actor Adrienne Walker.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesAs Grimes demonstrated in the 2013 Broadway production “After Midnight,” he is a tap dancer of astonishing head-to-toe ability. But, unlike many Glover inspired hoofers, he also sees himself in the all-around entertainer line of Hines. Alongside his flourishing performing career — he’s in the upcoming Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” — he’s found acclaim as a choreographer of regional productions, including an updated “42nd Street.”Grimes said that he jumped at the chance to revisit “Tap Dance Kid,” which he called “the musical that every tap dancer dreams of getting a hold of.”The context has changed from the early ’80s, and from the late ’90s, too: “When I was coming up,” Grimes said, “if I looked to my side, there were other Black kids that were already tap kings and queens, but now almost none of my students are Black.”Kenny Leon lifting Bello after a rehearsal.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesSpeaking for kids today, Bello said tap is the dance style they “are most likely to overlook.”“Because you either think of it as Shirley Temple or as something guys did in the ’70s,” he said. “To other kids, it seems like tap never really modernized, but that’s not true.”Ayodele Casel, a tap dancer of the post-Glover generation whose career has been soaring lately, said that pockets of young Black tap dancers exist but that they don’t necessarily see themselves on Broadway because opportunities have been scarce. Yet, speaking more broadly, she noted the significance of someone like her, steeped in tap culture, being specially hired to handle the tap choreography for “Funny Girl.”“There is still a gap,” she said, “between the actors and singers, who have long been able to get by with tap basics, and the serious tap dancers, who haven’t had much incentive to train in acting and singing. But I think people, artists and producers, are starting to think about tap differently now.”Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesAlong these lines, the background of the creative team, more than of the cast, might be the most significant change in the Encores! revival. The music remains the same, by Henry Krieger in a mode similar to his “Dreamgirls.” But Lydia Diamond, who has adapted the book for the Encores! production, has shifted the story from the 1980s to the 1950s — when the lines of racial struggle were more legible and tap was losing its place at the center of American popular culture.“We’re trying to show how something as precious as the history of tap is affecting this family who’s fighting to find a place in the ’50s,” Grimes said. He said that he’s been helping to get more accurate (and Black) tap history into the script and a sense of tap in transition into the choreography.“I want to show tap as storytelling and crazy rhythms,” he said, “but also tip our hat to vaudeville and comedy and what might be seen as what we had to do to get into the door. We can do that with integrity.”Grimes said this after a long day of rehearsal, eager to rehearse some more. “The security guards have to kick me out,” he said. “That’s love, man. I hope that ‘Tap Dance Kid’ will get a whole new crop of people to feel like that about tap.” More

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      Martin McDonagh’s ‘Hangmen’ Will Open on Broadway This Spring

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      The production, which was canceled at the start of the pandemic, will try again, this time starring Alfie Allen of “Game of Thrones” fame.“Hangmen” has been saved from the executioner.The dark comedy, by the British playwright Martin McDonagh, will open on Broadway this spring, two years after the production was canceled by its producer as the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close.The resurrected production, about an English hangman at the moment Britain banned capital punishment, will now star Alfie Allen, who played Theon Greyjoy on “Game of Thrones,” as a mysterious visitor to a bar run by the hangman. The hangman will be played by David Threlfall, a Tony nominee for “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.”The play is now scheduled to begin previews on April 8 and to open on April 21 at the Golden Theater.In 2020, “Hangmen,” with a slightly different cast, had completed its 13th preview performance, also at the Golden, and was a week away from opening when Broadway theaters closed.Eight days into the shutdown, producers announced that they were canceling the production, saying, “We do not have the economic resources to be able to continue to pay the theater owners, cast and crew through this still undefined closure period.” The show was the first, and one of the few, to make such a move.“I’m not saying I had any wisdom, but when people were saying we’d be back open in four weeks, I never believed that,” the lead producer, Robert Fox, said this week. “We were still being charged rent, and all sorts of expenses we didn’t have the money to cover. I assumed that was the end of ‘Hangmen’ on Broadway.”But the play was given new life by the U.S. government: It was awarded a $5.2 million Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, and was then granted an extension for its use of that money until June 30, 2022. Fox said that a combination of the federal aid, and investors returning money they had received from an insurance claim, “meant we had enough to put the show on, and hopefully to be able to support it in its early days, if it needs support.”Much had to be rethought: During the last two years, one of the play’s producers, Elizabeth I. McCann, died; several of the play’s lead actors became unavailable for personal or professional reasons; and the set was dismantled. But Fox said he wanted to try again, in large part because of his fondness for the work of McDonagh, a four-time Tony nominee whose other plays include “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” and whose films include “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”From left: Jeremy Crutchley, Tracie Bennett, Mark Addy, Richard Hollis, John Horton and Ryan Pope in the production of “Hangmen” that was slated to open in 2020. The play will reopen with several new cast members.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m a huge Martin fan — I think he’s a true original, and a brilliant writer, and this is the third play of Martin’s I will have produced on Broadway,” Fox said. “I don’t think anybody’s putting it back on because they think they’re going to make a lot of money, but they believe it’s a wonderful play of Martin’s, and hopefully people want to see a dark mystery comedy and enjoy themselves.”“Hangmen” began its life in London, at the Royal Court Theater, and then, following a West End run, had an Off Broadway production at the Atlantic Theater Company, where The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “criminally enjoyable.” Matthew Dunster has directed each production, and will do so again on Broadway; the Broadway production will feature Tracie Bennett (“End of the Rainbow”) as the hangman’s wife. More

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      Review: In ‘Intimate Apparel,’ Letting the Seamstress Sing

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      Lynn Nottage’s play about a Black woman in 1905 becomes an opera, with music by Ricky Ian Gordon, that forefronts voices ignored by history.We begin with joyful ragtime, that musical theater fallback for telling Black stories of the early 20th century.But the sound is muffled, distorted. The party is elsewhere in the boardinghouse where our heroine, Esther, a shy, plain woman of 35, sits in her room sewing corsets and camisoles for socialites and streetwalkers. She is too serious and too ambitious to descend to the parlor and cakewalk with the revelers.So is “Intimate Apparel.” In musicalizing Lynn Nottage’s play of the same title, Ricky Ian Gordon, working with a text by Nottage herself, wants more for Esther than a quick dance and a slick tune. A woman so bent on betterment in an age that makes it almost impossible deserves the most serious and ambitious musical treatment available — and gets it in the knockout Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, that opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on Monday.That the play was excellent to begin with was no guarantee of a viable libretto. But looking back on its 2004 Roundabout Theater Company premiere, starring Viola Davis as Esther, you can see that “Intimate Apparel” already had the necessary ingredients for a powerful opera: spine, scope and poetry.The spine remains neatly articulated. The first scene quickly establishes that Esther (Kearstin Piper Brown) has the discipline and drive to make a career of her handiwork; with the savings she sews into the lining of her crazy quilt she plans one day to open a beauty salon. The scene also establishes her pride, as she rejects the last-chance men who come to the parties given by her landlady, Mrs. Dickson.“Pride’ll leave you lonely,” Mrs. Dickson (Adrienne Danrich) warns.We next meet two of her clients, whose lives express in contrasting ways the limitations Esther hopes to escape. Mrs. Van Buren (Naomi Louisa O’Connell) has every luxury a white woman of privilege could want, including the pink silk crepe de chine corset that Esther brings to her boudoir for a fitting. But Mrs. Van Buren, trained only to be a wealthy man’s wife, has no options when her husband loses interest.Though poor and Black, Mayme (Krysty Swann) is likewise at men’s mercy for her few luxuries — which, amusingly, include the same corset as Mrs. Van Buren’s. (“What she got, you want,/What you got, she want,” Esther comments.) Instead of an absent husband Mayme has johns who are often vile or violent, yet she is closer to Mrs. Van Buren than either might like to think.Brown and Arnold Livingston Geis as Mr. Marks, a fabric salesman, in the opera at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEsther’s friendship with the women is more than professional but nevertheless circumscribed by class and race. (She has never entered Mrs. Van Buren’s house through the front door, and presumably never entered a brothel at all.) Her third professional friendship is even more delicate. Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis) sells fabric on Orchard Street, saving the most beautiful bolts for her. Though he is the only man ever to recognize and encourage her gift, he is literally untouchable: an Orthodox Jew.But he is not the only man to flirt with her. Esther is surprised — and then, almost against her will, gratified — to receive a letter from a Barbadian laborer working on the Panama Canal. It seems that George Armstrong (Justin Austin) is looking for a pen pal to counter, with beautiful words, the filth and harshness of his job. As Esther can neither read nor write, she depends on Mrs. Dickson to tell her what George is saying; and then on Mrs. Van Buren and Mayme to forge suitably Cyrano-like replies.I will say no more about the plot except that at the end of Act I Armstrong arrives in New York to marry Esther, who wears an exquisite dress made with fabric she bought from Mr. Marks. If she is not what might have been expected from their correspondence, neither, she gradually realizes, is he. In Act II we learn why.Many plays sewn so tightly unravel completely as they stretch toward their crisis. Not “Intimate Apparel”; with its eye on the big picture, it maintains both its integrity and its tension to the end. Never stinting on detail — or, apparently, period research — Nottage forces the audience to keep sight of the larger pressures pushing all her characters into situations they must eventually escape more explosively.I focus on the story because it is usually the problem with opera, as books are with musicals. Nottage has cut perhaps half of her play to make room for Gordon’s music, and in doing so has made the smart if painful choice to retain only what is most narrowly tailored to the plot and yet most allusive. What we call poetry in opera is not really the verse (though Nottage’s libretto is lightly rhymed where necessary) but the rich texture of everything doing double duty.Courtship by mail: Brown and Justin Austin as George Armstrong.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSo too with Gordon’s lush yet intricate score, which soars into the timeless atmosphere of operatic writing (though he calls his hybrid works “operacals”) while always regrounding us in the specifics of period and character. In numbers like “No One Does It for Us,” repeated choruses do more than ram home lovely melodies; they underline the similarities between Esther and Mayme, who sing it. And it is not for nothing that George’s letter arias from Panama are typically accompanied by a ghostly chorus of other men, as if to question their strange intimacy.None of these smart choices would matter if the performers could not make hay of them, but Sher has assembled and tuned an unusually fine cast of opera singers who can actually act. Brown is especially heartbreaking as Esther — and astonishingly tireless in a huge role. (Chabrelle Williams takes over for the Wednesday and Sunday matinees.) Her scenes with Geis as Mr. Marks are so gentle and rich in subtext you don’t want them to end. But all six leads are terrific, and the ensemble of eight other singers performs dozens of roles, each quickly and perfectly etched.Sher’s staging in the 299-seat Newhouse, on a simple turntable set by Michael Yeargan, is a marvel of constant movement that never feels busy, and the costumes by Catherine Zuber are exquisite even when plain. As always, it is a joy to hear an opera in an intimate space with acoustics so clear and natural — the sound is by Marc Salzberg — that the captions projected on the walls of the set are rarely needed. And though the voices are prioritized in Gordon’s orchestration for two pianos, the presence of the instruments, on platforms above the stage, is not incidental. As played on Friday evening by Nathaniel LaNasa and Brent Funderburk, they seemed to have dramatic roles of their own, representing not only the need of women, especially Black women, for emotional independence, but also the world of 1905 that forbids it.In that sense “Intimate Apparel” — even more as an opera than as a play — is an act of rescue. When Esther tells Mrs. Van Buren, as they write the first letter to George, “My life ain’t really worthy of words,” she means that she isn’t special enough to be made permanent on paper. That isn’t true; as Nottage and now Gordon have shown, she is worthy of even more. She is worthy of music that is finally worthy of her.Intimate ApparelThrough March 6 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In Clare Barron’s ‘Shhhh,’ Staging a Memoir of the Body

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      The playwright directs and stars in her new play for Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2. It’s less a traditional narrative and more of a series of flirtations with discomfort.To get to your seat, you walk past someone’s toilet, stationed next to their sink, above which their pill bottles sit on a shelf.It’s hard to get more intimate than that.And yet that’s exactly what “Shhhh” manages to do. The new play, written by, directed by and starring Clare Barron, is explicit and occasionally uncomfortable, but all for the right reasons.Arnulfo Maldonado’s exquisite set design for the show, which opened on Monday at Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, truly makes the space feel as if it were an apartment transformed into a theater rather than the reverse. There’s that bathroom stage left. And in a corner, partially obscured by a wall, a mattress lies on the floor, the sheets tousled on top. Candles and hanging string lights create a seductive atmosphere, but the industrial-looking metal rolling carts add a cool edge. And the audience members in the first few rows sit on cushions on the floor, extending the cozy vibe.“Shhhh” begins with Sally (named Witchy Witch in the program, and performed by Constance Shulman) recording an ASMR meditation. The sound of it is unsettling. Shulman’s signature rasp seems to envelop the space as she narrates what she’s doing — she talks about the Lysol wipe she’s using as we hear the sound of the cloth moving, amplified by a mic, and she taps her nails against a ceramic cup, telling us it’s full of lavender tea. She speaks slowly, stretching the syllables of each word so far they could reach from the theater, in Chelsea, to the East River. (The sharp sound design is by Sinan Refik Zafar.)Sally, a postal worker, says her job makes her feel close to people, even though that intimacy isn’t real. She goes on a so-so date with Penny (Janice Amaya), a nonbinary person who shares that they feel most comfortable and in control of their body during sex parties.Sally’s sister is Shareen (Barron), a playwright with a lot of “health stuff” who has a codependent and often consensually iffy sexual relationship with a male friend, Kyle (Greg Keller).And Francis (Nina Grollman) and Sandra (Annie Fang) are, well, two random young women who talk about body agency and consent in a pizza shop as Shareen, sitting at another table, silently listens.Barron and Greg Keller in the play. Arnulfo Maldonado did the set design.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Shhhh!” doesn’t have a traditional narrative; there’s no antagonist, and there’s not much of a sense of causality across scenes. The work itself has the feel of a series of flirtations: discomfort, assaults, insecurities and sorrows are spoken about and alluded to, but not detailed. We don’t get back stories or explainers. We just get the way these people speak and move and touch in relationship to one another. It’s telling that most of the sex acts mentioned are ones of penetration and discharge but much less often about the simple delicacies of a caress, or a kiss.The conversations these characters have are visceral: They talk of gushing wounds, feces-covered sheets, body fluids of all flavors. Though this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with Barron’s works, which include “I’ll Never Love Again” and the Pulitzer Prize finalist “Dance Nation.” She’s made a specialty of writing what are essentially staged memoirs of the body. Barron rarely opts for the romantic idea of pleasure, instead examining pleasure tied to physical violence and emotional manipulation, shame, self-esteem and trauma. The whole production aches with an unspoken loneliness.That ache comes through in Barron’s direction, but also in the performances, led by Barron herself, who sheaths Shareen in a delicate melancholy. Her gaze seems to drift off into the distance serenely but without satisfaction. She seems unsteady. And yet her somberness also belies a ferocious hunger; throughout the show Shareen plays with her food, pressing her fingertips into the scraps, crumbs and flakes on her plate or table and bringing them to her mouth, almost compulsively. The characters move self-consciously — in the way they recline or cross their legs — and seem to traverse the distances that separate them cautiously, as if wading through a river to the other shore.Keller is believable as the guy friend who soon realizes he may have to hold himself accountable for some questionable bedroom behaviors, and Grollman, Fang and Amaya, who get to wear the show’s most eclectic fashions (the satisfyingly offbeat costume design is by Kaye Voyce), give top-tier performances in small roles. Shulman is less convincing as Shareen’s older sister, supposedly by only two years, despite the nearly 30-year age gap between the two actresses. Shulman’s monotone drawl is a comic novelty at first, helping many of the jokes land, but this delivery, dry as a dust storm in the desert, becomes tiresome.Nina Grollman, left, and Annie Fang in a powerful scene at a pizza shop.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe other issue is the show’s erratic pacing. A Looney Tunes-esque chase scene and a mystical ritual both feel interminable. While other scenes are too short, and characters lack depth. Amaya has a sparky energy, but their character is less developed in relation to the others. And the characters of Francis and Sandra speak in only one scene, in the pizza shop, though the dialogue is incredibly compelling: candid exchanges about what it’s like to be a woman in a world of modern dating, and romantic metaphors about isolation and desire. I could’ve watched an entire show of this conversation.I went into this show expecting the grotesque and perhaps even the gratuitous, especially once I passed a sign in the theater warning the audience about the nudity and the play’s content. Nothing triggered me or offended me, not even Shareen’s description of her diarrhea or the sight of a used DivaCup. (I can’t say the same for everyone else, particularly the three audience members who shuffled out early in the show, never to return.)But then there was one moment that got to me, when Francis and Sandra are talking about the ways the men they’ve dated have manipulated their way to getting what they want, like unprotected sex. As Francis recounted a drunken negotiation she had with a guy, my body stiffened. The exchange was so familiar; it made me recall my own sticky encounter with a date.While that moment in the show may have made me feel uncomfortable, I was also grateful for the scene, and even the thorny feeling it inspired — theater should sometimes cause us discomfort. After all, the greatest intimacies we can hope for, as audience members, are those we build between our seats and the stage.ShhhhThrough Feb. 20 at Atlantic Stage 2, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Private Data Shows Broadway’s Hits and Misses After Reopening

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      Big shows did well when they returned in the fall after the long pandemic shutdown but new plays struggled, previously undisclosed industry data shows.During the long dark months when the coronavirus pandemic kept Broadway shuttered, a hypothesis took hold in parts of the industry: Once theaters reopened, the audience would include more New Yorkers and fewer tourists, and the result could be a more receptive marketplace for ambitious new plays.It did not turn out that way.Previously undisclosed data about the financial performance of individual Broadway shows reveal that the fundamental modern economics of the industry, in which big brands dominate and adventurous new works struggle to break through, were reinforced, rather than upended, as the industry reopened last fall.The good news: In the months between the reopening of Broadway and the upheaval caused by the arrival of Omicron, the biggest prepandemic hits were doing reasonably well. The disappointment: Many new and unfamiliar plays, including a much-heralded wave of work by Black writers and a pair of experimental plays by white writers, struggled to sell tickets, much as plays have often done in recent seasons.The information about the shows’ financial performance was collected by the Broadway League, a trade association representing producers and theater owners, and distributed to the association’s membership in mid-January. The League, in a break with past practice, has decided not to make show-by-show box office data public this season, saying the circumstances are so unusual that the data cannot fairly be compared to that of other seasons, but The New York Times has obtained access to the numbers.The data, which begins in mid-September, when some of the biggest musicals reopened, runs only through Dec. 12, just before a spike in positive coronavirus tests among theater workers forced as many as half of all Broadway shows to cancel performances. In the weeks since, Broadway has taken a tumble — even though the wave of cancellations has stopped, attendance has been soft and multiple shows have closed.Before Omicron hit, Broadway’s return was going better than some had feared, especially for big-brand musicals. Plays had a harder time.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesBut before the Omicron variant, Broadway’s box office was doing far better than pessimists had feared, given the dearth of visitors and office workers, ongoing concerns about public health, and uncertainty about the effect of vaccine mandates and mask requirements. During the final week covered in the data — the week that ended Dec. 12 — about one-third of the shows running grossed more than $1 million, which has often been seen as a sign of strength. Among them: the musicals “Hamilton,” “Wicked,” “The Lion King,” “Moulin Rouge!,” “Tina,” “Six,” “Aladdin,” “The Book of Mormon,” “Hadestown” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” and the plays “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Lehman Trilogy.”Notably, the club of top grossers included two newcomers, “Six” and “The Lehman Trilogy,” both of which were well-reviewed, small-cast shows that were in previews in 2020 when the pandemic hit, and then finally opened last October. “Six” is still running on Broadway; “The Lehman Trilogy” ended its Broadway run as scheduled on Jan. 2 and on March 3 it plans to begin a monthlong run in Los Angeles.Also noteworthy: “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which during the pandemic shutdown was trimmed from a two-part play to a more traditional one-part show, appears, at least initially, to have benefited from the reconstructive surgery. The shorter version impressed critics and reduced running costs, and its weekly grosses in early December were about $1.7 million, which is significantly better than it was doing during that same period in 2019.During the industry’s best fall stretch — Thanksgiving week — “Hamilton” grossed over $3 million, and “The Lion King,” “Wicked” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” each grossed over $2 million.The effect of the Tony Awards, which were held Sept. 26 in an effort to showcase the reopening of Broadway, is difficult to discern. “Moulin Rouge!,” which won the best musical Tony, sold well through the fall, but less well than it had in the fall of 2019 (the week before Thanksgiving last year, the musical grossed $1.5 million; during that same week in 2019, it had grossed $2 million).The fall was especially tough for plays, which often struggle in an era when Broadway is dominated by big musicals. Critically acclaimed plays like “Pass Over,” “Is This a Room” and “Dana H.” played to houses that were at times between one half and two-thirds empty.The average ticket prices for all the new plays other than “The Lehman Trilogy” were well below the industry average, suggesting that the plays were resorting to steep discounts. During Thanksgiving week, the average ticket price at “Hamilton” was $297, while at “Chicken & Biscuits” it was $35.Other than “Lehman,” the strongest selling of the new plays was “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” which grossed over $400,000 in some weeks. It has since closed, as has every other play that was running on Broadway last fall other than “Cursed Child.”There were also, as there always are, musicals that struggled too. The new musical “Diana,” which opened to harsh reviews and closed a month later, played to 51 percent capacity houses and grossed $374,000 (for seven performances) during the week that ended Dec. 12. “Girl From the North Country,” which has closed but says it plans to reopen in the spring, played to 47 percent capacity audiences that week and grossed $310,000, and “Flying Over Sunset,” which ended its run early, played to 69 percent capacity audiences and grossed $323,000 that week.“Jagged Little Pill,” the musical featuring songs by Alanis Morissette, did better than those shows, but not well enough to sustain a long run. The show was playing to houses that were about four-fifths full in the late fall, and it grossed $768,000 the week of Dec. 12. It closed a week later.Broadway is now in the midst of a particularly grim winter, and there are currently only 19 shows in the 41 theaters, which is lower than it has been for years. But producers say their daily wraps (that’s their net ticket sales) are picking up and they are optimistic about spring; there are already 14 openings scheduled in April. More